Editor’s note: In this series, we’ll highlight conversations with our Transamorous Network readers/viewers. We think folks will benefit from these conversations. All names are made up to protect everyone’s privacy:
I’m in a straight relationship with my partner, although I found out I was attracted to “trans” before we got together. I told her in the early stages of our relationship and it was almost laughed off and dismissed.
Unfortunately, I went behind my partner’s back on one or two occasions years into the relationship and it confirmed my “fetish” with trans women. I didn’t want to enjoy it but I found out I loved it. It was exciting, different and turned me on but it was just fun.
My partner did find out and I came clean, we had counseling and she came around. I completely love my partner 100 percent, but desires took hold and I lost complete control of myself and my emotions.
In the end, she came with me to meet a trans woman and enjoyed watching me have fun. She knows I am completely in love and committed to her in a daily and family life and has accepted who I am, what I like and we can now be completely open without lies or deceit.
I am very lucky to be able to be myself, I am able to have an intimate relationship with my partner who is absolutely amazing and also satisfy my desires.
I think the best way to understand a person who is attracted to trans is to go with them and see what it’s all about. In doing so, people may see what it is for real rather, than what they think it might be in their heads, which makes more out of it than there needs to be.
For men, and speaking for myself, sex is just sex. A realease of the stresses of day to day life and a time out to enjoy some variety.
I hope any partners of “trans addicts” reading this can look at it from a different angle and realize that it’s not the end of the world. [It] is in no way your fault and you have no inadequacies.
People can’t be put in boxes and conform to expected social norms, we’re human, not robots.
Jason.
Hey Jason,
The most important thing you’ve talked about is the relief you feel and the willing acceptance your partner now experiences. Congratulations for finding that. Just a couple more perspectives we want to offer, mainly for others who might read your comment.
An entire industry surrounds the word “addiction”. Lots of money goes back and forth as people contend with what they think that word describes.
Desires are good. They are not “addictions”. Attraction is good. It is not an “addiction”. Love is good too and it is not restricted to just one person.
It’s great you love your partner and are committed to them. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t experience that same love and commitment with a transgender woman. Often, men think that’s not possible because they are caught up in their “fantasy”, which is really just a future reality they can’t have, because they don’t believe having it is possible. It is possible, but many men don’t believe it is. So they don’t experience that.
Choosing obligation over joy
We’re going to presume your partner feels better about your attraction because they now see it doesn’t threaten what they get from you being in their life. Maybe they were telling stories about you leaving, what that would mean to them and others involved, and the havoc they think that would create. Such stories can be tremendously painful. That’s obvious in some of the comments in this thread. Now that these have been soothed in your partner (through counseling) they no longer cause your partner discomfort that comes with telling such stories. Again, that’s a good thing.
And yet, men (and women) often get themselves into situations that are hard to get out of. Their stories about life, children, family, societal obligations and more keep them in situations, even though some (not all) may not want to continue in them. We’re not saying this is you Jason, or your partner.
We’re saying many men and women in similar situations (with wives and families) feel a righteous obligation to remaining in these situations because society, family upbringing and other “authorities” have convinced them not to “go against” what they’ve learned.
Some people are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the adventure, the joy and that “what’s next!” of creating life experience. They’re unaware that they can have any life they want. So they settle into lives of stability, adherence and compliance because the rambunctious life-as-their-creation, that they came to have, feels so foreign. We’re not denigrating such decisions. They can impede, however, the natural, wholesome desire-for-more that is inherent in all consciousness. Trans attraction is a dimension of this.
Sounds like you and your partner found enough relief in balancing your attraction and your desire to stay in your situation so you can stay there AND be happy. That’s good.
Sex isn’t just sex
Although it can be seen as release, it is much more than that, and to call it “just sex” significantly diminishes its wonder and meaning. But again, if you find “release” in it, go for it, because that feeling is crucial to getting what you want. Whether you call it “relief” or “release” those emotions mean something important. Feeling them is even more important.
Back to “addicts”: That’s a significant, negative and loaded word for what really is a natural, wholesome desire. The reason trans-desire feels so strong, sometimes compellingly so, is because the desire itself, and the joy derived in its fulfillment, is something you know, at the core of who you are, will fulfill an aspect of who you are.
In doing so, in fulfilling it, you also transform, inform and altogether make worldly experience more enjoyable for those with whom you come into contact with. You’ll also expand the nature of what it means to be human. All these are worthy results of pursuing desires. And they line up with what everyone comes into the world to experience: desire fulfillment.
Every desire is meant to be (and is) fulfilled.
We do not encourage trans-attracted people to see their attraction as anything less than that: a wholesome desire wanting to be fulfilled. For in its fulfillment will emerge wonderful more, joy, fun and happiness for all involved. All that happens, but that doesn’t mean everyone involved will experience it.
As we say everywhere in our content: stories are powerful. They can block what is really happening. That’s always temporary though. The pain and anguish expressed by ex wives whose ex-husbands owned their trans-attraction and thus divorced them, doesn’t have to be these people’s reality.
We know it’s hard knowing that when you’re in the thick of the suffering. But suffering doesn’t mean the joy is not available. It’s just that joy isn’t one’s experience when one tells stories that are not aligned with joy.
Being gay isn’t a bad thing. Labelling trans-attracted and transamorous men gay, however, creates a host of problems for everyone. Especially because that label – that men sexually and or romantically attracted to transgender women are gay – doesn’t align at all with how trans-attracted and transamorous men actually feel. It’s very similar to calling a transgender woman a man…when she clearly is not.