Please note this is not my story, I have copied this from reddit.

Married 10 years. We have two children 6, & 3. I’m 29, she’s 31. This is probably going to be rambly, sorry.

Honestly I was originally going to post this in relationships, or the sub for spouses of trans people, but a friend suggested here. She’s hated my wife since the moment wife and I met so I honestly don’t know if she’s a good person to talk about this to or if she’s telling me what she thinks I want to hear. The only other person I’ve talked to about this is my sister and she thinks we should go back to couple’s therapy. Friend told me what to expect from this sub and I’ve been lurking for a few days; for the sake of writing I’m going to refer to my wife as “her”, because I don’t want to accidentally call her ‘him’ offline -that’s not pleasant for anyone the occasional time I slip up.

Call her whatever you like when you reply, she’s not going to see it and I have other things to think about.

My wife is a trans woman and came to terms with it three years ago. Told me, started transitioning and all that. I love her. This wasn’t a deal breaker and we talked to a couple’s therapist and honestly everything was fine except for a few issues around my pregnancy and then our newborn. (Like she wanted to jump straight to breastfeeding despite barely being into her transition; it was costly and not something, from our research, that would help our baby much if at all and would purely be for her benefit. In the end the cost made her agree to put the idea aside (but not without a lot of tears from both of us)).

We both work full time, and the budgets tight. Neither of us have a degree and we both only make a little more then minimum wage. We weren’t perfect financially before our second child was born, but things weren’t so tight.

I have three bras and they’re ratty sports bras that I got with my first pregnancy after I outgrew my other bras. I don’t wear makeup besides a bit of mascara and colored lip-gloss, and my skin care routine is simple as is my hair routine (I cut it myself and don’t dye it or anything). I’m low maintenance partially because I can’t justify buying myself a new cheap bra when that $20 could go to our debt or something the kids need or something the kids want and partially because I don’t feel like I need to wear a ton of makeup or stuff like that.

My wife is high maintenance. She gets to go to a nice salon for her hair care and waxing needs, she owns a dozen nice bras, she has a complicated skin routine, she gets to tan and get new clothes and owns way more shoes then I do.

We cannot afford this. 95% of our credit card debt is from her high maintenance needs.

I was fine with it all at first; writing this off as part of the costs of transition. I realize now though, that my wife is not going to stop racking up credit card debt for these things she thinks she needs. I go without, because I don’t feel as though anything I want like a new bra is that needed for the family to incur more debt or to pay off that less debt that month.

Despite her eagerly embracing the “momma bear” attitude since practically the first moment she told me she was trans, our child care and household chore duties have barely changed at all before and after transition. She still goes to the gym straight after work while I pick up the kids and go home to make dinner. Except now she’s got a really cute gym bag and exercise outfits and sends me a cute selfie or two of herself while she’s there.

She still gets home, eats dinner with us, then hangs out in the kitchen with me and the kids while I do the dishes and clean up. She tells me about her day. I like this part honestly, but I wish she would help because it would get done a lot faster if both of us were doing it.

She won’t mow the lawn or do the outside chores any more -it gives her mental distress to do the household activities she did before she transitioned. So now I do all those in addition to most of the inside chores.

Last month she got mad at me for washing one of her lacy bras with my sports bras, upset enough to the point of crying and all I could do was stand there staring at this grown woman sobbing because a bit of lace came off her bra, thinking to myself “I could have fixed it, come on, there’s no need to act like this. And why is she so upset when she has four times the amount of bras then I do and hers are all much nicer than mine?” Then I wondered why the hell I was doing her laundry, my laundry, and our children’s laundry? She never does laundry.

She’s literally never been alone with our children for any significant amount of time. I left her and the kids for four days last year for a friend’s out of state wedding (that friend paid for, and we didn’t feel comfortable asking her to pay for the whole family), and she couldn’t handle that. She called her friends in so there was a friend of hers at our home with them the entire time. By the way, she completely dropped all of her old friends and now the only friends she has are also trans women or non-binary or whatever. So that was a fun conversation to have because I only know like two of her friends well enough to babysit my children and she can’t possibly know everyone to know they’re safe to have around our kids. I got called transphobic for that one, by the way. She apologized, but the very fact that’s what she jumped on instead of my concerns about who is in close contact with our kids? And maybe I’m paranoid, but I was molested as a child by a family friend which she knows.

Oh, and her friends…besides the two I know, everyone else just aren’t very nice to me if we at a gathering or host a party. I’m treated like the help instead of the cohost. Most of them have no interest in getting to know me or even talking to me and are on the edge of rude. She doesn’t see it.

I’m so sick of it all. She won’t have a real conversation, instead she just bursts into tears, has excuses or just gets mad and tells me she needs some alone time if I try to talk to her about anything. It honestly wasn’t this bad when she was my husband.

A relative of mine left a trust fund to be given to me when I turn 30. That’s in six months. The plan was to pay off all our debt, get me a new car because my current one is on its last legs, and for me to go back to school, then after I was done with school she would go back. And then, we’d take the remainder of the trust fund and move to a cheaper city to live where we would buy a house.

Wife told me last week that she wants to be the one to go back to school first, and that she can do the stay at home mom thing while she’s doing it and of course, that means she gets the new car while I’ll get her current car. She also said that it’d be a good time for us to have our last baby, since she could stay home with him/her while in school after I went back to work and it’d “practically be maternity leave”

Which stung, by the way. My current employer had me back at work three weeks after our 3 year old was born. They claimed there was an issue somewhere along the way and if I wanted to keep my job I needed to come back that soon. Probably not legal, but I was in no position to find out for sure.

I told her that if we have the money for one of us to go back to school and stay at home with a baby, it’s going to be ME. And brought up how long it took for me to fully heal from giving birth when I had to work -on top of the knowledge that I was missing out on time with our newborn.

So instead of having an honest conversation about who should go to school and how we’d handle the trust fund money, she made it about her, and how she felt watching me while I was pregnant and her agony of not being able to breastfeed her baby or of knowing she could never be pregnant and on and on and how another baby that she did the majority of care for would be her chance to be a real mother. And I ended up tuning her out, wondering if she’s always been this selfish and self centered or if it was new. The conversation ended with us deciding to talk about it closer to my birthday.

Maybe it’s me, I don’t know, but hearing her talk about having maternity leave when I was the one who would be giving birth, dealing with all that comes with that made me angry, really honestly angry for the first time in a long time. What kind of partner would be so callous? And it dawned on me that we aren’t really in a real partner ship any more. I love her, but that’s just not enough any more.

I just can’t do this anymore.

Edit: I already have meetings to talk to a few different lawyers and see what they say/how I feel about them next week. Like I commented, I think I was mainly posting here to be told I’m not a shitty person throwing away my marriage…I just want some support that’s not biased towards my spouse I think.My older brother has already received his inheritance and is fully willing to let me borrow as much as I need for a good lawyer. I didn’t talk to him about why I was thinking about a divorce like I did with my sister, just that I was….I think he’s probably better to talk about this with then my sister given as soon as I said “lawyer” he immediately offered to loan me the money without me even asking.

Edit Again: Please don’t pm me if you are trans or the spouse of a trans person, thank you. And I don’t know what on earth a ‘terf’ is, why it’s bad to be one or how to be one.