How Marriage Inequality Affects Transgender Spouses
Posted by: Cara
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/04/28/how-marriage-inequality-affects-transgender-spouses/There are several things that bug me a lot about this NY Times article on a married couple that stayed together through one partner's transition as a transwoman. There's referring to the transwoman, Denise, by masculine pronouns and her birth name to reference past events where she did identify as female but had not yet had sexual reassignment surgery. There's the very equation of surgery with transition — one is accepted as a woman only through virtue of a vaginoplasty, not only with regards to the law, but also in terms of how her gender is treated by the newspaper (and vice versa for a transman). Since not all transgender people choose to have surgery, and since not all people determine their very identity based off of their genitals, it's insulting and obnoxious, and a big part of the problem that the paper is trying to examine. (Not to mention how the story is run, of course, in the Fashion and Style section.)
