Can a marriage survive a gender transition? Yes, and even thrive. How these couples make it work.
Couples talk about how gender transition affected their relationships and brought them closer.
Marissa Lasoff-Santos and the person she would marry quickly fell head over heels in love. Lasoff-Santos was a gay woman. Her girlfriend was a bisexual woman — or so they thought. Now her partner has become her husband, and they both identify as queer. And things are better than ever.
“We’ve always just had this deep connection, so that’s why, like, I never stopped loving him throughout any of this,” says Lasoff-Santos, a 33-year-old librarian in Michigan. “I’ve become more attracted to him. I guess part of it is just, like, that confidence in him and, like, he just seems so happy.”
Lasoff-Santos’ relationship and others like it show that a partner’s gender transition does not necessarily mean a death sentence for a marriage. Data is scant, but couples and therapists say that in many cases, a relationship grows and flourishes under the light of new honesty.
Such marriages, when they do prevail, can underscore the resilience of love, the flexibility of sexual identity and the diversity in LGBTQ relationships 20 years after the first same-sex marriages in the U.S. and with Pride Month in its sixth decade.
“Even though he was the one transitioning, I felt like I was going through my own transition,” Lasoff-Santos says. “It was definitely hard to not, I guess, come across as kind of selfish, because I was going through all these emotions, and he was going through his own journey.”
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