Let me introduce you to my husband-wife.
A couple of months ago, I got married. It was, in many ways, traditional — I wore an elaborate white dress; my beloved, a tailored suit. I tossed my bouquet. In other ways, it was not — we walked each other down the aisle, hand in hand. After we exchanged our vows and made out before our community, the officiant (a friend who had become an ordained minister via the Internet) gazed down upon us. “I now pronounce you … married!”
We were never going to be pronounced ”man and wife,” my partner and I — firstly, because it’s gross and archaic, and secondly, because my brand-new spouse is not a man.
She looks like a man, though. Much more than she resembles a woman. She’s lanky and lean. Wears button-down shirts and dress pants she buys online from Topman , a U.K.-based retailer that sells menswear in XS. Her hair looks like a Pomade advertisement from the 1950s, so short the nape of her neck feels like velvet after a salon visit, the sharpest, straightest side part painstakingly combed into the shine of it.
And speaking of advertisements, my former fiancée did a wee bit of modeling, for a website that focuses on the style and fashion of women like herself — masculine, to put it simply, or what was once called butch, a word that can feel a little 1990s, if not 1960s. To get radical academia about it, she’s genderqueer, or gender-variant, or gender-nonconforming, all of which fall into the roomy transgender basket. The photos were so hot that they wound up in the wedding section of the New York Times.
My partner is not a man — she doesn’t wonder whether she should begin a course of testosterone, as many of our friends have done. That’s not her path. She does go by a male name, preferring it to the female one she grew up with. She doesn’t ask people to call her ”he” — though if you do so by mistake, she doesn’t mind. In most all ways cultural and social, my partner is a boy. It’s just that she’s a girl.
http://www.ozy.com/true-story/let-me...mpaign=US_LGBT