Who am I?

My name is Vic Kelly-Victor and like everyone, my identity has a lot of parts. I’m deaf and I use a wheelchair. I’m autistic and I have cPTSD and OCD. I’m white Irish and settled. I’m agender and my pronouns are they/them. I’m panromantic, demisexual and married to an American-born, white, able-bodied trans woman who has ADHD. I’m a scientist, she’s a therapist. I’m a geek, she’s a crafter and artist. I have special interests, she has hyperfocuses.

Why am I blogging?

In early 2018, five years into our relationship, my spouse told me that she is a trans woman. She began her social transition, then her medical transition and we began to navigate what that meant for both of us. I learned to call her Veronica and use she/her as pronouns. We’re still on that journey, learning about ourselves, each other, and the way the world treats trans people.

Confronting the change in her identity also made us both more aware of other aspects of our identities: the ways in which we were already showing up for each other and the ways in which maybe we could do more and be better. So this blog is partially about being trans reality. But it is also about being a partner and an ally to a disabled person with mental health issues; and about that life.

The strange attitude to Veronica’s transition

When Veronica and I started telling our friends about her transition, many of them assumed that we would soon start talking about divorce: “still friends and support her but, you know…”. Perceiving me as a gay man and her as a woman, they questioned how our relationship could last. Jokes about my being straight now were made; the question “what about sex?” was hinted at or directly asked. To these people, it seemed that Veronica was now someone she hadn’t previously been.

To me, Veronica is still the same person she always was. We had both assumed she was a man but she’s a woman. Her values, politics, sensibilities, sense of humour, and artistic vision are unchanged. She looks different but she’s still the person I married. Her gender identity doesn’t change that — and my identity is flexible enough to survive being seen as a straight man.

I’m not saying it’s been easy or that it was an overnight adjustment. We’re learning to navigate realities we hadn’t seen in our future, with more new challenges coming as we get older. But we try to keep showing up and I try to keep showing people that everyone deals with changes in their partners’ and friends’ realities: it doesn’t always mean that it’s “the end”.