Partner's Transition

My name is Isobel. I am a 20-year-old artist going to university for a BA in sociology. I am an artist, an animal lover, a vegetarian (and I have been since the womb), lazy, sometimes bitchy, and also very caring. I live in a smaller town with not much to do other than stay home with my cats, go outside for a walk, and deal with the debilitating cold weather that comes with living in Northern Ontario... so basically, I hide in my house curled up under a blanket all winter. I live with my partner who is kind, caring, intelligent, emotional, motivated, sweet, hard working, an animal lover, a great cook, creative, loves to read, a great writer, the best at giving hugs, is warm, loving, oh and he is transgender. Through living it and research I have done for my sociology class on gender, I have come to learn that many people realize that transitioning is BIG for the person going through the transition, and I am not saying it isn't. They are changing their whole life around! My partner is going from female identifying and presenting to the world as feminine, to male identifying and presenting to the world as masculine. He will be going on testosterone injections and going through surgery. It is a really big, stressful, and exciting ordeal! However, not many people realize that their partner also goes through a transition. I have only started to experience changes in myself and my identity once my partner came out the world as male. I start to look at myself in a new, strange, and different light. I see my partner as being who they always have been, I just call them by a different name and pronoun. No biggie. Looking in on myself, I feel completely different. I feel lost. Not to say that I am not happy, I am just left confused. My partner was female when we first started dating. My partner was female for eight months out of our relationship. I was in a homosexual relationship for eight months. I was seen as a lesbian—although I identify as pansexual. (For those of you who don't know, lesbian means girls who like girls and pansexual means people who like anyone no matter the gender.) My identity became solid. I was used to the world seeing me as a lesbian, I embraced it. It became part of me. Now, everything has changed. I don't know how to act, or dress, or walk. I used to act butch, dress butch, and walk like I didn't have a care in the world. Now I feel I can't dress butch because it will make my partner look less manly, I have to act more feminine because then my partner will look more manly... My identity has changed... and I am not sure what it has become. I can barely walk around without questioning if I am walking feminine enough, or speaking in a high enough voice. The stress is tearing me apart. But no one understands, and no one will because the way people look at it, I am not transitioning, I am not being affected by my partners transition. "The only one affected by a transition is the person transitioning," or so I am told. I can only imagine how the next few years are going to affect me. I love my partner with everything I have, and I will not leave them because of this. This is not their fault; I just have to find a new identity. I have to transition.