I love your site and I’ve been looking through all your genderqueer and transgender tagged posts, and it’s awesome. I’m writing because I’m not finding much representation of transwomen or people who are non-binary, but present more femininely. I did find that great Jeffrey Marsh photo shoot, and this piece you have about transgendered wedding dresses. Most importantly, I found this post about Liz & Elly’s wedding… which is WONDERFUL! But still, that’s only three posts, and I was hoping for more photos of real transfeminine people at weddings, getting married, or as guests.
My partner’s a transfeminine (non-binary but feminine, assigned male at birth), and is struggling MIGHTILY trying to envision what they might wear to our wedding. Thank you so much! I really appreciate your taking the time to read my message.
-Rosie
Ariel responds:
Related Reading
This gender fluid wedding dress photo shoot gives zero fucks about the “gender binary”
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Heya, Rosie! The sad news is that if you’ve browsed our genderqueer and transgender archives, then you’ve seen not only everything that we’ve ever published that might be relevant… you’ve seen almost everything even submitted to us that might be relevant.
We feature almost every single trans-related wedding that’s submitted to us, and the reality is that we see way way more FTM representation than we do MTF representation. I’m not sure if it’s a cultural issue, or a gap in our readership, or something else… I’m curious, honestly!
In a decade of being online, Liz & Elly’s wedding from 2012 is the only transfem/MTF wedding ever submitted to us. And as for that Jeffrey Marsh photo shoot, we went out hunting for it! We’re working hard to get more MTF content onto our sister site Offbeat Home & Life, with posts like Stomping out transmysogynoir: An interview with badass black trans femme Brielle Nicole… but you’ve spotted an interesting blank spot in the offbeat world, for sure.
Rosie writes back:
I understand, and I assumed that it was a problem of not receiving submissions from transfem people. It just sucks since there is already such an exaltation of being butch in the queer community — I just wish we could uphold transwomen as sexy and beautiful in a similar way in which we are now celebrating transmasculine people.
One thought is that trans people tend to be straight, or more straight than not (so I’ve read and anecdotally experienced), so most transwomen are marrying men, whereas most transmen are marrying women.
Since the entire wedding industry has centered ciswomen for ages, it makes sense that you get more submissions from ciswomen, the secondary effect of having so few from transwomen might be related in that way. However, that is some deep sociological speculation that I would not repeat before extensive fact-checking. Hah.
I can only assume that if you continue doing what you’re doing, you will eventually get more submissions with even greater variety.
Anyway, thank you so much for your work. It’s really the only place that I feel like we can reliably go to without feeling pushed off to the side as we envision our wedding.
Thank you so much to Rosie for asking this question and being willing to dig into the answers with me! As many of you know, deep sociological speculation without research is my favorite thing (HA!!), so I’d love to hear from y’all with your thoughts on this issue… when it comes to transgender weddings, why do you think we see so many FTM folks and so few MTF people?
