Two Transgender Online Influencers Talk About Their Relationship

Welcome to Love Transcends, a special project by Cosmopolitan that celebrates the resilience, wisdom, hope, and joy of the trans community as its members navigate romantic love. Through in-depth interviews and personal essays, trans people share what it’s like to date, hook up, break up, and fall in and hold onto love in the midst of sweeping anti-trans legislation and attacks on personal safeties and freedoms of expression. Click here to see the entire collection.

The life of a very popular person online is not for the faint of heart. The intense scrutiny, the constant pressure to be on, the competition for our fickle, judgmental attention, and the need to feed the social media machine day in and day out would exhaust pretty much anyone. For trans influencers and artists seeking to make a name for themselves, add in routine harassment, an often confused or indifferent public, and conservative forces actively seeking to criminalize something as basic as what bathroom you use or what sport you play, and the job just gets harder.

Ezra Deran Michel and Elle Michel Deran are two sane and kind voices in this otherwise chaotic realm. Even more importantly, they are an extremely in love trans couple building an adorable life together. Think lots of cuddling, hikes with gorgeous vistas, hormone shots, and piggyback rides.

Elle is an actor and advocate with an online presence that mixes education with playful memes and snapshots from her own life. Ezra is a musician, the lead singer of the band The Pussyboys, and the founder of Pussyboy Apparel. Their social media videos gently critique norms around sexuality and gender and poke fun at the cringe aspects of queer culture. Now, fresh off a move from Los Angeles to a tiny town in Jalisco, Mexico, the couple chats with Cosmopolitan about why they left America, how accountability can be sexy, and why both being trans makes it easier to cope whenever their relationship gets tough.

Your social media followers have seen you celebrate Christmas, frolic with your dogs on the beach, and have a giddy courthouse wedding. You’re clearly two funny, deeply in love queers. How did you first meet?

Ezra: I was playing a show at Redline in downtown L.A. I was in an open relationship with somebody else at the time who was quite famous. [To Elle] You were at the show and we met, but I figured you wanted to talk to him rather than me.

Elle: I had followed him on Instagram, but he didn’t follow me back. I never saw him as available. [To Ezra] I just wanted to meet you because you are so cute. That night, I filmed a video of you performing and posted it on my Story and tagged you. That was my secret way of sliding into your DMs. We started going out every weekend with this group of trans folks. Ezra is and was sober. I am now but wasn’t at the time. So I was getting—

Ezra: Messy, yeah. I have this video of Elle walking through downtown L.A.—

Elle: You filmed my toe peeking out of my tights. And then you cut to me, and I said, “My toe is freer than we’ll ever be.”

Ezra: I was falling in love, but she was this messy, messy girl, and I’m very sober. So it felt like that energy was off-limits for me at the time. Still, something about Elle was just so attractive. You were so hilarious and vulgar…and no one knew.

Elle: In L.A., we were surrounded by “cool girl” energy. I was trying to access it but just couldn’t.

Ezra: People would be looking so hot and taking pictures and going out to be seen, which was a fun experience, especially as L.A. trans people. But then we would just find ourselves acting like little trolls in the corner, dancing absurdly.

Elle: There was a physical experience of energy between us. It felt like tingling. That’s what I call love, something guiding us toward our highest truth. It’s the same physical sensation I got when I realized I was trans.

What is it like to be in a relationship where you have this magic energy with another trans person?

Ezra: I had been transitioning medically for many years when we met and Elle hadn’t started hormones yet, so we were in different places. [To Elle] But I was astounded that even though you were still so deep in dysphoria, you were so far beyond your years in your thinking about gender.

Elle: That dysphoria gave me an opportunity to really focus on figuring out what felt right for me.

Ezra: The way we understood our transness ended up being so parallel. We’re both nonbinary and fluid.

Elle: Like, I’m a woman…asterisk, asterisk.

Ezra: And I’m a man…asterisk, asterisk. I wear it as a loose garment. It’s a loose skin suit.

Elle: I was inspired by how Ezra’s physical transition freed him up to express and access his femininity. I’ve been on hormones for two and a half years now and have had hairline surgery and I feel so much freer to not wear makeup and to wear baggier clothes. That’s a freedom we’ve found in each other. We like to say we’re gay in every way—but we’re never straight.

Definitely not straight, but are you monogamous?

Ezra: When we met, I had this really, really slutty identity that I mostly identified with conceptually. I was afraid to leave that behind, because of what it meant to me musically, artistically, and on the internet. But with Elle, I am super, super monogamous and I feel sexier and sluttier than ever before.

But monogamy for us isn’t a prison. There’s freedom within our relationship to be able to say, “Oh my gosh, that person is so hot.” Doesn’t mean, “Oh we’re gonna go fuck that person.” We don’t have to lie to each other about never staring at someone else’s boobs.

Elle: I’ll be the first one to send Ezra incriminating reels on Instagram of hot girls with big boobs. I’m mindfully engaging in these norms—it’s not cishet monogamy.

Ezra: Every time we do something that feels like a nuclear family, we’re like, LOL. We just bought six pots for our houseplants, they’re so beautiful. And we have a golden retriever and a Labrador retriever and I’m like, What has happened?

Those are very heterosexual dogs.

Elle: It’s like drag though. At some point, we realized we both dreamed of having a family and wanted to get married. These were dreams that previously we might have tried to detach from because they felt incompatible with our queerness. Now I’ve realized that these are things that I want, not just things that are being forced on me.

Okay, you’re a newly married, monogamous, never-straight couple with two heterosexual-coded dogs who just moved to Mexico. How is it going?

Ezra: It’s been so good. We drove from L.A. to this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, where my dad was born. There’s a population of 1,000 and most of them are related to me somehow. We’re so far away from Laurel Canyon and Hollywood and the scene we used to be a part of—it’s just so cathartic.

Elle: I had started making videos with brands in mind and I realized my success cannot be measured by me making it in an industry run by billionaires.

Ezra: Yeah, and then while doing that, you married somebody whose company is called Pussyboy Apparel.

Elle: That disruption is so attractive to me, but before it didn’t feel accessible. Now, all I want to do is say horrible, horrible words on public platforms. I’m not going to—

Ezra: But they want to and that’s what matters. Elle is this beautiful princess in my mind and I feel like a goblin, gremlin monster. I’m completely tatted; Elle has zero tattoos. She’s a musical theater, A-plus student, and I’m a college dropout, barber, weirdo artist—yet we complement each other so well.

How does that play out in your relationship?

Elle: I often feel like I need to be in control and think of anything that could go wrong.

Ezra: And I don’t think about anything that could go wrong at all.

Can that lead to conflict?

Elle: There is no relationship where you will not get triggered. It’s just about feeling safe to be triggered by that person. When we were in Vegas, the Venetian hotel upgraded us like crazy. Suddenly we were in this giant suite with a living room and a kitchen—there was even a sauna. It felt like, “Oh my god, we have to film this.” I was really taking charge, like "Let’s go here. Now let’s do this.” You started shutting down.

Ezra: It had stopped being something we were doing together...

Elle: I realized I could have said, “Do you even want to film this?” We took a breath, then had hot sex in the amazing hotel room instead.

Ezra: Accountability is so hot. Elle and I are absolute opposites when it comes to our deepest fears. But we went into this relationship knowing that about each other. There’s no fantasy world where we’re never gonna fight and everything is just gonna be really smooth.

Elle: Because of our transness—because I know how much hormones affect my personality and who I am behind the hormones—we have such an awareness of how we feel in our bodies. I had to confront so much trauma in order to learn to love my trans identity. The way we move through conflict is what I’m the proudest of—maybe even my life. Yeah, it’s kind of a flex.