I know I said no more posts for this weekend -- but I just saw this and I thought it was worth posting. This is an issue that has weighed on me a lot. Miss Manners addresses the questions of how to invite a former husband (and child's father) to the wedding of their daughter after the former husband has transitioned. An excerpt from the mother's letter:
My husband, the stepfather, has been much more distressed with this sex change than I. Though it's been almost five years and our paths with the former father occasionally overlap socially, out of respect for my husband's feelings, not all of our friends know what has happened. We have still referred to the former father as a male.
Of course, you might expect that I'm annoyed by several things in this paragraph, especially calling the child's father "the former father", but also the kowtowing to people who can't deal with it and continuing to refer to her as "a male." I thought Miss Manners dealt with it the question (how do we address wedding invitations) very well. For example:
The rest of it is not difficult, Miss Manners promises you. You should treat your daughter's father — and that this person did father her does not change retroactively — with dignity, but you needn't offer explanations. A formal invitation would come from "Mr. and Mrs. Clive Carvington and Ms. Catherine Tyson," and an informal one would be as a letter from you saying that you, your husband and Annabel's father, Catherine Tyson, would be pleased ... etc.
Of course the fact that the formal invitation would still come from "Mr. and Mrs. 'I'M MALE, SO YOU LOSE YOUR IDENTITY AND NAME' annoys me at another level, but that's the subject of a different post and a different day.
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