Sociologist Carla A. Pfeffer has been writing some excellent work on partners of FTMs, coming out of her dissertation research where she interviewed 50 women partners of transgender and transsexual men. She draws on the extensive literature in feminist sociology to make the argument that for most couples, the female partners often reported “inegalitarian, gender-stereotyped divisions of household labor between themselves and their trans men partners” (172-3). Weirdly, but I get this, women whose relationships began prior to transition (and who saw their relationships as ‘lesbian’) were MORE likely to report they did more household labor than the transpartner. Weirder still, many of these cis-gendered women described themselves as feminist, and explained the uneven arrangement as predicated on ‘ideals of individualism, free will, and choice.’ (177). Pfeffer doesn’t say this, but it does seem creepy to me that queer feminists are resorting the the discourse of free market neoliberalism in order to make sense of what, in some situations, are some pretty awful ‘personal politics’ when it comes to changing dressings, co-producing masculinity, cooking and cleaning, initiating sex, talking about difficult things, bringing home the bacon, etc. Where’s the feminist critique within the partner community for this sort of imbalance? Why this creepy move to neoliberal discourse? There appears to be an ‘emotional habitus’ (Gould) of feminist/queer fear: we need to ‘stand by our (trans) men,’ not give them a hard time for what can sometimes be some pretty unreconstructed gender politics—even at our personal cost, and the ongoing invisibility of women partners’ affective labor. The historian in me says: hey, haven’t we been here before? Lots of times? [see: Carla A. Pfeffer, “‘Women’s Work’? Women Partners of Transgender Men Doing Housework and Emotion Work,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 72 (Feb 2010): 165-183.]