After a row over wedding guest roles that has led to threats of canceling the wedding, a prospective bride has asked the Reddit community of Am I The A**hole (AITA) if she was being unreasonable to tell her fiance he couldn’t have a woman as his best man.
The OP explained how her fiance, Kevin, wants to have his closest friend, Amy, as his best man at their wedding in August this year. The two are as close as family and have known each other for over a decade. Still, OP fears that a woman being the best man will upset her traditional family.
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His Best Friend is Transgender
She is especially concerned because Amy is transgender and that her family would “have a lot of issues” with her, which would lead to Amy receiving transphobic behavior.
OP asking her fiance to find a different best ‘man’ has led to a large fight between the couple. Kevin reportedly stated he would rather cancel the wedding than not have Amy in the best man role.
He considers her the closest thing he has to family. Having been kicked out of his blood family’s home by his mother when he was seventeen, meeting Amy shortly afterward.
From what the OP tells us, her and Kevin’s wedding is more for her family than for them. They had initially planned to be wed years ago but postponed due to concerns about safety during the pandemic.
She claims that Kevin has often said that the wedding isn’t very important to him. He is doing it because of its importance to her and her family rather than for himself. Implying that this means he should be more amenable to her wishes.
It occurs if one party repeatedly says he doesn’t care about getting married. The other refuses to support their fiance’s closest friend against potential transphobic attacks. There may be more relationship problems here than wanting a woman as the best man.
OP’s concern for putting a transgender person in a potentially uncomfortable situation may be commendable. Still, her willingness to cast aside her fiance’s request to have his family play a prominent role in their wedding is not.
Reaching out to AITA for outsider opinions. OP received a unanimous response from the community: “YTA. This is incredibly transphobic! Amy is his best friend, and when your fiancé chooses her as his best man, you have to respect that, and so does your family,” says one commenter.
“How very telling that OP’s only concerned with appeasing her bigoted family and demands Kevin exclude the single most important person in his life,” says another.
We agree with the commenters in this instance. A wedding leads to a marriage, and Kevin would be made to cooperate with bigoted in-laws for the rest of his life—or at least until the divorce.
Enabling transphobia is in itself transphobia—and, as one insightful commenter points out, seeing as Amy has been in the process of medically transitioning for around a year now, “Why would anyone even know Amy is trans?! Whose telling them?”
The wedding is not unsalvageable, but OP has to rethink her attitude first. At thirty years old, she should be able to stand up to her family if they are the problem. If not, she has far more significant issues than her fiance wanting a woman to be his ‘best man.’
You can read the original post on Reddit here. This article is inspired by the internet and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Because Mom Says.
