Like many transkids who come out young I had a boyfriend, a man I loved deeply and who I leaned on for emotional support during a couple of years prior to my getting SRS and a year after while I was recovering.
We broke up about a year after I had SRS.
It seems as though just about every single younger sister I knew who was in a committed relationship with a man saw that relationship end after SRS.
Now conventional wisdom was that our partners were secretly gay and they couldn’t handle our having pussies.
I think part of this thinking bleeds over into the profile of “trannie chasers”. But, I don’t think it is necessarily the case because most of our boyfriends weren’t trannie chasers and tended to wind up with WBW girlfriends..
Now some may have exoticized us (Not eroticized as Julia Serano would have it but rather a different issue) in the same sort of model placed on women from non-white, non-Christian, non-American women. The idea that we tried harder in our femininity. Maybe we did in our insecurity regarding what we thought was expected of us by the gate keepers. Or maybe it was simply a phase we were going through…
But anyhow the way things went down many of us broke up. Perhaps it was the working together that had been part of the glue that held us together.
But I suspect there may well have been something else. You see I have the perspective of the years and the good fortune to have watched a number of people go through the surgery.
Second Wave feminism may have attacked the idea of women as property but the ephemeral idea still lives. After SRS we are new people, whole for the first time in our lives and many if not most of us aren’t ready to become property. So along with getting rid of the physical parts we shed our partners of before and try to find someone or something new in life that doesn’t have the baggage of having been with us before.
All too often the thought in our minds say, “They were with us when they must be gay.”
Or perhaps we are thinking about trying our new wings and flying instead of settling in to the role of wife and becoming the exclusive property of someone we knew before.
Whatever… We are most often the ones that do the things that end the relationship.
