How changing laws doesn’t mean there isn’t still work to do
Netherlands — 1 April 2001
Canada — 20 July 2005
New Zealand — 19 August 2013
England & Wales — 13 March 2014
Scotland — 16 December 2014
USA — 26 June 2015
These are significant dates. They are dates upon which the recognition of a human right was codified into law. They are dates that matter to thousands, if not millions of people. They are dates which changed lives by giving people a legal choice they didn’t have before, a way of signifying and celebrating their love for each other, as well as ensuring legal protection and support.
These are only a few of the dates in only a few of the countries where the right to marry now extends beyond heterosexual couples. Where two men and two women can benefit from the same protections afforded heterosexual couples — shared income declaration, the right to see their loved one in the case of hospitalisation, standing as next of kin in the event of death, just to name a few.
Here’s another date for you:
22 December 2015
This was when my wife and I got married. We invited our nearest to witness it and live-streamed it to an audience of friends and family all around the world. It is a day worth celebrating, one that we couldn’t have if not for a change in the laws in Canada ten years earlier.
I remember the 20th of July, 2005 well. In 2004 the Federal Government of Canada made marriage equality possible on a provincial level. While Quebec and Newfoundland and even the Yukon were no longer denying same-sex couples the right to marry, I lived in a province where the premier chose to believe that a majority of Albertans opposed marriage equality. He cited both Darwin and the Bible to legitimise the provincial government’s refusal to acknowledge and protect this human right.
It was liberating to have the Federal government step in and legalise it across the board, in the face of such ignorance and hatred. I remember crying as I realised that something I wanted for my life was now possible. Even if I didn’t meet someone I could make that commitment too, the option was there.
When my wife and I decided to get married, we talked a lot about why. Each of us has our personal things, the appreciation and the enjoyment we get from each other’s company. But as anyone in a long-term committed relationship knows, marriage is not a necessary follow-through from love. Nor does getting married guarantee commitment. For us, these were just things that added to how right it felt to get married, rather than reasons for it.
It was also an utterly practical decision. We knew, regardless of a certificate, that both of us were committed to the other and to being together. We proved this right off the bat as our relationship has been quite international. My wife is American; I’m Canadian-British. We met in London when I was still living there, and she was passing through for work. For a significant portion of our relationship she lived in Australia, working there on contract. Now she’s back in the US, I’m in Canada. Visiting each other and the possibility of living together is made much easier by being married.
But for both of us, the most significant benefit of being married, and our ultimate reason for it, is that it is the most recognised way to legitimise a relationship in our society. We have both known, from day one, that we are incredibly compatible. We have both known since the end of the first week we met that we will spend the rest of our lives together (and every life afterwards) without question. We choose each other, every single day. I could tell everyone I know this, and we demonstrate all the ways in which we maintain a healthy, resilient relationship over distance, but nothing says ‘This is IT’ quite like a wedding. Marriage equals some certainty. Despite high divorce rates, we take it to mean that we know.
As soon as we were married, people stopped asking me if I was ‘sure’ about it. They stopped giving me knowing looks as they talked about how they couldn’t possibly manage a long-distance relationship—implying that their inability to do so was proof that our relationship was doomed.
She went from being ‘just’ my fiancé (i.e. Not really family and someone I might want to visit for whimsy) to being my wife (i.e. Legitimately recognised family and obviously someone I should spend my time with).
I’m immensely proud to be her wife and to call her mine. I am smug when I refer to her as “my wife”. I love it. I drop it as often as I can. We both do. We talk about how much fun it is. We make eyes at each other when one or the other of us gets to say it at the bank, to a letting agent or on the phone for customer service. But we’ve also noticed something else. We say, “My wife” and we are met with “Your partner” or even more peculiar, “Your girlfriend”.
As in: “My wife is going to be the account holder.”
“So your girlfriend is going to be the account holder?”
“My wife.”
… Silence… “Okay, we’ll get that set up for you then.”
I know not every couple who gets married is going to want to use traditional terms. I know that a lot of people prefer ‘partner’. In fact, in the UK, partner is the assumed default regardless of sexual orientation. But to use a term I did not when I have just clearly used a word I prefer is like misgendering someone who has just told you which pronouns they prefer or insisting on calling a group of adult women ‘girls’ when it’s been pointed out that this is insulting.
We seem to think that discrimination stops once laws have been written and established. Or that it has to be blatant to count — obviously violent or outspoken, easily spotted by everyone involved. We also seem to think that people who discriminate are somewhere over there, apart from us, as if the world is not a complex, interconnected place and we are in no way influenced by the social constructs in which we were born and raised.
I don’t believe for one moment that there is malice in it when someone refers to my wife as my girlfriend just moments after I called her my wife. Because of this, I don’t get indignant. Righteous indignation, whilst invigorating, is never useful. My assertion of our married status is not done to shame or berate but merely to reestablish that which someone is not yet comfortable with — a shift in their lexicon and to whom certain words apply. I don’t expect that they will change. I have merely done my best to plant a seed and expose them to an experience that differs from their own.
What I do expect from such an exchange is that it will bring to light my own implicit biases. As someone who considers themselves to be open and accepting, kind and compassionate, I self-reflect to see if the things I say back that up. I appreciate that identifying as queer does not mean I only experience marginalisation. For example, as someone who is ‘able-bodied’ — in that the world is constructed in a way that accommodates my mobility — I have immense privilege. While I do not believe for one second that someone who uses a wheelchair has less value as a human being, or should have fewer rights and freedoms than me, a term like ‘lame’ is in my vocabulary. What an ultimate irony if I should say that it was lame when someone referred to my wife as my girlfriend!
The above is just one example of an implicit bias I am choosing to address. I have many others, as do we all, and none of them should be ignored. Modifying and addressing any single implicit bias within ourselves is a step towards changing and addressing all our implicit biases.
Having human rights recognised and codified into law only goes so far. If we want to change society for the better, we have to understand that laws do not make society, people make society. Society is not something happening over there, or some ethereal entity. It is the communities we live in, the countries we come from and the people we know. We are society.
If we want society to change, then we have to change.
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Originally published on Medium