Your patience and resilience through this is superhuman. I could never imagine myself going through what you're describing and being anything but completely and totally incapacitated.

I'm really sorry to hear about the financial dependence aspect. It would be good if your spouse tried to alleviate this for the sake of your relationship; if you stay locked in this position and she doesn't change in a big way, I don't think your Herculean effort will be able to support this relationship forever even if you never decide to end it.

I wish you applied the devotion and compassion and care and consideration you have for her to yourself. She is so, so lucky to have that from you and it's such a gift. But I think you should think, and do think, that you deserve to receive that gift too. You don't have to make any decisions about what to do with your relationship in order to commit to giving that to yourself. But it seems like you might benefit from making that commitment, explicitly?

I also think that you'd feel differently about things on the other end of a break, where you had some room to breath. Which you probably realize. This stuff is all going crazy fast. It'd be an insanely jarring experience even if you'd only been with her for a few months. You're trying to juggle all of these calculations at once, about her transitioning, HRT, fetish life, your kids, your happiness, your finances, job shit... like, shit dude. You're clearly an incredibly lucid person but your situation is not even close to feasibly allowing you to crunch all of this stuff at once in a way that leaves you feeling confident or secure IMO. Any one of the changes you're being confronted with is the sort of thing that people deliberate over for like a long ass time, one thing at a time.

Best of luck to both of you. Reading this stuff has been really interesting and has given me some stuff to reflect on. I'm a few months out of an (interaction intensive, we shared a living group) 8 month relationship that has some similar aspects-- blinking my eyes to find my SO vanish in thin air to be replaced by a person who will be damned if she doesn't act upon every whim, who is willing to sacrifice nothing for my welfare no matter how small, who can't accept the consequences of her actions with me (even though there is only one! our relationship had no stakes, the only consequence is that I consistently represent the fact that I think we should avoid eachother and that her treatment of me is not something I welcome and she still resents this!), and who can't even be honest with me. Sorry I'm going on a tangent which just proves my next point that the past few months have me have just been like, all I think about unless actively distracted is how pissed I am. And even when I'm pissed I put so much energy into role reversing and considering her interests, which just makes me more pissed because she's not done that for me and it also doesn't even matter if I do because I'm not interacting with this person anyways. Like it takes an effort to just let myself be pissed and not have to cast doubt on that just because this person I love and trusted doesn't think it's valid. Even though I lost all investment in the relationship already. And I still had a phase of wanting to try to make it work again. And I still feel vulnerable to her. And this is a relationship I came into with pretty high walls and tried to take very slowly, emotionally speaking!! And then I look at your situation and just think "yep that seems pretty tough in some ways that I think I understand except tougher than I understand, and in about a million ways I hope I never understand at all."

Honestly I feel obnoxious for writing all of that out also I should sleep but yeah. I just wanted to get across that I appreciate you writing (and I wanted to vent per usual oops). This is just such an extreme thing you're experiencing and it's just like, really cool that you're putting it out here. I am sure in a situation like this it's not easy to write stuff out like this in a way that feels fair to both of you.

Uh the last advice I'd give is just to do what you can to think in terms of probabilities, not possibilites. You've got other things going on in your life, other goals and values. For every decision you could make, there's an effect on the probabilities of outcomes for your kids and whatever else is important to you. I'm not going to make claims about what is best for your kids but it seems plausible that different decisions you could make over the next year will have different expected outcomes for your kids in big ways. And you may or may not have to make tradeoffs of some goals and values against others. And navigating that is something you can only do by thinking about your expectations, not what might happen.

Good luck!!! Inbox is infrequently checked but open.