Jane Eaton Hamilton: No Legal Impediment

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle. 

By Jane Eaton Hamilton

In June 2003, my friend Tanya and I sidled up to the counter at London Drugs, where marriage certificates were sold, and requested applications. The whole business of a drug store was going on behind us; chatter, tills, merchandise moving over beeping scanners, money changing hands. Drugs were being dispensed. But my heart was thumping hard like I was about to get caught doing something illegal.

Name of bride. Well, that one was easy, at least. My beloved, Joy, was “butchier,” so I could be, for legal purposes, whatever she wasn't.

Three years earlier, Joy and I had been denied our first marriage license – the prerequisite to becoming litigants in Canada's same-sex marriage case.

Although our case was federal (because in Canada, who can marry whom is federal jurisdiction), we had slowly wound our way toward the Supreme Court of Canada by moving up provincial channels. We had already lost at trial in the British Columbia Supreme Court, and then won upon appeal in British Columbia Appellate Court. The feds were ordered to change the law but had been given 15 months to implement the change.

Then an amazing thing happened in Ontario's lower court: The lawyers won their arm of our case, and their remedy wasn't delayed. According to the courts, Canadian gays and lesbians could wed immediately.

A federal law had been overturned. Technically, this meant that same-sex marriage was legal everywhere, which is what led us to reapply for marriage licenses in British Columbia.

I put myself down as bride. And beside me, Tanya put herself down as bride. Then we conferred a bit about how to list our lovers: Grooms? Cross that out and leave it blank? Amend it to bride? Bride One and Bride Two? We settled for making the two other women brides and handed the forms to the greasy-haired boy behind the counter.

He ran his hand through his hair. He moved his weight from one foot to another foot. His cheeks were fire red, and his neck was almost purple. His eyes sidling up from the papers to catch a glimpse of us, he said, "So, let me get this straight, you two wanna marry each other?"

“No, our partners.”

He lifted his head, as if these partners were fictions. "I'm not issuing you marriage licenses. You hafta be a man and a woman, and you're, like, not."

We explained that a federal law had just changed.

"I'm callin' somebody," he said. And then, a minute later: "Okay, so we're denyin' this. My supervisor says I, like, don't hafta."

Tanya and I turned to leave.

"Hey!" he called out.

We turned back.

"So, like, listen. If I gave you marriage licenses… Can I ask you? What would you do with them, anyhow?"

I resisted telling him the rude place I might want to stick mine if I hadn't needed it for other purposes. But what we really would have done with them is precisely what we did with the ones issued in Ontario a mere couple weeks later: We got hitched.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of several books, most recently the short fiction book "Hunger." Her writing has appeared in the NY Times, Seventeen, Macleans, the Globe and Mail, En Route and other magazines, and she has been the recipient of many awards, including first prize in the CBC Literary Award. She writes in Vancouver, BC.

Photo credit: Luna Nordin. 

Out Cry: Ending Violence Against LGBTQ Youth

This piece was originally published as a Women's Media Center blog exclusive.

Another week, another name to add to the list of gay children dead by their own hands. The newest entry: a young woman by the name of Aiyisha Hassan.

Aiyisha was nineteen years old. She was black, a former student at Howard University. Though media reports describe her as a lesbian, friends say she was struggling with her sexuality -- struggling to come to terms with expressing a sexual identity that could have left her ostracized. Acquaintances put her in touch with a group that might have helped her find a community of loving support, but for whatever reasons, Aiyisha Hassan still felt terribly alone. And last week, she became the latest headline in the rash of reports detailing the suicides of LGBTQ teens.

Aiyisha Hassan: Gay -- and dead at nineteen.

Read more »

Lifting Up the Voices of LGBTQ Youth

The Ms. Foundation has been deeply troubled by the deaths of nine LGBTQ youths in the span of five short weeks. It is clear to us that our culture's unyielding adherence to a system of "gender norms," which sets strict rules for what makes a "man" or a "woman" this society, played a major role in encouraging these deaths, and the violent bullying that in many cases preceded them.

Read more »

Economic Crisis Hits Transgender Community Hard

Though it is true that each of us has been affected in some way by the Great Recession, it is also increasingly evident that some groups are feeling greater pains than others thanks to this economic crisis.

One group hit hard by the surge in US unemployment is the transgender community. Though rarely highlighted in media reports that parse the uneven employment rates across class and education level, transgender people are "twice as likely to be unemployed as other Americans, and face even higher rates of unemployment if they are people of color" -- making them especially vulnerable as the job markets remain weak.

But as an article on Women's eNews points out, it's not just the lack of jobs that poses problems for the transgender community. Dealing with government agencies also brings special challenges: because state and federal agencies remain inconsistent in determining how and whether an individual is allowed to change his or her sex identification on official paperwork, many transgendered people find themselves caught in a proverbial "no man's land" when it's time to file for unemployment. Their Social Security card might list them as one gender, while their driver's license might list them as another. In many cases that leads to an uncomfortable outing while applying for state aid; in other cases it can cause outing with potential employers -- and sometimes cost individuals their jobs entirely.

Among the outstanding organizations leading the fight to address the inequalities faced by the transgender community is the Audre Lorde Project. Their Welfare Justice Campaign, which "sought to address the rampant transphobia, discrimination, and harassment that Trans and Gender Non-Conforming people in New York City face when seeking to access welfare/public assistance" is one example of how activist organizations are now winning battles to secure the rights of transgender individuals.

Another is Ms. Foundation grantee Southerners on New Ground (SONG). This Atlanta-based organization works with the LGBTQ community in the southern region to build the power of marginalized groups and organize across lines of race, class, culture, gender and sexuality through its unique organizing school model.

These are organizations that are doing things right for the LGBTQ community, and they have great lessons to teach about the power of grassroots organizing. If little else comes out of this economic crisis, perhaps it will at least help us learn that the vulnerabilities of diverse communities are unique and nuanced -- and require, at best, the input of the people experiencing the problem to develop viable solutions. That's the kind of change we can believe in.