Chapter 1: ‘Til Death Do Us Part … Or Not, I Really Don't Care: A Thematic Analysis of Sexual Minority Transgender Young Adults’ Marital Aspirations

In recent years, sexual and gender minorities have gained historically unprecedented access to the institution of legal marriage all over the world. In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to recognize marriages between two people of the same sex, while in the United States, marriage equality was first achieved in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2004 (Crary & Corder, 2021). In 2015, national marriage equality was achieved in the United States as a result of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision (Human Rights Campaign, n.d.). Despite recent concern that marriage equality may be in legal peril, a significant number of sexual and gender minorities in the United States today have exercised their legal right to marriage. Looking at sexual minorities specifically, according to the Census Bureau, there are approximately 710,000 married same-sex couples in the United States today, making up 59% of all households headed by a same-sex couple (Scherer, 2022). At the individual level, approximately 10% of all adults who identify as a sexual minority are currently married to a same-sex spouse (Jones, 2022). Looking at transgender Americans, because very few population-representative studies have measured gender identity until quite recently, estimates of the share of transgender people who are currently married are mostly based on smaller, non-representative samples and thus vary widely. For example, whereas Dawson et al. (2023) report that approximately 26% of adults who identify as transgender are currently married, London (2022) estimates that 37.5% are currently married.