My (mtf) partner came out as a transgender woman

Hi, This may be a long post, so forgive me.

For background, I am an afab person who has questioned their gender in the past but I'm probably a cis girl at the end of the day, and I identify as panromantic and bisexual. When I first started dating my partner over a year ago, I met and started dating them as someone who presented themselves as a heterosexual cis man. I knew something was more to what met the eye, but I couldn't pinpoint what it was.

Within the first week of us dating, my partner came out to me as genderfluid. I was okay with it, and allowed them to explore some of the stereotypical actions related to the female sex (painting nails, doing makeup, wearing clothes from the women's section, etc.) With each individual task they were able to do, they became happier and happier as a person.

Over time, their personality kind of split into two separate entities. There was their "masculine" side that was soft-spoken, deeply intellectual, and calming. Their "feminine" side was spunky, ditzy, energetic and obsessed with makeup and cute things. This was deeply troubling for me because I wanted to accept all the feminine things about them because it made them happy, and I was missing the intellectual person I fell in love with.

Last night, just three days after our one-year anniversary, they came out to me as a transgender woman, and that life as a girl and the thought of them being a woman made a lot more sense than them being a man.

This has been a lot to process for a variety of reasons. This includes the fact that both my mother and my partner's parents have expressed some transphobic tendencies and language over the past few years. We live in a small town that makes information easy to spread about certain things. The personality split they adopted has been really hard- and I told them that they can be a boy that wears makeup or a transwoman with intelligent things to stay and I would fall for them all the same.

I am not going to leave them. Especially because I am the first person they were able to comfortably and openly have these discussions with. It has just been a lot to process. Does anyone have any advice on how to support them, feel okay with myself? My partner being transgender does not remotely bother me, and I have fallen in love with transwomen in the past and had a crush on a transman as well. I just never expected to be in a relationship with a transperson who will possibly go through their entire social transition from coming out for the first time to becoming the person they want to be, and it's all very new (yet not new simultaneously).

Footnotes:
1) I use the 'they' pronoun to address my transwoman partner out of habit. While they were using the genderfluid/bigender label it was something that I adopted in addressing them. It's also because I do not want to out her to my family but not misgender her simultaneously. Not trying to sound transphobic- my partner is okay with me using the 'they' pronoun in certain spaces.

 

Thank you so much, it means a lot to hear that. My partner and I have had very open and honest discussions about it down to me opening up about the personality split causing me significant distress. She reassured me that she was still that intelligent conversation, soft spoken person I fell in love with but subconsciously felt like it belonged to her more masculine characteristics. We've had more intelligent conversations since then (much to my pleasure! I fall in love with people's minds. Some may even call me a sapiosexual! heh). Thankfully I am still in University and my University has an LGBT+ center. I just wanted to talk to someone who may understand their point of view a bit better on it. As a person who likes multiple genders, I had to face a lot of my own battles in the coming out process, and she is actually my first lesbian relationship I ever had! So in a way I try to be the person that I wish I had when I was trying to figure out who I was and how I was going to have my life pan out. But I know at the end of the day I can never truly understand everything she's going through, but I want to do all I can to make sure she's safe and happy.