That’s one of the ironies of the situation for us. Because Wisconsin never had a X marker for gender on driver’s licences, I never bothered trying to get it changed. So on paper we’re entering into a heterosexual marriage, even though we’re both queer (nonbinary tran fem pansexual + agender asexual panromantic). At least right now, there’s nothing legally problematic about the polyamorous aspects!
We’ve started to jump through the legal paperwork before, but things kept keeping it from happening – like the law office suddenly closing down! We have some of the protections in place like medical PoA and advanced directives, but they can still be challenged. Going ahead with a marriage cuts through so much of that. Love is still a huge part of why we’re doing this, but cementing those protections is also a major consideration.
Also: Thank you to everyone for the congratulations and well wishes!
The initial ceremony is going to be small, but we plan to have a larger celebration with as much of the polycule we can get together in one place. We might need to rent a moderate sized banquet hall for that!
This is what my wife and I plan to do. We got married in a forest in BC with 2 partners as witnesses in order to make applying for her permanent residence a lot easier, and plan to have a proper ceremony and celebration when we’ve got more room in our life for such things. Hopefully soon
A study of just over 10,000 US kids and teens aged 11-15 years found that 1.02% of adolescents identify as transgender; approximately 8.2% who were assigned female gender at birth and 1.3% assigned male gender at birth reported sometimes feeling like the other gender.
I think there are some folks who would absolutely lose their minds over this study, but it meshes with what I see IRL. I find the assigned-as-birth split interesting, with roughly 8x the number of AFAB “sometimes feeling like a boy” vs AMAB feeling like a girl. I wonder if this is related to the fact that female is the “default” gender expression, requiring hormonal intervention to express a male phenotype. Without the proper hormonal kick at the proper time, the phenotype will appear, and sometimes even function, as female. Really don’t know, way too complicated, still being sorted out (probably research in this area will get the axe hard) Anyway, interesting study. About 10k subjects, so not tiny, but still, don’t hang your hat on a single study.
I would also look at cultural influences, since it’s a lot more acceptable for women to wish to be men (i.e. moving up in the fucked up social structure we’ve created) vs men wishing to be women (thus losing status and the only logical reason to do it is because you’re a mentally deranged perv).
I certainly looked at society when I was a teen and first figuring this out and decided it wasn’t worth the social cost as I perceived it then.
There is also the fact that a woman who is acting in a traditionally “male” way, dressing, acting, succeeding, is much more likely to be accepted than a man acting in a traditionally “female” way. And I say this as a man in pediatrics, which has long been dominated by women, at least at the frontline level. In 1990 I was the only male peds resident in my program. And, as other fields have experienced, as more women enter it, the prestige, income and respect decline.
I’m not sure this is entirely true. There’s definitely a master regulator that can tell everything to develop as male (assuming it listens). However, in its absence there might also be some other regulators that are necessary for everything to develop as female…there was a paper suggesting for instance that mice without that could end up with some parts of the male reproductive system still present if there wasn’t a different signal to cause them to degenerate.
It’s definitely way too complicated for me, especially since the answer to “well can we compare how this works in other vertebrates” seems to mostly be “not really, we have no idea”.
That’s it in a nutshell. It’s a friggin’ mess, and as usual in anything evolution-related, it puts Rube Goldberg to shame. We have some ideas about some parts of it, but nothing to tie it all into a cohesive whole. What is known is that different aspects develop at different times, and usually, but not necessarily, line up with each other. But any and all combinations can and do occur.
).