AIO to still be upset about being ghosted? How would you handle this situation?

All the parties in this story are middle aged adults. If you are anti-trans please do not respond. I don't need that viewpoint and I will block you without reading it fully.

I will keep this as brief as possible. I am at a little bit of a loss as to how to proceed now and I am having trouble sorting out my feelings. TLDR at end but these details are important.

5 years ago my husband and I had a decade long friendship with a guy, Alex who was important to us. (Fake Name) A couple things punctuated this friendship.

1. Alex grew up Morman and had a tendency to be very conservative in viewpoints even though we were part of their large group of liberal friends. Alex hosted a poker game that mixed these friend groups.

2. Alex started experimenting with cross dressing. They said this was very freeing but they couldn't be open about it with many. I was especially supportive and they sent me weekly pics, we talked about makeup advice and I bolstered their self esteem.

3. Alex started getting into gun culture a lot more, putting him in increasing contact with conservative friends. At the same time, BLM exploded and Alex was firmly on the side of the cops. They felt that anyone a cop targeted asked for it and they would defend the cop even in the most sensational of national cases, the kind where the cops would end up charged and found guilty. Alex got a lot of guns and participated in local clubs.

These tension points created some problems in our friendship with Alex. My husband started to fight with him constantly about politics and social views. My husband wanted him help Alex see with logic how hurtful Alex's views were to people like us and Alex themself (the gender issues). Alex was prone to sharing deeply disturbing content to dehumanized people and then passing it off as "It is just a joke. I don't believe that. I just share it to get a reaction."

In the meantime, I tried to steer away from our differences and keep my separate friendship with Alex neutral. Our talks focused on his family, hobbies we shared and overwhelming support in being a safe space for his gender discussions where I asserted that whoever he was and however he wanted to express gender was fine.

I stopped going to the poker game because Alex's gun friends made anti-trans, racist and misogynistic comments that made me uncomfortable. All the rest of Alex's liberal mutual friends slowly dropped away too.

The situation came to a boiling point 5 years ago (2021) when my husband couldn't take it anymore and told him that he was done with the friendship. He had tried and tried to encourage empathy and discuss the problematic world views but Alex was difficult to get to. Alex wanted to continue the friendship but my husband told him that he couldn't do it. My husband made clear that if I wanted to continue my friendship with Alex, I could. I did want to, mostly so Alex wasn't left alienated in a conservative echo chamber.

Here is where I got hurt. That was not my decision about how to handle Alex. I still cared for them and saw the good in them and my almost daily conversations were largely drama free. I had a separate and very different friendship with Alex than my husband did. I supported my husband's choice for himself but expected to have a separate discussion with Alex.

That didn't happen. Once my husband broke it off with them, Alex unfriended and blocked me on social media without any discussion. NGL, it hurt. I felt like I wasn't considered a separate valuable friend. I was just the same person as my husband to Alex. All the support and care I had given them had been difficult for me.

5 years passed and my husband saw a post from Alex who had apparently unblocked us at some point. She had come to a lot of realizations and was sort of apologizing to the world. She realized that she was transgender, and her conservative upbringing lead her to reject herself and dig deeper into conservative roots trying to have acceptance there to cancel out her truth. It was a long detailed post talking about the horrors of her journey in the world and the deep attacks and rejections she received from the conservative friends once she decided to live a more authentic life. She talked about how good friends had tried to open her eyes to the problems in those communities and she hadn't been open to it.

She talked about how hard she has always fought to not be the person she really is. How bad her mental health got when she tried to be deeply conservative and how she almost didn't survive. She detailed how much happier she is living an authentic life including her mental health and daily happiness. She deeply regretted not listening to friends earlier. Her gun hobby, which was still important to her ended with the gun club making a special rule preventing transgender people from participating in competitions for either gender.

My husband decided to reach out to her. They went to her house and spent hours discussing things with Alex and meeting some new friends in her life. It was a healing conversation for them and they started playing WOW together again. I am happy my husband has regained a close friend.

My part of this is still unacknowledged. I had been waiting to see if Alex would reach out to me separately. She has not. My husband and she talk about me and she is positive and loving in her comments about me, stating she misses me. My husband talks about me all the time and Alex is interested and asks him about me. There is no acknowledgement or understanding about how she treated me though, and no effort to talk to me outside of her time with my husband. I had decided to just let this be my husband's friend.

Recently my husband told Alex about my feelings. He said, "You know, you really hurt Cass." He explained how it felt to be blocked by Alex as if Alex and I didn't have a real separate friendship. Alex is still sort of doing this by rekindling the friendship with my husband and just assuming one with me.

Alex was apparently shocked. She did not remember until prompted that she blocked me without speaking to me. She was so wrapped up in the more dramatic fight with my husband that she really didn't even consider me as a separate person in spite of the fact that our interactions had always been different than theirs. She realizes it now and said, "Yes, that is very shitty."

I got the message attached in this post yesterday and didn't reply until this morning. The thing is, I am still very hurt and I honestly don't know if I want the friendship again, or how to feel about it. There is a big voice in my mind that says if Alex cared, she wouldn't have to be prompted to even consider me as a human factor. I think it is a continuation of her conservative mindset that she can't stop treating a women as an extension of their husband. I was more open to rekindling the friendship months ago when my husband did. However, in the months since with no attempt at contact from Alex my willingness has cooled. I COULD have been the one to initiate contact, but I didn't because I wanted to see what Alex would do. The answer disappointed me but I worry that the "test" was not fair.

What are your opinions about this? I am open to giving more details if needed and I am still going to make my own decisions, of course. However, I wouldn't hate having some insights and outside perspectives. AIO to be this upset and conflicted? What would you do?

TLDR:

My husband and I had a long term important friend, Alex with whom we both shared separate good friendship. Alex became increasingly conservative over time in spite of having some gender identity issues. My husband broke off his friendship with Alex but I wanted to continue. Alex treated me like an extension of my husband and blocked and ghosted me without closure. 5 years later Alex has come out as a trans-woman, shed the conservative friends and reconnected with my husband as part of her more authentic life. Alex did not understand the impact of her treatment of our friendship on me and just assumed she and I were good, but didn't reach out. Now my husband has made her aware of the situation, and she has.