Hey friend! I also slowly did this. I dont regret taking the years to figure it out and try things. From like 19 to 24 I just thought i liked femme stuff sometimes. met my wife, who affirmed my feelings for the first time ever, but she wanted a bf so we dated cishet for 2 years. then i became a femboy ((egg)) and there were signs before that for her. she was always supportive without outwardly telling me, i never thought to ask. i thought i was just doing my regular atrange femme guy stuff. WRONG. dysphoria started hitting like a train around 28 to 30 then i just started HRT with zero inout from her because i was scared. i didnt know she supported me already. she sometimes aligned with TERFs and i thought it would end the marriage.

our marriage only got better, went poly, both rather happy because we enjoy each other fully. she likes how i gained a lot of emotion and we express feelings a lot more together. another poster said “living with a teenage girl” yeah… HRT did that to me too lol

my wife was cis het, but now ids as queer. she still only prefers men, but we still have a great relationship 😉 i get to be an exception.

My wife is enby (genderqueer she/they) and had actually explored her gender for a few years before I did (though I didn’t know it was quite so far, I thought they were just trying out a new style), so my situation won’t mirror yours exactly or be super relatable. I first started questioning my gender in mid 2024. For the 3 years prior, I had been just saying I’m “gender non-conforming” and would wear stuff like skirts around the house and little decorations and clips and stuff in my hair. I basically just brought it up as “I’ve been questioning my gender.”

They said they knew for sure as soon as I started talking about questioning since I didn’t immediately have a solid answer. “I couldn’t be trans, right? Nah. I’m just a guy who likes feminine things… Right?” Apparently isn’t something cis men generally ask themselves.

So… She decided not to break the egg prime directive, and some two months later after getting sick of hearing me hem and haw about it, asked me if I wanted to try some things out. “How would you feel if I said you’re my wife?” … And my heart skipped a beat. Breath caught. I may have cried a little. They pulled me into their arms and have been my biggest supporter ever since.

I share that because I know I’m in a unique situation of being so very supported - but I know seeing hopeful and good stories can help others so I wanted to share.

Plenty of good stuff here. I’ll just say that your egg cracking was probably the culmination of years of questioning, but it’s going to be totally new to your partner. So don’t be surprised if they freak out for a while.

My wife and I are pathetically codependent, and when I had my moment of realization that put me into a week of questioning, I stewed on it for the evening, and told her what had happened in the morning, and what was on my mind. She spiraled for a week, which made me spiral, thinking it was going to end our marriage, and she asked me regularly if I had figured it out yet. I wasn’t sure yet, but I kept an open dialogue the whole time because I felt she deserved to know whatever she could. I eventually figured out that I definitely was trans while talking to her, and told her soon as I did. There was some crying, lots of stressing about the future, but that open dialogue made a big difference I feel. We’re still together, happier than before I’d say because I’m not subconsciously suppressing my gender, and she gets to share girl things with me now, but since I started HRT, she equates living with me to living with a teenage girl 🤣

My advice is to be open about it with your girlfriend, but this is coming from someone who’s relationship worked out after starting transitioning. You got this!

Understand it might be hard for her at first even if she’s very supportive of trans people. You’ve had years to process these feelings, you can’t necessarily expect her to me able to process everything herself right away. It might have implications for her own sexuality, the future she imagined together with you, etc.

My partner and I are going through similar things. It’s still hard sometimes but we’re both really trying to make things work, so I have hope it’ll all work out. Open and honest communication is very important.

One thing we’ve had to work on is including each other in our processing, instead of one of us doing processing on these things and then presenting it all at once to the other.

It’s hard for me to write on this topic without sharing more than I’m comfortable with. Sorry if it sounds a bit vague here and there, that’s just me biting my tongue.

It kind of flooped out when I gave one too many sad sighs. She pressed me on what was going on, and eventually I told her. She didn’t take it very well because she was never exposed to any of this. All she knew about transgender women was from what she saw on tv, which wasn’t exactly a complete representation. We spent a long time talking, with me giving reassurances over and over again that my feelings for her hadn’t changed at all. We had been married for 15 years at the time, have kids, so basically a long happy life together suddenly started to crumble before her eyes. It didn’t help that she is incredibly insecure in general.
It took several days for things to calm down, and I decided to not do anything for a few months to let her process it. It took me years to get to this point, it’s not like I could expect her to speedrun through the entire thing.

It’s about a year later now and things are better. She’s still a bit weary, but supports me in a lot of things and seems to be coming round more and more. She already overcame so many of her old prejudices and preconceptions.
It helps that only a month or two after our talk, she got a trans woman as a new coworker at work. That coworker just started HRT at the time and is very outspoken and loves to overshare on everything that’s going on with her life and the changes happening to her body :)

There’s still a long way to go, but I feel hopeful.

i can’t talk about romantical relationships in any way. but i imagine it to be a friendship with even higher levels of trust and closeness?

I felt bad enough going to the first appointment “secretly”, despite my body being my own choice but as life partners it feels wrong.

this secrecy is what i can’t stand in my life. i hate the feeling of hiding, policing how i act, what i wear and not telling where i am going. i was confronted with the question, if i would keep the info of being trans from a partner, if i could pass consistently. as soon as i felt i was actively keeping a secrect and having to put effort in it, i wouldn’t want that, i can’t stand it. not even with friends. i’d imagine in a romantical relationship my tolerance for that feeling would be even lower.

outings are opportunities to learn more about the people in your life. :)

The long-distance thing is hard. I would say however much you’re communicating with your girlfriend now, do it more. Double it, i don’t know. If you care about each other, then you both want to support each other through this. You don’t even have to ONLY talk about being trans, just talking and being attuned to each other will go a long way.

In my experience, my partner has been my greatest ally, and I don’t know if I could’ve done it without her. Even still, when I was questioning and deep in dysphoria, she struggled a lot to see what our relationship would become. We wrestled with the whole thing together: are we still attracted to each other? Are we still happy together? It wasn’t easy, but good communication has really helped, and I think we’re better at that than ever.

Therapy is also huge. You mentioned checking with your girlfriend to see if it’s okay for you to go to a therapist, and honestly, if she said no that would be a huge red flag. Maybe she’s uncomfortable with it for some reason, but in my opinion it’s nonnegotiable.

Well, for me it was easy because my wife is also transfem and she had clocked that I was probably trans before we even started dating. When I said I wanted to transition she was like “Egg cracked?”. XD

I didn’t really have a questioning phase; I went pretty much straight from “it would have been nice to have been a girl” to “oh shit, I’m trans”.

The conversation went largely along these lines:
[ME] So, er, you know what being transgender is, right?
[WIFE] Yeah.
[ME] Yeah.
[WIFE] Hmm, figures.

Everything was fine for a year or so, she seemed perfectly supportive, until suddenly she started insisting that I stop “dressing up” (presenting femme) when I’m out of the house, because “what if the neighbours saw you”. No idea what made her change her mind, or whether she was faking support all along.

And so (for that and many other reasons) we’ve now split up.

Hope that helps!

I don’t have concrete advice for you since I’m not in a relationship and weren’t when coming out. But this

Since I might be more gender fluid or non-binary, technically, I’d personally be fine “coping” with myself as I am if that was her preference (I mean this sincerely) if otherwise our relationship would end – I value her more than I value my “identity”, if that makes sense.

will probably change with time now that you started questioning your gender identity. You can’t put that back into a box.