Partners

Your partner of 20 years may have just come out to you, or maybe you’ve recently started dating someone who’s let you in to their trans experience.  Whichever way your relationship has come about, partners of trans and gender diverse people offer a powerful and important form of allyship.

As a partner you hold a particularly intimate insight into someone’s life; their wellbeing, their body, their hopes and plans. With this intimacy comes a responsibility to affirm, hear and support your person. Taking care to follow your partner’s lead, you might need to be a buffer for concerned or curious family, friends or acquaintances or just be prepared to stand back and allow the relationship to evolve without expectations.

Similarly, it’s important to reflect on your own understanding of gender diversity and how it impacts your relationship. For some people it might be a perfect queer match, for others - particularly long-term partners – the discovery your partner is trans or gender diverse might be confronting and confusing. Acknowledging this and doing personal work will allow you to navigate these changes in a healthy and empowering way for everyone.

Being an ally doesn’t mean always getting it 100% right, either, but it does mean knowing when to stop and apologise, how to self-educate so mistakes are less common, and to listen and learn from those you are an ally to. Allyship isn’t just a description, it’s a doing word, and requires knowing when to take action and change.

So, whether you’re wanting to support your monogamous life partner, or one casual squeeze of many, the below advice is a good place to start.

This page was developed in collaboration with Trans Pride Australia.

Love, open communication, curiosity and support are all essential to any healthy relationship. When your partner comes out it might be something you knew all along and you’re ready to champion them during this exciting time or it might come as a shock and feel like your life is in free fall. This initial stage can look very different to different people but where ever you’re at, acting out of love, communicating and being curious will help you understand the kind of support your partner (and you) need. Think of it as a time for growth, for everyone.

Below are some basics to help get you started and lovingly support your partner as they affirm their gender.

Your reaction matters

Many trans people avoid socially and medically affirming their gender out of fear of losing their loved ones. Often by the time they tell you they’ve been struggling with the decision for many months, years, even a lifetime. Your response will have a huge impact on their journey and be a fundamental part of establishing how they feel about themselves and living confidentially.

In an ideal world you will confirm your love and ask what you can do to make this transition easy for them. If you haven’t had a lot of engagement with LGBTQ+ people, or have only seen trans and gender diverse people portrayed negatively through the media, you might react out of fear. Strong and immediate emotions are normal reactions to change, but it’s important not to take these emotions out on your partner. Allow yourself a period of adjustment. Do some reading on trans and gender diverse matters. Maybe seek out a mental health professional, a doctor, or trusted friend to talk to. Reflect on your own fears and prejudices.

Ultimately your partner is moving toward living a better life, and who wouldn’t want their partner to be their best self?

Name & pronouns

It’s a small thing to start off with, but using your partner’s name and pronouns can be really powerful for small, everyday affirmation. Depending on who else they have invited in, you may have the opportunity to be using language they hear rarely, if at all, in the rest of their day to day lives, and little things can go a long way.

It can be difficult to use the correct name and pronouns at first, and you will almost certainly slip up. It’s important when this happens to quickly and sincerely apologise, but not dwell on the mistake you made. Instead pick up where you left off with the correct language, and work to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

It can sometimes be difficult to shift to using neutral pronouns like they/them for someone, even though we’ve been using them in the English language for centuries. You can also read more about pronouns on our page here.

Names and pronouns are important but it’s most important to take on the process of updating how you see and think of your trans partner, not just trying to remember the correct name and pronouns. When you can see your partner as who they are, you’ll likely find the language occurs far more easily.

The Little Things

Before your partner takes any big steps in their gender affirmation you can support them by engaging in the small changes. Shopping for new clothes is an exciting first step and you can help make it a safe and fun experience for everyone. Your partner might like to paint their nails or do their make-up with you or perhaps have a new hair cut that helps them feel more like themselves. You could watch a movie or suggest a book or podcast that might be helpful for them to understand their gender. As a partner you have the ability to create an environment in which they can experiment without feeling judged and safely discover, in their own time, how they want to assert their identity in the world.

Often when a partner comes out you will begin to question who you are in the relationship and how the world now sees you, or if that still even matters. 

Responses like “so does this mean you’re not straight anymore?” or “does this mean you like women now?” are common when sharing the news of your partner’s gender transition and, if you’re not prepared, it can create more uncertainty and confusion.

Reflecting on your own identity and sexuality is essential to supporting your partner. The realisation that your relationship has suddenly changed, that it might not be accepted as “normal” in the mainstream can be a shock, especially if your sexual identity is something that you’ve attached strong and valuable feelings to.

In reality, there’s no hard rules around how this should look. Sexuality can be a highly personal and important thing and you are not automatically a different sexuality because your partner is a different gender to what you presumed when you started dating, but it also doesn’t mean that nothing should or can change.

Something to consider and talk about is how you might refer to your relationship. This doesn’t require you to start waving a new identity flag, it might just mean careful omission of particularly gendered words. EG: Saying partner instead of boyfriend or girlfriend, spouse instead of husband or wife.

It’s also important to discuss what kind of language you use for your sexuality. For example, if your partner has recently come out as a man, referring to being in a lesbian relationship, or being same-sex attracted, could give people the wrong impression about both you and him. This isn’t saying to stop using labels that are significant to you, rather to think about the contexts in which they may be viewed.

As with all things, it’s something to talk to your partner about; how they feel, if they have any misgivings or strong thoughts, if anything feels good or bad for them. This is a negotiation, it’s not up for either one of you to issue the rule of law about how the other should define their sexuality but it’s also important to work with each others’ needs and desires.

The good news is looking at your assumptions about bodies and gender can provide unexpected insights and possibly uncover some thoughts and feelings you didn’t know you had. Remember, what matters more than your identity is the love you have for each other.

A part of many intimate relationships is touch, sex, and expressions of sexuality and romance. How this works for you and your trans partner may look different at different points in your relationship; as they experiment with how they want their body to look, feel and be touched and as you figure out how to exist physically, romantically and emotionally together.

If you’re in a new relationship this may not look much different to how you negotiate and explore relationships already, learning about the other person’s wants and needs, where they do and don’t like to be touched, what language does or doesn’t sounds good for them, and where their hard boundaries and triggers are.

Even if your partner isn’t trans, it’s important to negotiate how to blend this kind of care and caution with keeping things hot and exciting. Understanding what you and your partner do and don’t want is the foundation of great consent and a great habit to get into, which you can read more about here.

For those who are in an existing relationship with someone who is figuring out how they want to exist and be affirmed by others, this may also involve things being pretty similar to how they’ve always been, but could also mean going back to the drawing board entirely.

It can be a bit overwhelming to rethink the love language you have in your head and how you physically relate and respond to another person. However, most relationships involve some degree of having to reconfigure how you and your partner/s exist together, and what works and doesn’t work as time passes, and as your bodies and brains change.

This is one example where it may happen a bit more suddenly or at a larger scale than you were expecting, but change can be as exciting as it is scary.

How to approach sex and touch with someone will obviously change depending on who you are with and what they want, but some good ideas to try across the board could be:

• Having a conversation about what touch is and isn’t okay

• Use language for their body that they find affirming, and avoid using language that they could or do find upsetting

• Accepting that there might be some things you want to do and your partner doesn’t want to, or vice versa, and being able to say and hear “no”

• Asking before you touch a new part of someone’s body, or try something new

• Checking in afterward, and asking if they’d like to do anything different in future

This resource [PDF] by Autostraddle is a really sweet activity to do together and can help start a conversation about actions, language, fantasies and more in a way that might be a bit more light-hearted or fun than starting that dialogue from scratch.

Listen and Learn

Listen to your partner first. It doesn’t matter if your relationship is long term or new and exciting, giving your partner the time to talk about their feelings, fears, hopes and desires around their gender will provide all the clues you’ll need to understand and support them. These may change over time so allow some space for this conversation to evolve.

Do your research. Learning about gender diversity and using current language and terminology will show your partner you care and provide a strong foundation for your relationship to grow. Often the responsibility of educating family, friends and the broader community is left up to the a trans person and this can become really exhausting. Arming yourself with information to share this burden is an act of love and care. You can find our language guide here.

We recommend starting with our ‘Getting Started’ pages about Social Affirmation and Medical Affirmation, which provide an overview of the many forms gender affirmation might look like. While the gender affirmation sections of TransHub are written for trans and gender diverse people, anyone can read them and learn more about trans people.

It’s also good to acknowledge you won’t always get it 100% right but showing you’re committed to listening and learning will go a long way.

Seeking Out Support

Sometimes it can feel difficult or overwhelming to support someone through their gender affirmation, not necessarily because of their gender but simply because supporting anyone through any sort of life change can be challenging. It’s no different to any other big change they (or you) might undergo.

Processing different experiences can take many different forms and it’s important to seek out support outside of the relationship so as not to burden your partner.

Talking to a supportive friend or family member can be helpful but remember to be respectful of your trans partner and to acknowledge your friend might come with their own fears and prejudices. It’s also important to take into account your partner may or may not want others to know about their gender or the way in which their changing. This is not about keeping secrets from other people or not being able to share your feelings and difficulties but respecting the privacy of your partner and what they’re going through.

Connecting to and talking with other people in your situation in support groups or online is a safe way to share experiences and discover you’re not alone.

Trans Pride Australia has an online group for partners of trans people. You can also search Facebook for “partners of trans people” for local and international groups. Transfemme is another great resource that provides stories, tips and resources to support healthier relationships between trans women and men.

Further to peer support it can be really valuable to talk to a mental health professional like a counsellor or a psychologist to help make sense of your feelings. Mental health professionals are bound by confidentiality so provide a safe space for you to discuss your concerns and frustrations without worrying about outing your partner. Many relationships also benefit from participating in some trans-affirming couples counselling.

Being an Ally

There’s no doubt the world can be a challenging place for trans and gender diverse people. While there’s more visibility and inclusion that ever before there’s still major challenges faced by the community including barriers to health care, discrimination at work and public bathroom challenges.

When the world is a hostile place your partner may want you to speak up on their behalf or quietly support them in the background, they may need you to act differently at different times; either way, your involvement is important.

During your relationship your partner’s body may change through hormones or surgery. Supporting this process by noticing, being curious about and celebrating these changes is essential for your partners self esteem.

It can be helpful to seek out a community to help both your partner and yourself feel understood and accepted and provide further ideas around allyship.

One simple thing any ally can do is to write to researchers or event coordinators who aren’t collecting gender information in a way that supports trans people and reflects best practice. eg: If a question asks if your gender is “Male, Female or Transgender”. ACON’s recommendations for appropriately collecting demographic information on surveys and forms can be found here.

If the Relationship Ends

Sometimes partners can’t resolve their differences or can’t see a future where both their needs are fulfilled and it’s healthier for the relationship as it stands to come to an end.

Leaving a relationship with anyone is difficult and complicated. Ending a relationship when someone is affirming their gender adds an extra layer of complexity including the rejection of their true self and their process of exploration and discovery. If a relationship needs to end it’s important to make it about you and your changing feelings and needs rather than about them and their affirmation process. It’s also worth questioning if this feeling has come up due to issues in your relationship or as a direct response to your partner letting you into their trans experience.

At times a trans partner needs to leave you in order to fully explore who they are. It’s understandable this can feel like a betrayal but it’s really important to acknowledge it isn’t personal or intentional. Instead, try to accept the many complicated reasons why your partner wasn’t able to come out earlier and know they would have done things differently if the world was a different and easier place for trans and gender diverse people.

Ideally, you’ll both remember the love you felt for each other was always real and find a strong and loving friendship in the future.

Ultimately, whether it’s for a fun time or a life time, it’s an honour to love a trans person and be invited into their world. At times it might be challenging but it will always provide an incredible opportunity for personal discovery and for genuine love.