Marc Sueselbeck’s fiancee, Jennifer Laude, was allegedly murdered last October by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a US Marine. But Sueselbeck has been unable to return to the Philippines to properly mourn Laude, a transgender woman, whom he calls the love of his life.

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That’s because Sueselbeck, a German citizen, was banned from the Philippines after scaling the fence of a military camp where Pemberton was believed to be held last October 22, less than two weeks after the United States put the Marine in custody following Laude’s death. Sueselbeck said that nobody had been willing to answer his questions, and he scaled the fence to speak to the camp director and try to find answers himself. This resulted in his deportation and in a ban that the Filipino government continues to enforce after nine months.

“Nobody knows what happened in that room except for Jennifer and Pemberton,” Sueselbeck told me when we met up recently in Thailand, where he is living to argue against the travel ban and drum up publicity for his plight from closer proximity. I published a long article about his case for Vice six months ago. “But I don’t believe that my wife betrayed me, and even if she did in the eyes of others, I know the kind of person she is, and I know how scared she was ... I continue to fight for her, because I want to prove to her that I will always love her and will always stand by her.”

This love, publicly expressed by a man who had no desire for fame prior to Laude’s death, who insists on fighting for her despite the judgment of others, is an act of enormous courage. And hardly anyone is listening.

Trans women are regularly depicted as being unworthy of soul mate-type love. When tabloids report on celebrities who date them, stories are inevitably written from a place of how crazy; he can’t actually care for that freak. But when a man loves a transgender woman unconditionally, and stands by her despite society’s perception of her sex-work history – in the backdrop of a case that spans three continents and affects military relationship between the US and the Philippines – it barely registers as news.

Imagine the international outrage had Jennifer Laude been a cisgender woman – especially if she had been the US citizen. Sueselbeck might well be seen as the grieving fiance who boldly scaled a fence, risking his own well-being to make sure Pemberton didn’t escape, who has worked tirelessly, since his exile by a ruthless government, to return to visit her grave and mourn her passing, and to stand witness at the trial of the man accused of killing her. He would be a combination of knight, hero and steadfast companion even in death, their story bearing shades of both Shakespeare and Nicholas Sparks.

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But to pay attention to Sueselbeck’s plight would require people to empathize and identify with trans women, rather than dismissing them as less-than. It would require engaging with the real reasons why so many trans women engage in sex work, like Jennifer Laude did – not because we’re inherently dishonest or sexually depraved, but because society gives us so few options for survival. It would require understanding and coming to care for Jennifer Laude the way Marc Sueselbeck did.



In the age of Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox, it’s easy to do all this theoretically – to support trans women and the people who love us in the abstract, to say from a safe distance that it’s OK for people to love who they want. It’s harder to risk something to support us: to risk being associated with the stigma of sex work, to make active, public and unpopular demands of the Philippine and US governments. To take measures towards letting a man back into the country where the love of his life is buried, almost a year after a single act, performed in the throes of grief, has left him banished.