hey dan I looked for FuckStick and CumDump apps on iTunes store and couldn't find em. How do I get those, they sound fun!

who gives a shit, mike is your ex. might as well be dead.

MHL, why are you bringing up this ex of 16 years in conversation with random co-workers and acquaintances? There seems to be no occasion that would have to discuss someone who you describe as a horrible human being who emotionally and physically abused you. That seems to be a bigger issue than the fact that these conversations get "derailed" by that information.

But it would be simpler, easier, and ally-ier if you sidestepped the issue by not speaking to anyone about your asshole ex ever again.

This. I got about one paragraph in before I started wondering why the LW even talks about her asshole ex. Those questions only grew upon learning that said ex was out of her life entirely.

My wife and I have been together for a decade. In that time, we've never discussed any of our prior relationships, good or bad, beyond the occasional offhand reference. I don't know the names of any of her exes, and she doesn't know the names of any of mine. What's the point of talking about that shit?

I know we're not supposed to intentionally misgender people just because we don't like them, but can this be the one exception? This guy is a complete asshole. She can use any pronoun she wants to refer to the abuser.

But yeah, why is she bringing up her deep dark traumatic past with people she doesn't even know well enough to explain the concept of transgenderism to? That's weird. Maybe she should talk about the weather instead.

@5 She does mention M/Mike rarely comes up, but sometimes the tale of an abusive ex is a useful object lesson.

I thank Mr Savage for advancing my policy of no-pronouning people who have forfeited the courtesy of respectful pronouns.

This probably isn't the last time autonomy and allyship will clash.

@2: Seriously, this person is traumatized and or looking to continue the abuse if they're devoting so very much effort to keeping their ex in their head.

The best step to being an ally to yourself: don't keep talking about him to anyone but your therapist or whatever is absolutely necessary to get out with a few close friends. He deserves nothing from you but the consideration that he is who he is while dropping off the face of the earth.

@6: She's casually discussing being continually and piercingly abused by her ex at work?

Watercooler chat where I work doesn't go nearly that dark.

@6 When I tell useful object lesson stories about real people from my past I often change the name, gender, relationship to me, and even where the story happened so that the person's privacy is protected. I don't see why that can't be done here - change the foul ex's name, use whatever gender, city or whatever you want, and tell the object lesson story. The essence of that kind of story is not the person's actual real identity.

But Dan's right, the very best route would be to completely excise this person from her life, and just don't talk about her ex again. Every time she thinks about the damaging things that ex did to her, the ex is damaging her again. She needs to find ways to stop that and think about more satisfying things.

Maybe we can reserve "it" for these sorts of people (I've had a few in my life as well), because human they are NOT.

Your abusive piece of shit ex is dead. You don't owe her anything.

Alternately, she may just tell long-winded stories unnecessarily. If you have to worry about properly gendering an abusive ex while discussing the abuses with your coworkers, you may be going into more detail with acquaintances than is necessary.

@10: Right? You'd think it would be tiring having to find new people to talk about any ex with, then cornering them to talk about the trauma.

I joke a little harshly, but I do hope she's had a chance to talk about any of this with people who care about her.

And anything that may have happened to her after you cut her out of your life is a mystery in a meaningless void.

Also, why wouldn't anyone who knows how to use email forward the ex's communications (all from the same email address) straight to dev/null?

I kind of have a much less serious version of this problem. I used to know an individual, who was a key member of a group of people I have a bunch of crazy stories about. We're no longer in touch, but a while ago I got a third hand semi-reliable report that this person was transitioning. Maybe. Now I'm wondering if I need to go digging to find out if it's true before I mention anything about those times to anyone.

An alliance is a two-way relationship, by the way.

@16: Retroactive transitioning seems pretty pointless to me, but it would certainly give Caitlyn Jenner's gold medals a whole new significance, not to mention the various Jenner offspring.

Occasionally, in chatting with work-friends and other mild acquaintances, the subject of abusive exes (or first loves, or whatever) comes up.

It's totally legit to share one's experiences at the hands of an abuser, if one is comfortable doing so. MHL is comfortable. I like Dan's recommendations from top to bottom (no pun intended, but isn't it nice to have happened).

I can see sharing the story of an abusive ex with close friends or a new partner (as part of sharing one's past), but then LW just needs to say "I had an ex named M and she was an abusive piece of shit" which is true. If LW is talking about Mike in the present then she should refer to Mike appropriately and might explains he's trans if she's really worried about losing her gold star. But why would LW need to talk about Mike? She needs to cut every line of communication with this terrible person. This is history and her history is with M and not with Mike.

The lesson is shitty people exist no matter their gender and if anything the fact M was abusive humanizes Trans people. That's the only thing of possible worth that could be said.

If M is still emailing the LW, then one could assume the latter hasn't finished with the relationship. Has she (LW), really let M know how the relationship went down for her? Maybe before she deletes M, she could do one last email where she lets M know how their behaviour effected her. Then say farewell and block.

My first partner also came out as trans some years after we were together. When I'm having a conversation that requires this information, I say "The person who I thought of at the time as my first girlfriend but who later turned out to be a guy," and use male pronouns going on from there. But I agree with Dan that just generally talking about your terrible ex less is a good idea.

What Dan didn't address is, I think, the underlying question. This person was a woman when you knew her. He is now a man. That doesn't mean he was a man back in the day when you knew him... Does it? You're a lesbian; you had a relationship with a woman. The fact that that woman no longer exists is irrelevant to your past story. It doesn't look (to me) like your past story has anything to do with trans anything.

MHL could say things like "My ex, who later transitioned"; "My ex-girlfriend, who is now a man"; or call Mike by the gender-neutral pronoun "they."
It is difficult to use the new pronoun for a person who, at the time they were in your life, identified as their old gender. I know someone who is not an ex, but was a good friend pre-transition, and while she is definitely now "Sally" and "she", I can't edit my memories to make her a "she" when she was in them. So, like Dan says, I try to avoid thinking in pronouns generally or say things like "back when she was Steve."
I think if MHL is an ally to the trans community, that should be clear from her attitudes and actions, not whether she occasionally calls a trans man by the pronoun she remembers him by.

@25. Like that.

Although I do think lw needs to end all contact and maybe get some counseling. Firstly because she is still in contact with a horrible horrible person. Secondly, because she believes his transition fifteen years later somehow takes something away from her or alters her identity. She had a relationship with a woman. Now, he's a man.

She seems to have devoted way too much headspace to this ex, rare conversations or not.

"My ex-from-hell" has worked nicely for me, no more details necessary.

@27: I like the sound of that very much. I suppose it can also be modified to "one of my exes from Hell", to make it useful to those with particularly interesting relationship histories.

@25: Tense does matter. He *was* her ex-girlfriend in how he had previously identified. He now is a man. None of that is disrespectful.

@27: Right? Does she really need to itemize the abuses in such detail? That someone feels the need to share details with relative strangers is a sign that there's definitely stuff that's not being worked out with herself and her close circle.

@25: why bother making that effort? She owes her ex absolutely nothing. Jumping through hoops to avoid being seen as a bad person is exactly the kind of thing that keeps people in abusive relationships. Fuck that noise.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". L.P. Hartley, "The Go-Between".

If her ex had been called Sara and had changed her name to Stacy 15 years later, would she have to be respectful and say "my ex Sara, who later changed her name to Stacy" every time she referred to her evil ex? No, of course not. She can just say "Sara". She has no obligation to update the listener on Sara's current life status in any way shape or form.

The LW should definitely block contact from Mike, but it's important that people who were in abusive relationships tell their story of getting out. Dan recently posted a TedX talk by a woman who is very open and vocal about having herpes--I think the same lessons (shit happens to good people, you're not alone, it affects your life but doesn't lessen it) can and should be applied here. She doesn't describe the nature of her conversations, so I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt that these are actually helpful stories that help people identify abusive relationships and find a way out.

Chase @30: "Jumping through hoops to avoid being seen as a bad person is exactly the kind of thing that keeps people in abusive relationships. Fuck that noise." Yes. And that is why, while I wish I hadn't had to pay such a high price to learn that lesson, I'm glad I did.

*** *** ***

Retroactivity, names and pronouns:
Some people and editorial policies declare that it's clear: when someone changes their name for any reason, we use their new name to refer to them throughout their life. So we say, "Hillary Clinton was born in 1947" and "Mike abused me back when we were dating" even though Hillary Clinton didn't legally have any name at all until after she was born and even though "Mike was using the name 'M' back when we were dating" happens to also be a true statement.

That's wikipedia's editorial policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:…

Interestingly, it's not that clear. When we go to the Hillary Clinton wikipedia entry, we have "Hillary Rodham grew up in the Chicago area. She attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1969, and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas, marrying Bill Clinton in 1975. [...] As First Lady of Arkansas she led a task force whose recommendations helped reform Arkansas' public schools, and served on the boards of corporations including Wal-Mart."

In this paragraph, "Hillary Rodham" refers to the Chicago schoolgirl and to the First Lady of Arkansas. So whatever the opposite of retroactivity is.

GLAAD just suggests people try to word their statements such that it doesn't come up. http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgend…

(Philophile, that page also has a little glossary you might be interested in. Or not.)

I was trying to think about what kinds of situations she would be referring to her ex, and it made me think about situations where I might casually mention a long-ago ex of nearly 20 years ago. Most of them are rather banal anecdotes: my ex and I used to go to that restaurant, or my ex used to do xyz in his childhood.

In general, I agree with Dan's first suggestion: stop talking about your ex. At least casually.

If it's a general anecdote about the two of you, can you tell it with just yourself, omitting your ex's presence in the anecdote? Then do that. If not, maybe skip the anecdote entirely. Especially if the anecdote is only about your ex.

This isn't about gendering your ex. It's about healing and moving on.

Another way to think about it: is the story important enough, and the person you're telling it to important enough, to merit going into all those details of your letter to Dan? If so, then maybe it's worth it. Those would be situations where you're talking to a future partner or someone close about things deeply person, where those details matter. Otherwise, skip the whole anecdote entirely.

I think this is probably valid advice for any painful, abusive, long-ago former relationships even if the ex hasn't changed preferred pronouns.

@25 Bingo

We decent human beings, we are privileged to have the duty to our trans friends to be supportive and respectful of them before, during and after their transition.

But however they may understand themselves now, however they may even have understood themselves then, our memories of them, complete with the gender they outwardly manifested are ours. Those memories cannot be edited like entries in a database when the transition happens. The alternative is literally Orwellian.

Whatever else Mike may be, he is a transman. That implies at the very least living as a woman for part of his life. That history should be respected with honesty. And so, I, personally, would consider it entirely appropriate to refer to that history with feminine pronouns, just as I would consider it appropriate to honor his present with masculine ones.

@25 @36 Your friend can't change the past, but what if he lets you know that he's known he was male as far back as he can remember, and female reference always felt nasty but for 25 years it didn't occur to him he could try to do something? And female reference feels nasty now? Do you stand on non-Orwellian principles?

Not all trans people see it like that -- of my friends where this has come up, one says "I used to be a man, now I'm a woman and it suits me better", and one is like gender identity what is it even. But some do, and I don't see it as an unreasonable thing. I'm not talking about asking you to lie about the past -- like to pretend they were never assigned as the unwanted gender -- but to communicate the full state of things if you talk about their past.

Mike comes up because he is part of her coming out story. And explaining the post-breakup transition makes the whole point of the story lost.
Coming out stories were a critical point of contact decades ago, but are still important now.
LW gets to use the female pronouns when talking about her ex in the past because her ex is a part of that story.

LW - 1) I think how you treat the trans people currently in your life is more important than what pronoun you use to refer to someone long gone into your past. 2) Block this person. 3) Part of blocking this person is not chatting with people about this person.

This issue comes up frequently when one member of a longterm couple transitions, and they stay in each other's lives (whether they stay married or are amicable co-parents, or friends, or whatever).

The trans-person may want stories about their past to be told to new people as if they always presented as their inner gender. Picture two women (trans and cis) on a cruise, and people at the table ask how long they've been married. If they say they've been married 25 years and have two adult kids, that leads to questions about how they got same-sex-married 25 years ago, and what adoption was like.

Conversely, the cis person may want to tell the stories the way they experienced it. But that means outing their partner as trans. Picture a straight couple (trans and cis) on a cruise, and people at the table ask how they met. The cis person wants to talk about the couple's longtime participation in the gay rights movement (which is how they met), but that makes no sense without knowing they both presented as gay for a time.

Over time, I think these couples can find some work-around that makes both of them not too miserable. But in the first few years, when emotions are tender, I think it's best to just avoid sharing old stories as much as possible.

Chase @30: It's not about what she owes her ex. It's about what she owes the rest of the trans community.

Mtn. Beaver @37: For trans people who hold the position that they were always #newgender even back when they didn't correct people who read them as their birth gender, I would say "back when they identified as female" instead of "back when they were female."

@41: This seems a scenario where it's really more about her ex's ongoing presence than anything to do with the wider community.

Ms Erica - "Straight" couple?

That reminds me, though, that, about a year or two ago, I read one or two essays (I'm not sure where) by a man whose partner had out of nowhere announced the intention to transition to female. The author was apparently going to chronicle the transition. Much of the first essay dealt with how thrilled his parents would be if he were to phone them and say, "I'm straight now," while the second was so full of Male Guilt that I declined to continue with the series.

Mr. Venn, the couple in my hypothetical looks straight, and the trans one thinks of them as "straight." It's true that the gay cis one doesn't accept that label.

@37, being male may have been Mike's reality for his entire life. But the part where he was outwardly female, and did nothing to contradict that, was part of OP's reality.

Where is it written that, by virtue of being trans, Mike gets to trump OP's interpretation of events?

@22 The wouldn't really help the LW. If anything all it will do is let M know that he still has a foothold in her life and he will use that against her. Really it's not her job to be this person's therapist and seeking an apology or closure that isn't going to happen will just mire her in their toxic stew.

LW you don't need to spill your life story to anyone who says 'how's your day'. Kick M out of your life totally and just use 'they' or 'my abusive ex' when they come up.

Since Mike is no longer around or part of her social circle, why not treat them almost as a split personality or two different people?

"When my ex-girlfriend M was mad at me, she ..."

"Mike used to be a friend, but now he ..."

Erica @40/Venn @44: "Picture a straight couple (trans and cis) on a cruise, and people at the table ask how they met. The cis person wants to talk about the couple's longtime participation in the gay rights movement (which is how they met), but that makes no sense without knowing they both presented as gay for a time."

Straight people participate in the LGBT movement as allies. A straight couple having met this way might be unusual but certainly not impossible. And Venn, if a couple consists of a straight cis person and a straight trans person, I don't see why such a hypothetical couple couldn't call themselves "a straight couple." That phrase would imply, to me, that the couple had got together post transition; the cis person never dated that person when they were their previous gender, so their claim to be attracted to only one gender is not assaulted.

I agree if, in the hypothetical, you have one man who identified as gay while he met his partner who at the time identified as male, but who now identifies as female, I smell some serious bi (and trans) erasure going on if they call themselves "a straight couple."

@48 Cynara. I didn't say anything about the LW being M's therapist.
They have stayed in touch, which to me says the LW has not told M how offensive and abusive their behaviour was. I'm suggesting the LW just clearly write to M and tell her truth. Maybe then she will no longer need to carry so much emotion about M's gender.
I've found it a great release to clearly communicate to those who I have felt violated by, how their behaviour was experienced.

@50: "They have stayed in touch"

This is not true, the LW has offered no contact to her abuser. Her abuser has been sending out emails with no replies incoming.

@46: I'd frame it more as her memories on his presentation versus her "interpretation". Though this letter is full of unconstructive overthinking, and that's the brilliance of an abuser, I guess. Always keeping themselves inside the head of their victims with minimal effort :(

"This isn't a guy who built the railroads. This is a guy who peed on my rug!"

BiDanFan @49, yes, from what I've seen, people who transition often want to erase the parts of the past where they presented with a different persona.

They don't want to be seen as trans, they want to pass as cis.

And, yes, that often means erasing their longtime partner's sexual identity. A partner accommodating enough to stay married to a transitioning partner often finds it hard to stand up for their own identity and insist on their own sexual identity still being acknowledged, given the emotional and physical risks of thereby outing their trans partner.

It's a hard issue.

I'm in a somewhat similar situation, and I can see why this could come up even if LW isn't really intending to talk about their ex. Like when someone asks me what I did after college (answer: move to a new city to live with my ex) or why I don't have those cute dogs in my Facebook pics anymore. When you share a life with someone they are part of your story. Even if you decide you don't need to talk about them as a person anymore, it is hard to erase their footprint on your life without erasing your life too.

@55: I don't think anyone's saying you have to erase their footprint, just that it's possible to dance around who he was to her, who he is now and abstract without lying if she doesn't want to get into the whole story.

@53 brilliant, I was just thinking about that scene, but hadn't connected it to the letter. IT really is about preferred nomenclature vs rug-pissing...

@11 That's what I tend to do, on the few occasions that I have to talk about the creature that abused me. (I have permanent damage to nerves and spinal cord, brain damage, visible scars, adhesions that sometimes bleed during sex, and probable infertility, so there are occasions when I have to talk about It.)

I do not consider It to be a person. It may have human DNA, but It is not capable of courage, love, kindness, compassion, empathy, humility, or any of the traits that define humans.

It is not trans*, as far as I know, but it wouldn't make a different to me if It were.

You don't have to be an ally to someone who abused you. You don't have to be anything to them.

@56 My comment was more in response to those wondering why the heck the LW is still talking about this other person. I just wanted to point out that it isn't, necessarily, that the LW actually wants to talk about their abuser, they just need a convenient way to discuss their life during that time.

Totally understood.

@50 Lava what do you think will happen if the LW sends that email? Do you really believe the ex will sincerely apologize and everything will be forgiven? I think it's far more likely the ex will drag them into a never-ending debate about how they weren't abusive and how the LW even mentioning it makes them transphobic and crap like that.

I think writing a letter to them and ripping it up and burning it is a good way to purge any lingering feelings, but she should NOT open any sort of communications with this person.

No, it is not ok to misgender your ex, just like it's not okay to call an ex racial slurs. Call them narcissistic, abusive, fucked up, whatever. But dehumanizing them brings you down to their level. I feel the LW is quite a manipulator, going right for the heart with sob stories so that we're twisted up into agreeing with their heinous plan. Get over your ex, then get over yourself.

Telling someone their abusive behaviour for eight years has left scars, is not opening communication. It is finally closing it.
LW. Just say when talking of M/Mike,
something like' my partner at the time M, she transitioned in (year),was a total control freak...'or whatever you are using M/Mike as a reference for.
That conveys the truth for you and Mike and your trans* ally card stays current.

@63: That's absolutely terrible advice and will not help the LW but WILL let her psychotic, possibly violent ex know that she's been looking at every single one of his emails.

It is literally opening up a line of communication after years of her doing the right thing in not responding to his manipulation.

LW. Up to you to decide if I offer terrible advice or not. You still allow this person to contact you, why? As I said above, I've been able to move past issues and find some inner resolution after telling those who have abused me just how that abuse effected me.

Ms Fan - That's basically what I meant, though in general I'm more careful about pinning S or G to pairs of elephants than most people here. Obviously trans people can be straight or gay, and can be part of such couples. The interesting case to me is when someone's orientation (or possibly presentation of orientation) spontaneously changes (or maybe becomes recognized) during the relationship.

*****

Ms Erica - Thank you for #54. I still don't think it's equitable to call the first example "two women" and the second "a straight couple". It's a minor quibble.

Mr. Venn, thanks for coming back to explain in more detail. You're right that I resisted calling the first couple "lesbian" (although they look lesbian, and the transwoman in such couples generally thinks of them that way) because I identified more with the straight woman, than with the gay man or lesbian in a similar situation.

The shit people worry about. If this, "horrible person" is a memory then you are free to use the pronoun associated with that memory. Maybe work out why a horrible person is your life.

Being considerate to preferences is a good thing, but reality is a better thing. Bruce Jenner, he competed in the men's Olympics; Caitlyn Jenner, she did not compete in the women's Olympics.

Otherwise we'll come to statements like, "My ex, Mike, cheated on me and he got pregnant with his lover's baby".

@30 @69 and @70....totally right. And to take it a step further, even if this person is not a total asshole you are under no obligation to do shit for them. I am currently in the middle of a divorce. My ex is transitioning right now. Out of politeness to him I use his new name when addressing him. But we are not even divorced yet and I moved across the country twice in 3 years with him...then back home (so yes I discuss my recent past a lot). I can use whatever pronoun I want when I discuss it. And I can talk about it as much as I want to whomever I want. I will continue to refer to him as "him" because no one is entitled to know anything about me that I don't want them to know just because I "owe" something to the trans community. I DO NOT. I understand the derailing. People still ask me all the time "what happened?" If I even mention or elude to the transition people assume that is why we broke up...and that I left him...wrong assumptions. Or they feel so bad for me. Beyond that I married a man, he has been my husband. My experience with him was as a cis straight couple. I was prepared to stay in the marriage and I helped him embrace his new identity, get counseling, and provided otherwise non-existent (I was the ONLY person who knew for months) support during the early months...even helped with clothes, makeup, and hair. I owed him that as my spouse. Now I don't owe shit to him, or the trans community. I owe my self whatever it takes to feel normal. If that makes a bunch of people I do not know uncomfortable...they can go fuck themselves. I AM an ally and not being willing to throw myself under the bus to prove it, does not undo that. If my friends transition, I will respectfully use their pronoun of choice. But NO ONE is entitled to know anything about MY story that I don't tell them.

@66 LavaGirl - when you have an obsessive ex, it's not about "allowing" them to contact you. They're going to do it, whether you like it or not. If you tell them you're going to block them so goodbye, all they do is create a new email account and go "Why? We need to discuss this! I thought we were friends and everything is cool now!"

Perhaps that wouldn't be the case for this LW, but that was my experience. At first, I told my obsessive ex in no uncertain terms that it was over and to leave me alone. I stopped responding when this resulted in my coming home for months to several emails and dozens of IMs every day alternating between angry insults and begging me for "one last talk" to discuss why I was cutting off all contact, and what was wrong with chatting for just 15 minutes a day as friends? I moved and changed my phone number around this point (not because of my stalker, but it was certainly a welcome bonus), so my stalker stalked me only on the Internet. He joined every single online community I frequented, and harassed my friends and family when I refused to respond. When he was banned from the community, he would just start up a new profile with a new throwaway email. I had to start using fake user names to avoid him. After a couple of years of this nonsense, it got so bad that one of my friends seriously suggested faking my own death on the Internet to get rid of him. Fortunately I didn't have to go to those extremes, but for that entire time, his sole focus was to provoke me into responding to him. His constant refrain to my friends was that they should persuade me to talk to him because he wasn't an obsessive stalker, he just needed to understand what happened because I obviously had the wrong idea, and he's a good guy on the inside, really!

Now can you imagine how he would have blown up my computer if I actually *did* respond?

My suggestion to the LW is to set the ex's email address as spam, so she never has to see them. That way, he won't get a message that he's been blocked and he can continue sending fishing emails in ignorant bliss (that is how it would work, right? I'm not very savvy in that direction). I'm positive he is sending updates on "mutual friends" she's never heard of because he's trying to get her to reply with "I don't remember so-and-so, who was that again?" My stalker tried that too - I would get messages like "so-and-so is sick right now." "You're not responding? How can you not care about them? Why are you so heartless?"

Also, I'm not sure why people are saying she should never ever talk about her ex? My own relationship may have ended badly, but it was still part of my life and shaped me in some ways. I'm also completely over it, which is why I don't mind sharing the story here or elsewhere. It's just an incident from the past now that I mention if the topic comes up and I want to explain why I feel a certain way about certain subjects.

Forgot to mention - I did tell my stalker exactly why I wanted him out of my life. He simply decided that that wasn't the real reason and made it his mission to clear up this huge "misunderstanding."

I've been with a few "guys" who later transitioned, including on who raped me while we were together. I consider myself a trans ally (and I think my trans friends would agree), but it's a lot harder to change to female pronouns when you still remember her dick inside you after you said "no".

@73: Right, catharsis has nothing to do with the other person, engaging someone of a stalker-y persuasion will never give you "closure".

@74: Something the LW already knew will happen, and why she's having such nervousness about framing it externally.

@66: "You still allow this person to contact you, why?"

You say this as if what he does is at all related to what she wants. Should she break his email-typing hands? You can't go to the police to keep people from emailing you things unless there's an existing restraining order.

Regarding the "never talk about", I was mostly suggesting that if the LW didn't trust the persons enough to want to explain her sexuality, it was possible to abstract the story without going into so much level of detail.

Neutral pronouns, abbreviated story, they'll get the gist of what happened.

In general, I think offering any feedback to obsessive exes is a huge mistake. Any attention will increase their emotional investment. It's for us each to decide what we want in our lives, and what we don't. If you don't want someone in your life, don't engage, and don't explain. I would be protecting myself against her/his messages, and turning them into spam.

I also agree that the LW feeling obligated to be a good person is part of what's keeping her hooked into an abusive dynamic. I think she owes herself, not the ex, and not the trans community. Protecting oneself from abuse trumps all that. She can (and obviously wants to) be a good ally in every other arena, but she owes no one anything when the stakes are her personal well-being.

As for her coming out story, it's hers, and she can tell it the way she feels is true. Whatever scars she has from this relationship are still affecting her. Figuring out
what she needs to do for herself to heal these might be a better focus for the LW.

@76 - my response @74 was for LavaGirl as well, since she posted @66 that she thought the LW should at least write back and tell her abusive ex how the relationship affected her. I was trying to explain why this would do nothing except encourage the abusive ex to keep trying, based on my experience with how my stalker turned everything into "no, this is just a misunderstanding, just let me talk to you so I can set the record straight!" Sorry for the confusion. :)

@77 - I completely agree with you here, and that's what I do as well. I was just puzzled at responses like #3-5 that seemed to think there was no reason to talk about this or any past relationship EVER.

@jina and #78 exactly. Lava you need to keep in mind we're not talking about someone who's emotionally healthy, someone who might benefit from understanding their screw-up, but an abuser. Someone who will use any sign of interest, no matter how minor as a wedge they can use to force themselves into the LW's life. Someone who's whole history is about mistreating people and then justifying this mistreatment to themselves and the world around them.

@79: No confusion, I wasn't disagreeing!

I ordinarily use the most recent expressed pronoun even when referring to events that took place before the person's transition, but if LW is at, say, a support group and talking about her experiences, then the fact that M is trans is an afterthought. She should go ahead and say "she" and explain that M was a then-pre-transition trans man if it is ever relevant.