By Amanda Waldroupe

TransActive executive director Jenn Burleton compares the process of transitioning one’s gender to a circus, with the transitioning person in center ring and spotlight.

Helen Boyd is an advocate for partners of transitioning people and the author of My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband, memoirs about Boyd’s experiences of first living with her husband while he was a cross-dresser and then as he transitioned to a woman. She likens the experience to standing at the edge of a forest, looking for paths hard to find and difficult to pass through, but nonetheless there.

The partner of the transitioning person is part of Burleton’s and Boyd’s respective metaphors, but plays a surprisingly secondary role.

“There is…not enough focus on the needs of their partner, wife, or husband,” Burleton says. “We kind of ignore the other acts.”

“Partners are at the edge of the wood with machetes,” Boyd says. There is no path.

While numerous resources exist for transgendered people during their transition, there is a dearth, both in Portland and nationally, for their partners—who go through their own emotional and sexual travails during the experience.

Reid Vanderburgh, a local transgender therapist, says partners can have a tough time throughout the transition process, even if they support their partner.

“One of the biggest challenges a partner faces is calling into question their own sexuality,” Vanderburgh explains. “It makes them wonder… ‘What does this say about me?’”

Describing transitioning as a “self-centered process,” Vanderburgh also says the relationship can be put on the rocks because the process of re-creating a trans person’s sex and identity takes away from the focus on the relationship.

Partners also face losing part or all of the community they belong to (as in the case of a lesbian couple with one partner transitioning to male, for instance), as well as having to explain—whether they want to or not—their partner’s choice to a world of friends and community that may not be entirely supportive or understanding.

Burleton says that in a perfect world a peer support group would exist so partners could navigate through those challenges.

“I definitely think that the partners of transitioning trans adults need a community…where they can realize that what they’re feeling about this transition is shared with other people,” she says.

Vanderburgh and Burleton say they do not recall any effort to start such a group in Portland in the past, and so far as they are aware, there is not at present a movement to create one.

Boyd is skeptical that such a group could exist. She points out that the trans community is not very large to begin with, and the number of partners who would seek out support would be even smaller. She also says that the experiences of partners are so varied that a support group would not be effective.

“Finding support locally with people that you might actually have something in common with is very, very difficult,” Boyd says. “The Internet is almost required.”

Many resources that exist are, in fact, online. In 2000, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Boyd founded the My Husband Betty Message Boards, an online forum for partners to discuss a variety of topics, such as gender, romance and activism. Boyd thinks online forums are successful because of the anonymity they offer, as well as the breakdown of geographic boundaries.

One challenge to starting a support group is a reflection of an important and integral feature of the transgender community: that once someone’s transition is complete, they have become invisible, and may no longer identify as transgendered.

“They want to move on with their life,” Boyd says.

Vanderburgh agrees, noting that desire can create a lack of interest in wanting to sustain a peer support group for partners. “What would make it most viable is if the people who get involved stay involved,” he says.