Best of luck for your new decision, and the next page of your story.

Merci Aurélien,

I was very emotional and both hopeful and upset when I wrote the previous comment.

As per usual, I go back-and-forth about this decision — sometimes I am sure I will return to deep stealth, sometimes not so much… I am very torn between my need for personal happiness (which for me includes a husband) and my commitment to my writing and my readers — both are very important to me, and right now they seem to be in conflict.

In any case, I won’t have to make this decision for a while yet, and in the meantime I’ll keep writing and publishing.

I don’t think I could hide part of myself to someone I’m trying to build a life with…

It is a very hard thing to do, but as you said, I have experience doing it.

Stealth — or, at least, deep stealth — by its very nature, creates a conflicted, unstable platform on which to build one’s life; and it requires very disciplined psychological compartmentalisation to manage it. This is why I don’t think I can be both undisclosed in marriage and continue to write and publish on trans topics — indeed, in my experience I won’t be able to be undisclosed in marriage and even think about trans — that’s how deep stealth works.

I feel privileged to be able to tell everything to my loved ones.

And I really wish I could do this. Being undisclosed in marriage is a very distant second-best choice for me — completely unsatisfactory, but better than living the remainder of my life alone. My ‘attraction spectrum’ is, to my regret, quite narrow: large, dominant, older cis men — I’ve tried to change this, without success. Unfortunately this is the very demographic which pretty much never responds well to disclosure. So I feel pretty stuck.

Maybe something will change; maybe it won’t…we’ll see what happens.

Thank you for writing, Aurélien.
❤ Allison