My family disowned me when I said I was a woman

Your letter is heart-breaking — and I hope it may help readers understand something of the agony endured by those who feel they were born in the wrong biological body.

When you first told your family that you intended to live as a woman it would have been a tremendous shock.

Your ex-wife was surely angry and humiliated, while probably also feeling shame at losing the life she had known and her status as a wife.

This happened to people I know very well: an ex-wife’s fury deliberately used to turn offspring against their father — an awful thing to do no matter what the gender or sexual orientation of the people concerned or the circumstances of the divorce.

As a divorced woman, I understand hurt — but hating the person who has hurt you and using your children (adult or juvenile) as weapons for revenge is just wrong.

Adult children might be expected to have minds of their own, yet often do not. Here I can understand how very hard it must be to accept that Dad has now become another ‘Mum’ —

but ‘hard’ does not mean ‘impossible’, not when love is present.

Because I’m humble about my lack of experience, I shared your problem with a friend of mine who is currently transitioning and naturally he was full of sympathy.

He made the important point that your wife ‘had the choice of how to respond to that shock: with love and compassion, or with bitterness and hate.

‘Your reader’s wife chose the latter path. I have a close friend whose wife was far more accepting (she has a new partner, but has never been hostile to my friend), and of course that means that she, my friend and their children are all much happier.’

I entirely agree. It seems to me that you have behaved with great dignity in obeying your ‘ex-family’s’ instruction not to get in touch.

But it seems unjust, as well as sad, that nobody spoke to them to put the case for forgiveness and reconciliation, to ask them to choose to be kind.

Your sister and her family have been an object lesson, but if only they could have helped mediate.

My brave friend says this: ‘I wish I could offer words of comfort or advice. Sadly, I cannot.

‘I feel Chris’s pain and loss...and of course, the loss of the children cut off from their

father and the grandchildren who have never known their “extra granny”.

‘I have had many sessions with my therapist. He said, “What you are doing [transitioning] is a good and true thing. But anything that good comes at a price...and your children are that price.

‘ “All you can do is to continue to do what is right for you and hope that there will come a time when your children free themselves and come back to you.”

‘Not much comfort in some ways. But another way of looking at it is to say, yes, there is this terrible loss. But there are also gains.

‘My guess (and sincere hope) is that your correspondent did the right thing by transitioning and feels better and truer to herself as a result.’

Chris, of course you have committed no ‘offence’ — and in a sense that is proved by the way your sister and her family embraced you and by the fact that you have found new love.

I’m sure you endured great loneliness, sorrow and fear during your time of transition, not to mention the discomfort of the treatment …

So now you deserve peace and contentment. Your new partner accepts you and makes you happy — and I hope you have mutual friends, too.

Try to focus on these positives, embrace your true life with pride, and just go on hoping that perhaps . . . perhaps . . . your daughters will remember to whom they owe their lives.

Have you ever written to them? It might be worth a try now.