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Mr. & Mr.

I so love that this guy wrote to the AP to let them know that he & his husband use the term “husband” with each other. Apparently the AP is supposed to not use the terms for same sex couples unless those people use it themselves.

So he went on record and wrote to the AP to let them know that in his case, and in his husband’s case, they should go ahead and use “husband”.

I understand that the AP will only refer to my lawfully wedded husband, Michael Gallagher, as my “husband” if you are aware that we have regularly used those terms.

As this determination is being made on a case-by-case basis, I wanted to let you know, for your records, that we use these terms.

You can write to them to: Tom Kent, the standards editor, tkent@ap.org, [and] David Minthorn, AP stylebook editor, dminthorn@ap.org.

I really do want to write to them but I think trying to explain that we’ve gone from husband & wife to wives to sometimes just “legal spouse” – because the legally married part often needs to be underlined – might just throw the AP if they’re still pussyfooting around couples who are, and stay, the same legal gender.

And we in the trans community wonder why journalists get it wrong so often.

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Why Trans Partners Should Tell Their Stories

The other day I published a brief interview with Christine Benvenuto, who wrote a book about her marriage to and divorce from a trans woman.

I blurbed her book, let me admit up front.

I blurbed it because despite some transphobic tendencies (not respecting her ex’s change to feminine pronouns, most notably), I think it’s important that partners get their stories out there – as important as it is for trans people to do so. I’ve been enabling the latter for a long time, and I’m proud to have done so. But I see so often that partners who are having a hard time or who are bitter about a divorce or angry about transition are told – in trans community spaces – to STFU, pretty much. And that really sucks, a lot.

The thing is, nothing about her memoir struck me as patently false. I’ve known a lot of trans women and a lot of wives of trans women over the past 13 years. A LOT. And Benvenuto’s story, just as she told it, is pretty goddamned typical. I have seen behavior by trans women that is sexist, misogynist bullshit. I have seen trans women spend their kids’ college money on transition. I have seen 401Ks emptied. I have seen all of that, and more.

I have also seen the wives of transitioning women take out all their rage on their trans spouse – financially, emotionally, even physically. I have seen rage that I didn’t even know was possible in the wives of trans women. And I have seen them be unwilling to let it go.

That is, I have seen a lot of awful behavior on both sides of this coin. Trans people are not excused because they’re trans just as women are not excused because they’re women. We are all faced with loss and betrayal and heartbreak and all of the emotions that accompany those things. How you choose to express them is entirely up to you.

I can buy the argument that now is not the best time to be airing our dirty laundry in public. Maybe it is. Maybe right now is the “let’s put a good face on it so the public grants us our rights” period for trans issues. But I don’t think there ever is that time, to be honest. I think that’s the kind of thinking that results in shaming some members of a community over other members of that community.

Because, I would argue, the crap behavior of some trans women who come from lives of male privilege – & here I’m specifically talking about certain kinds of later transitioning trans women – is a fact. It’s not made up. I can promise you that. And what we want, as a community, is for trans people to be happy. For them to have people to love and who love them. For them to be accepted and loved by their families.

And transition after 20 years of marriage is very, very rarely going to make that happen. It just isn’t.

So if we as a community want trans people to be happy, people need to know what kind of devastation a late transition can cause on families and wives and communities and of course on the trans people themselves. There is so, so much pain, on everyone’s part. People need to know it. People need to transition younger so that some of this can be prevented.

That said: partners deserve to tell their stories because they’re their stories. There are other reasons, but really, that’s the nut of it. There is no saying who is “right” when it comes to he said/she said. There never is. But as far as I could tell, Sex Changes felt real. It felt hard to write. There were parts that made me cry to finally see things I’d felt in print.

So no, it’s not a perfect story. It could have been kinder, but my gut still says it was honest and that is worth having in the world. Honesty can only shed light in dark corners, and transition-fueled divorce is one of the darkest corners I know of.

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Beatie Complication

The Beaties were just trying to get divorced.

Thomas and Nancy Beatie are eager to end their nine-year marriage, but their divorce plans stalled when Maricopa County Family Court Judge Douglas Gerlach said in late June that he was unable to find any legal authority defining a man as someone who can give birth.

“Are we dealing with a same-sex marriage?” Gerlach asked. He noted Arizona has banned such marriages and refuses to accept those performed in other states. The judge added no court here is allowed to declare same-sex unions valid.

and


“What you have is a man and woman who are married, and their relationship is ending,” said Minter, who isn’t involved in the Beatie case. “And it’s no different, fundamentally, from other people in that circumstance.”

And Beatie, whom I’ve never been a gigantic fan of, redeems himself with this:


David Michael Cantor, one of Thomas Beatie’s attorneys, said it would be more financially favorable for his client if the marriage weren’t recognized by the courts, because Thomas could have to pay Nancy alimony. But Cantor said Thomas wants the divorce as an official recognition that their union was legitimate. “He loses money, but he wants to be told it’s valid,” Cantor said.

As a friend pointed out: it’s sad that he doesn’t want to pay alimony simply because it’s the right thing for a man to do in a sexist system, but at least he wants to see his marriage upheld as legitimate so as not to set a precedent (or rather, more precedent) that puts any other of our marriages at risk. Let’s hope he gets his way.

You can read the whole article here.

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A Modest Proposal

A trans guy puts the video of him proposing to his fiancee up on YouTube and the right wing mocks them.

But he wasn’t having it, and has responded with grace and humor and steeliness:

“To Laura Ingraham, a Fox News anchor who expressed dismay at seeing the news, we just want to say, do not worry. We will absolutely invite you to the wedding,” Scout says. As for Fischer, who Scout accidentally referred to as Miss Brianna Fischer, “We will offer you free LGBT cultural competency training.”

What his fiancee said is what drew me to this story.

There are some “people who think we’re mutants and horrible people,” said Margolies, who is executive director of the National LGBT Cancer Network in New York City. “But we’re just regular people struggling to do good in the world.”

This shouldn’t be a very difficult thing to explain, yet I find it is, time after time. The assumption that LGBTQ people – and especially trans people and their partners – are somehow living lives that are intentionally perverse is one that I find even welcoming liberals sometimes express.

We are not trying to be “out there”. We are trying to be happy, like everyone else.

A lot of the time, embracing the idea of being a pervert, or “out there”, is the only thing that keeps you sane, because otherwise, the constant judgment wears you down.

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Boston DOMA Ruling

In Thursday’s opinion, a three-judge panel in the First Circuit Court of Appeals found that the law couldn’t stand. Writing for the court, Judge Michael Boudin, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, observed that Supreme Court precedents limit government’s power to take action against “historically disadvantaged or unpopular” groups, including gays and lesbians. The 1996 law imposes “serious adverse consequences” on them, he wrote.

Justifications offered for the law—”defending and nurturing the institution of traditional, heterosexual marriage” and “traditional notions of morality,” among others—were insufficient to justify such discriminatory treatment, Judge Boudin said.

Six states plus the District of Columbia currently authorize same-sex marriages, and more than 100,000 same-sex couples have been married. Thirty-nine states have passed laws limiting marriage to a man and a woman.

More here.

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Seven + D.C.

Washington state’s Senate just passed a bill to make same sex marriage legal. It’s expected to pass all the way through to the Governor’s office, who is expected to sign it.

Washington will mean that seven states and D.C. have made it legal, folks. (Only 16 states had full suffrage for women before the Federal Government gave women the right to vote, and I don’t think there will be even that many before same sex marriage becomes legalized on the national level.)