Bells for all genders

A summer wedding adds a transsexual
twist to same-sex marriage

FEMME BRIDE, BUTCH GROOM, ALL HAPPY:
Joëlle Circé Laramée (L) and Dany Vleminckx

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Over the phone on Monday, July 21, Joëlle-Circé Laramée sounds like many women do after their wedding day: aglow, flushed, slightly overwhelmed. The previous Saturday, July 19, Laramée married her longtime partner Dany Vleminckx, in a civil ceremony performed by a celebrant at their home in the Laurentian town of St-Alphonse-Rodriguez. The lesbian couple is butch-femme, with Vleminckx the former and Laramée the latter. According to the Institut de la statistique du Québec, between 2004 and 2006, the last year with available data, there have been 1,323 same-sex marriages in the province. And according to Statistics Canada, figures from the 2006 census show that the “number of same-sex couples surged 32.6 per cent between 2001 and 2006, five times the pace of opposite-sex couples (+5.9 per cent)…. In total, the census enumerated 45,345 same-sex couples, of which 7,465, or 16.5 per cent, were married couples.” Laramée and Vleminckx, however, think theirs is the first one involving a transsexual.

Laramée was born with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS), which results in “ambiguous genitalia,” according to the Intersex Society of North America. Among many other symptoms, the clitoris is unusually large or the penis is unusually small at birth, and while corrective surgery during infancy can change this, the ISNA believes, according to their Web site, that “such cosmetic surgery of the genitals is harmful and unethical.” Surgery should only be undertaken when the child is of age to make the decision him- or herself.

Laramée underwent sex reassignment surgery in November 2001, at a cost, she says, of $9,400. “Officially, Medicare is supposed to cover it, with some conditions,” she says. “It’s supposed to be in a public hospital, by a surgeon who works within the public system. But the only doctors who are qualified to do it work in the private sector.” The province that has the best coverage for transition surgery, she says, is socially conservative Alberta.

Growing up as an assigned male, she says, she regularly took testosterone injections but remained by and large asexual. “I never played with boy toys or was interested in boys as romantic partners,” she says. “I just had friends I felt simpatico with.”

To the rescue

In 2004, Laramée, an artist, founded the Trans Day of Pride and, while she doesn’t consider herself a trailblazer, “nobody was talking about that shit. No one was talking about trans issues, and things needed to be said.”

The wedding was a political act, she says, insofar as she believes that “the personal is the political.” Nevertheless, she never considered her transsexuality a defining characteristic of her identity—“It was always just something there along the path,” she says—although she did encounter her own share of prejudice, even within the gay community.

“Many trans people can’t afford the surgery,” she says. “They can’t afford make-up or shoes or dresses… so they don’t come across [as all that presentable]. People can be very demeaning and much of the criticism comes from their peers.”

As a transsexual, she says she experienced some nastiness directed her way. She remains philosophical about it—“there are people like that everywhere,” she says—but today she is, proudly, a “queer femme lesbian.”

Not that it was easy. Besides the cost, says Vleminckx, the mental and physical toll the surgery took on both of them was high. “When we fell in love, I said, ‘You need this, so I’m going to give it to you.’” But the year and a half of recuperation that followed, Vleminckx says, were “emotionally draining, because I had to be the rock. Even a 10-minute walk was exhausting. I had to do everything because I knew she couldn’t. But I would do it again. She went through a lot for 40 years, so for me, one year of my life was not that long to give so that she could do what she needed to in order to live.”

“You’re my hero!” Laramée says in the background.

“Yeah,” says Vleminckx. “I feel like I’m riding around on this big white horse.”

The happy couple plans to remain in their small town—where they say they are very comfortable, and live in harmony with the other townsfolk—and will visit the city for Divers/Cité and to catch up with old friends.