Very afraid to come out to my wife. Advice appreciated.
I (26mtf) have been married to my high school sweetheart (25f) for 2.5 years and I pretty recently have been going through a lot of life changes that have led me down a path of me questioning my gender identity and ultimately coming to the conclusion that I’m probably a trans woman. I’ve been cross dressing since I was young, but only this year did I actually get my own clothes to dress up in and I fucking loved it. I spent (admittedly) far too much money on clothes, shipping them in from Amazon to a pickup location and just hiding it all in my car for the better part of 2024. By doing this, I began to slowly realize how off things have felt for me as a man, since whenever she left town I could basically live privately as myself. I have never explicitly told anyone about this before, mostly because I’m terrified to say anything, but also partially because I thought I just had autogynophilia (which I’ve recently learned is a really outdated and kinda bogus term often weaponized by transphobes) and didn’t want to let my “fetish” affect my day to day life.
However, over this past year, I’ve been having some issues with school (currently in my last semester of a doctorate program) which led to a lot of self reflection and eventually an ADHD and OCD diagnosis. When I started meds for these issues, I noticed a lot got better, but one of the major side effects was my libido crashed. Before the meds, I had a fairly high sex drive, but after starting 20mg/day of Prozac, I started to feel less and less arousal, which was made more extreme in the past month after I increased my dosage to 40mg/day. Well, now that I don’t have nearly the same sex drive as I used to, I figured my desire to feel like a woman would decrease as well. I was, in fact, wrong about that, and it only seems to be growing stronger since I am no longer aroused all the time. I’ve notice that, while I am attracted to women (especially my wife), I am also deeply jealous of them when I see them and wish I could be like them. It also doesn’t help that I live in the US Deep South, so bigotry is normalized here unfortunately.
My biggest fear right now is coming out to my wife. I will say, I feel extraordinarily fortunate compared to many trans folks, because I know my immediate family would be accepting. For example, my mom has said things before like “oh you would be an attractive woman, you know, if you ever decided you wanted to do that”, which makes me think maybe she knew something I didn’t. However, my wife is a different story. We’re both bisexual and both very openly liberal, but she’s also made some comments in the past that aren’t transphobic, but give me the vibe that she wouldn’t be attracted to me as a woman. First and foremost, I started growing my hair out (it’s about shoulder length now, long enough to make a small bun), but she repeatedly kept asking me to get it cut, to the point where I got extremely defensive and basically told her “I’ll cut it when I want to, goddamnit”. She’s made similar remarks about me shaving my legs. Idk if maybe she’s saying that because she still thinks of me as a man, and maybe if she started thinking of me as a woman it wouldn’t be as much of an issue.
Finally, we had a text exchange a couple months ago that bothered me a bit. To be clear, we often joke about each other being gay (since we’re both bi and have only ever been with each other), so this was kind of an extension of that Me: Well I guess you’re lesbian then Her: Maybe I am, and I’ll leave you for a woman Me: Maybe I’ll just transition, then you won’t have an excuse Her: Please don’t be trans Her (in a separate text seconds later): Although you might be cute with boobs
I feel like I’m way overthinking it but just the fact that she explicitly said “don’t be trans” makes me worried that she’s at best going to tolerate my transition instead of actively support it. I’d like to come out to her tonight (start 2025 off right) but I don’t know if I’ll have the courage to take that step. If anyone has been in a similar situation, or just has some words of support, I could really use it.
x 2 
