When Your Wife Becomes Your Husband

There’s a nice article by Roni Jacobson in New York magazine just now about men who stay with trans masculine partners; I was interviewed for it but it is mostly an interview with the guys of the blog Accidentally Gay.

Here are some highlights:

After Jello transitioned, did it make you think about your personal identity any differently? Do you think of yourself as gay now?

Lucky: I have a hard time thinking of myself as gay because I’ve kind of felt this way the whole time. That’s the one thing I have a hard time with with the LGBT community. I don’t know how to fit in.

Jello: You were worried people wouldn’t accept you.

Lucky: That they would call me fake-gay. And there’s still that. Sometimes we’ve had occasional weirdness.

Jello: Sometimes gay men are not that accepting. Go figure.

Where did you encounter that attitude?
Lucky: The first time was at this support group for trans people and their partners. Weirdly enough, from some of the lesbian partners of trans women. They were nice enough. No one has been outright rude.

Jello: It’s usually the frozen smile and this kind of pulling back from accepting you. I wanted to meet other trans guys. Which turns out is not easy to find. It was mostly older trans women and a couple genderqueer kids. I love the genderqueer kids. Genderqueer kids are, like, so accepting.

More accepting than the trans women and their partners?
Jello: Yes.

Lucky: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Jello: Older people sometimes have a really hard time with us. Most groups tend to be mostly transgender ladies. And transgender ladies, I think they need more support anyways, because society is crap and nasty to trans women. I think there was some frustration, too, like some ladies in the group had serious losses of partners, and here I come trotting in with a handsome man. Because the fact is that most partners don’t stay. And here I am. I end up winning the lotto with a dude that’s willing to be gay for me. I don’t think they wanted to invest in him because they didn’t think he was gonna stay. We were asking for resources [for people with FTM partners], and we looked and we literally could not find anything.

Lucky: Almost everyone I talk to in this community, their spouse is female. I’ve never met a guy who has stayed with a transitioning spouse. It’s all women who are staying with their partners.