The linear progression of relationships from dating to marriage and raising a family is often disrupted for LGBT+ people. The pressure to stay closeted and present as a heterosexual and cisgender person to please your family and escape persecution permeates all aspects of your life. As a nonbinary person, my relationship to my body complicates my relationships with other people and makes it difficult to decide how to handle feelings of dysphoria against the threat of rejection once I begin to physically change. Coupled with the familial and societal pressure to find a partner and settle down, love becomes very difficult to come by and difficult to navigate.
In my paintings and drawings I portray myself as a 50s American housewife in a strained relationship with their husband. Bogged down by the traditional role of women as homemakers and subservient beings, they are deeply unhappy being trapped in what should be a happily ever after and instead unable to be themselves. The transient nature of my body as a nonbinary person puts me in a position where there always feels as if there is something at stake in my relationship to other people when I think about transitioning. I don’t want to be happily married on the condition that I don’t demand to be called they, that I keep my breasts and my curves at my husband's expectations, that I make my existence palatable by not being too nonbinary, just enough that my partner stays attracted to me.
Undoubtedly there are other transgender people who feel the same way that I do, worried that the nature of their existence makes it impossible to live the same happily partnered life that cisgender and heterosexual couples do. Marriage and the start of a family may not be the finish line for all relationships, but I dream of a day in our increasingly queer world that it will be safe for all LGBT+ people to pursue it.
