Tying the Knot

Rituals, rites of passage, and community identity in transition

Foreword: The header photo is not the happy couple—it’s a stock image. The details of the couple themselves have been anonymized to protect their privacy.

The weather couldn’t be more perfect if it had been ordered from a catalog: a crisp-but-still-warm October afternoon, sun shining down on the wood-and-stone cabin where the ceremony will begin in a few minutes. Children squeal in that are-they-laughing-or-have-they-lost-a-limb way that children do a little way away, and the gentle sharpness of white rose thorns dig into my hand.

Inside, the music cues and, with a slithering of white satin, one of the people who’s dearest to me in the world rises to her feet, resplendent in her wedding gown. The sun catches on her, glittering in the jewels sparkling in her bodice and gleaming off the brand new, perfect smoothness of the satin. She breathes in, holds it, then exhales as her first attendant enters the cabin. Before I’m really ready, it’s my turn to enter, and I pass in through the side door and down the aisle, fighting to not go too quickly. I take my place, turn, and wait as the music dims again. Wordlessly, everyone stands.

The other bride enters with the opening notes of a new song, another of the people dearest to me in the world. The ruched bodice of her wedding dress—the same wedding dress she wore to her original wedding with her wife, before either of them knew transition could ever be in the cards—is stunning in a wholly different way, and tears start spilling down my face before she’s even at the front of the cabin.

And then comes her wife, beaming with barely-contained joy, stepping gently over purple rose petals as she too comes to the front of the cabin. They reach for each other as she gets there in what must be an unconscious reflex to them both, each with a bouquet in one hand and their wife’s hand in the other. Their dresses swish and sway together, something old, something new.

The officiant, resplendent in her homemade Weird Barbie cosplay, opens her book and says, “Allow me to consult the Holy Book: Player’s Handbook, Fifth Edition, Page 78.” The room dissolves into laughter. Soon enough, with a couple of jokes and a lot of love, the brides exchange their vows—one written, the words of her heart agonized over, the other spoken in the moment, because she couldn’t reduce the totality of what she felt to words on a page.

By the time the recessional plays—The Imperial March, naturally—there’s not a dry eye in the place.

The rite thing

I know, I know, the romance of it all.

And no, I promise, I’m not taking a week to just gush about the brides and humblebrag about being a bridesmaid. Weddings are beautiful, sure, but there’s a lot more going on than just two people publicly declaring that they’re a couple. A wedding is one form of ritual called a rite of passage. Rites of passage have incredibly important effects on the people they’re centered on, psychologically, and are how those people establish their place in a shared community.

And, overwhelmingly, they’re very strongly gendered—and that gendering has a disproportionately heavy impact on trans people in transition.

Standing quietly beside a bride, let alone as one, is a rite of passage just about every cis woman is invited into sooner or later. There’s a whole process to it too, one that’s almost never spoken of explicitly, of pre-ceremony isolation for hair, makeup, and wardrobe, a women’s space where men are not welcome. Whole little rituals exist within it “for good luck,” like not seeing your bride before she’s ready, a little rhyme about borrowed and blue things that amounts to a miniature scavenger hunt to keep everyone’s nerves under control, and bridesmaids are the hands that preserve that seclusion, that isolation, as they dash around to help the brides they’re attached to.

But… imagine you’re a trans man, invited into that space.

Or a trans woman, held outside it.

Or a nonbinary person, with no clear role at all.

There’s so often a longing for something different among trans people when it comes not only to weddings, but to rites of passage in general. I think it’s fascinating—and very telling—just how many couples who make it through transition have themselves a vow renewal that is, in effect, a whole second wedding to mark their love and commitment.

Why do we do it, though?

It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of rituals being a religious thing, because so many religious things are, very explicitly, ritualized. Thing is, a lot of things are ritualized, from graduations to oaths of office to the oath against perjury at a trial. A ritual, when you get down to it, is a way to attach cultural weight and significance to a moment, so that both the people participating and everyone looking on from the outside recognize that this is a special thing.

Put a different way: break a promise and you’re a jerk. Break an oath made in a ritual setting and you’ve done something horrible. It’s the social connections involved that makes them different.

That’s because rituals as a whole are a fundamental way that we build, strengthen, and renew our social ties to one another. They’re how we signal that we’re part of communities, not just present within them, and that’s why violating a ritual—no matter what kind it is—is so offensive to everyone who’s part of that community. It’s not just that the person involved said or did a thing in and of itself. It’s that they’re violating the social ties that bind us all to each other in a web of community.

But the thing is? Ritual isn’t just important for the people watching from the sidelines. It’s a key way that the participants in these rituals build and establish a sense of self within that social web.

Within the larger world of ritual, rites of passage are special, because they’re rituals made specifically to mark the transition of one stage of life into another, or a person from one social status or group to another.

Trans rites of passage

Rites of passage are huge in the trans community, as a form of tying ourselves together and building a sense of shared identity. Go onto just about any social media platform and you’ll see the evidence; trans folks put their HRT and surgical dates in their statuses, for instance, or even in their flair on Reddit, complete with cute little emojis; I can never not smile when I see a trans fella post on Reddit with a little syringe and melon emojis, plus dates, in his flair, so people can know when he started HRT and when he had his top surgery. The pride and joy in it are just beautiful.

But there’s a lot more to it than just showing off where you are in transition.

One of the things that you see very commonly is the buildup to those moments of transition, shared bit by bit by the trans people experiencing them. First doses of HRT are maybe the most common, but the one I want to linger on a bit is how trans folks—both transmasculine and transfeminine—talk about their bottom surgeries.

I know—Stained Glass Woman talking about bottom surgeries, for once! Better check for the other signs of the apocalypse. 🤭

There’s this slow build, this nesting, that begins when a trans person gets their bottom surgery date and gets ready for it. They go out and get supplies—for instance, a trans gal gets a big ol’ supply of pads for their recovery—talk to other trans folks who’ve been through that surgery, and gather up the other things they need. This is their time of separation, where they, by degrees, sever themselves from the parts of the social group that has not had bottom surgery in preparation for their own operation.

Then the big day arrives. Pictures in surgical gowns go up before, and then woozy after shots appear much later in the day, often with little celebratory “I made it!”’s or “Taco Tuesday” or the equivalent, while they rest in the hospital. Status updates trickle out in their Transitional moment from the liminal space of the hospital. This is their trial, the hard parts they have to endure as part of the rite of passage.

Then they go home, and are welcomed by the social circles of those who’ve been through the same operations. The first time peeing using their new equipment, for instance, is a big milestone for the gentlemen, and transfeminine people often talk dilators by color as they endure the long, slow grind of early surgical recovery. Sometimes-surprising levels of detail flit back and forth, as the post-op trans person is welcomed into the community they are now a part of. Some places, like the storied Suporn Clinic, even have planned recovery communities, where people come together and heal as one, in community.

These moments, these liminal, transitional moments, are a lot of where the tightness of the trans community comes from, and I think it’s also why the trans community tends to be segmented along gender lines. A major rite of passage for a trans woman—beginning estrogen—is very understandably repulsive for a trans man who’s spent an awful lot of effort to get onto testosterone. This, of course, doesn’t even touch on the nonbinary community and its many varied experiences, many of which throw out these rites of passage entirely for different ones, which fit their genders in ways that binary rites never would. I know enbies who use both estrogen and testosterone together, who find the most wonderfully unique bottom configurations for themselves, who might celebrate their first full beard with a breast augmentation, and so many more.

In each of these contexts, we build ourselves a sense of shared community and identity… but it’s one that’s limited to our spaces. Cisgender folks rarely understand the deep importance of the lifesaving surgeries or medicines we depend on, or even how life-changing a haircut or change of clothing often is for us.

They can’t, not really.

Crossing over

The vow renewal—second wedding, really—I had the joy of participating in a few weeks ago is a rite of passage that I see very frequently in couples where a transfeminine person transitions in an existing marriage. Whether we’re talking about the Knox family or my own family—after all, I renewed my own vows with my wife last year—there’s this almost-universal need for a trans gal to walk down the aisle and declare her love.

It makes sense, when you think about it. A white dress ceremony is built up for women in a very big way in the West, in the same way a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera is in the Jewish and Latine communities. Each of them is a moment of definitive womanhood where, among other things obviously, the adult, community-celebrated womanhood of the gal at the heart of the rite of passage is recognized by all. Those who have yet to complete the rite themselves, and those for whom it’s a faint memory from long ago all recognize this time of transition, and celebrate the happy couple in the exact same way as they celebrated the couple before transition.

And in many ways, that’s the point. It’s why transfeminine people so often feel drawn to plan and have those ceremonies so powerfully, despite how frankly old-fashioned and patriarchal the ideas behind them are. It’s honestly because of how traditional wedding ceremonies are that they’re so powerful at recognizing and welcoming a transfeminine person into shared, coequal womanhood.

Trans community is wonderful. Vital. But the whole world is not trans. Being a vital part of one community is not enough, nor should it be.

These seemingly-silly rites of passage, these rituals of initiation and transition, are the fabric that binds us together with the people in our lives, both those we’re deeply in love with and those who share our non-trans identities with us, whether those identities are familial, regional, religious, or any of a dozen, a hundred, other axes on which each of us defines our sense of self.

A wedding or a vow renewal is a moment of obvious symbolic importance, but it’s far from the only one that defines the gendered lives of both trans and cis people. Finding and completing rites of passage that fit your real, lived gender is a wonderful way to take back the lost time from before your transition, and renew a deepened sense of connection with the people in your life who see you as you are, not as you were.

And besides, the clothes are really snazzy.