Two years ago, Marie Cau was thrust into the spotlight. It is not so much for her election as mayor of a village, Tilloy-lez-Marchiennes in the North precisely, but because she became the first transgender mayor in France. The 50-year-old, computer engineer, is now at the head of the town in which she has lived for two decades. Release met her and portrayed a strong and confident woman in herself as in others.
Let it be said, his transidentity comes after his missions as mayor. She simply wants to be a positive example and show that it is possible to be a trans woman in love with another woman in a small provincial town. That said, his older sister Myriam Cau, also former green vice-president of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, sheds some important light: “It was unexpected and brave. Her situation might have made her hesitate, but she had confidence in herself.“An impressive journey for this 57-year-old city councilor who has gone through many hardships. The first being the difficulty, in her childhood, in making friends. Things get complicated in college where the teenager is the victim of harassment.
Despite everything, the child from the North of modest origins – a father who runs a grocery store and a fervent Catholic mother at home – studied in agricultural high school, then computer science in Lille. At the time married, Marie Cau has three children of her union and suppresses her transidentity for fear of losing custody of her children and her job. Time passes, offspring grow, professional life is stable. The one who will become a politician decides to divorce, not avoiding conflicts, aware that her ex is having trouble digesting this marital and personal decision. The procedure lasts fifteen years but she enjoys the unconditional support of her current partner Nathalie.
Less than a year ago Release“her social transition took a new step by changing her gender in the civil status after ‘a rather unpleasant procedure’. She took the steps alone and never wanted any shrink“. It must be said that Marie Cau is a whole person and who says what she thinks, says her lover who is also a municipal councilor. She also claims to be a partisan, rejects the extremisms and wants to maintain the dialogue with everyone. And his children? In his interview for Gala in 2020, Marie Cau summed up her relationship with her two daughters and her son with this sentence: “They said to me: ‘We don’t care, we love you like that and that’s it!‘”