Yesterday the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill passed its final stage in the House of Lords, making same-sex marriage legal in England and Wales.
Jack Saffery-Rowe is LGBT officer at Royal Holloway University
Yesterday the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill passed its final stage in the House of Lords, making same-sex marriage legal in England and Wales.
This is a huge victory for the LGBT movement after 20 years of campaigning.
Same-sex couples can now have their relationship legally recognised on an equal footing to opposite-sex couples for the first time in British history.
But this is not the final battle.
Throughout the height of campaigning for the bill trans* people have been almost entirely erased from the discussion, most visibly by Stonewall.
Stonewall is the leading LGB rights organisation in the UK, but has had the pomposity to call this bill ‘equal’ marriage.
However we do not have truly equal marriage, and won’t do so for a long time.
We must fight for non-binary and poly* relationships to be legally recognised in the same way.
The impact that this bill has on trans* people is complex.
Before the bill trans* people who were in a marriage or a civil partnership and wanted their affirmed gender legally recognised (for example, for pensions) by having it changed on their birth certificate, were forced to end the marriage or civil partnership, get the Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) (which changes the birth certificate), and then enter into the ‘other’ form – the option of ‘marriage’ or of ‘civil partnership’ permitted to the affirmed gender of the individual.
For a GRC to be issued, the trans* person has to be living as their affirmed gender for two years, which implies to a reasonable degree of certainty that their spouse would be aware of their transition.
Now, instead of a divorce, for the GRC to be issued and the trans* person to have their birth certificate changed the spouse has to consent to their partner being granted a GRC and the conversion of the union between opposite and same sex. This form of consent requires a statutory declaration signed in front of a solicitor, which also costs money.
Given that 51 per cent of trans* people who come out to their partner or spouse can expect a negative reaction in the long term, 29 per cent of trans* people stated that their spouse has made getting a divorce difficult, and 44 per cent of partners and spouses have actively attempted to prevent their trans* partner from transitioning, this creates a situation in which trans* people could be blocked from having their affirmed gender legally recognised by a partner, possibly even a partner that they are trying to divorce.
Worst still, some have claimed that this is the final frontier of queer rights and that we are now equal. This is not the case. LGB and T people are still the subject of some of the most violent attacks in the UK.
In June 2012, gay teenager Steven Simpson was burnt to death for being gay and autistic at his 18th birthday party by Jordan Sheard. Sheard received just three and a half years imprisonment for Steven’s murder. Sheard’s lawyer described it as “the result of a criminally stupid prank that went wrong in a bad way.”
The verdict of manslaughter was widely condemned; however nothing further has come of it.
Lucy Meadows was a school teacher who was hounded by the right-wing press for being a trans woman. On 19 March this year, Lucy was found dead in her home after committing suicide. The response from the press, primarily the Daily Mail and its bigot-in-chief Richard Littlejohn was entirely unapologetic.
This was just one of a string of transphobic attacks in recent years.
These deaths are a call to arms for the fight for true equality. Same-sex marriage is limited and will do little to curb this trend of violence against queer people. Fighting homophobia, biphobia and, most of all, transphobia should be the priority in our movement over the coming years.
33 Responses to “We have won same-sex marriage. Now we must fight for trans* rights”
Demon Teddy Bear
Nice that you’re ashamed of the word but not the thing.
The excuses for avoiding democracy are amusing, but equally disgusting. And vice is not a “basic right”, and lying about it does not make it so.
GO
“By your logic if a Catholic marries another Catholic in a Catholic wedding then there has to be spousal consent if one decides to drop religion or convert to a different denomination. Or if I marry an accountant I should be able to veto their career change. Or if I marry a blonde person then I should be able to veto their use of brown hair dye. Similarly your logic states that an employer should be able to veto a waiter becoming a waitress.”
But in law, none of those things constitutes a change to the contract in question (as far as I know). A marriage’s going from being opposite-sex to same-sex or vice-versa, on the other hand, *does* constitute such a change. So the analogy doesn’t hold up.
“Also you are forgetting that its already changed. Their name has changed for a start. Their genitals may have changed too. All you are able to prevent if their human rights being granted.”
No: the spouse of the person seeking legal recognition for their newly affirmed gender identity can also prevent their *own* identity, and the nature of their *own* marriage contract, from being changed in the eyes of the law. This is the whole point. If I’m legally recognized today as (say) the spouse of a woman in an opposite-sex marriage, it’s not right that I could tomorrow be legally recognized as the spouse of a man in a same-sex marriage without my say-so. Of course the change would be ‘merely’ legal in a sense – as you say, my partner’s name etc. would already have changed – but it matters to us how we are seen in the eyes of the law. (Of course it does; that’s why this whole issue crops up in the first place.)
“Also in every other contract if there is a breach or change made to it that you don’t consent to then you can get out of it afterwards.”
No: a contract can be *breached* by one party unilaterally, but not *changed*. If I enter into a contract with you to, I dunno, fit a new kitchen in your house in return for £5,000, there’s no question of me just deciding unilaterally that the contract has changed and I’m now contracted to fit a new bathroom for £5,000 instead. Hence there’s no question of you having to ‘get out of’ that bathroom-fitting contract. It never existed, because you never agreed to it. The idea that someone who enters into a same-sex marriage to a woman (say) should end up having to ‘get out of’ an opposite-sex marriage to a man seems similarly nonsensical to me. (Note: I’m responding here to your point about how ‘every other’ contract works, not claiming any analogy between kitchen-fitting contracts and marriage contracts!)
“Do you really think comparing rape with gender change is a good comparison? Do you believe spouses need protecting from trans* people in the same manner that they need protecting from rapists?”
This just isn’t fair. You made the sweeping claims that ‘no spousal consent is needed for anything else at all’, and that all requirements for spousal consent are oppressive. I demonstrated the falsity of those claims by citing a well-known case of spousal consent being required and of this requirement not being oppressive, but instead being necessary to protect the rights of the spouse whose consent is required. This establishes the general principle that a requirement for spousal consent can be a means of protecting the rights of spouses against potential violations of their rights. That is by no means to imply that any and every violation of rights that might be thus protected against is comparable to rape in terms of its seriousness, its likelihood of happening, or anything else.
“Similarly a very minor change to a marriage contract should be fine to protect the human rights of a trans* spouse”
After all that, here’s the crux of the matter: I’m not at all sure it *is* a minor change. It’s the difference between me being, in the eyes of the law, a man in an opposite-sex marriage with a woman, or a man in a same-sex marriage with a man. And that is a big deal.
A trans* man wrote to an advice page on the Guardian site recently. He explained that while he had come privately to identify as a man, as far as the rest of the world was concerned – including his partner – he was a lesbian woman. He wanted to be open about his gender identity but was worried, primarily, about the reaction of his partner, who he described as ‘fiercely gay’.
Now suppose those two people were married. You’re suggesting that this man should, if push comes to shove, have the right unilaterally to change the legal status of his marriage from a same-sex union between two women, to an opposite-sex union between a man and a woman. A ‘fiercely gay’ woman whose sexual orientation is clearly central to her self-image. A woman who might well attach huge significance to the fact that her marriage is a same-sex marriage, the right to which she has fought long and hard for. I take your point about her having the option to ‘get out’ before that change is made, but I still feel that there’s something wrong in principle with the idea that her spouse should be able to just turn her into the wife in an opposite-sex marriage at the stroke of a pen.
GO
I wasn’t really suggesting that any abuser would be likely to use this threat with the genuine intention of carrying it out by going through the whole process of transitioning. Nor, though, do I think any abuser would be likely to promise to allow their partner to have their affirmed gender legally recognized, and to stay with them in a same-sex marriage, with the genuine intention of keeping that promise. I’m just pointing out that an abuser who sets out find something in the law that can be used to manipulate a victim through threats and promises can, theoretically, do so either way.
GO
One more point.
A standard (and powerful) line of response to people who say they oppose same-sex marriage because they ‘don’t believe in it’ has been: “Don’t enter into a same-sex marriage, then. No one can force you.”
Under this proposal, though, someone (your spouse in an existing opposite-sex marriage) *can*, in principle, force you to enter into a same-sex marriage by having a new gender identity legally recognized and changing the nature of your marriage against your will. Of course, in practice you might well manage to get a divorce finalized before it came to that – though even that would be partly down to your spouse – but the principle still looks objectionable to me.
What was wrong with the principle that each individual should be able to enter into a same-sex or an opposite-sex marriage as they choose? What’s the problem with granting that trans* people have the right to legal recognition of their gender identity, but reserving for their spouses the right to decide whether that recognition can happen within their marriage or must happen outside it?
Jack
Hey. This was addressed at the LGBT+ community in general which has been focusing sole on this for the past year or so and erasing trans* from the agenda.