Imagine if …

Imagine if you could just go to the wedding celebrant and say we want to get married and the celebrant was able to just respond wow great congratulations lets set a date. And that date wasn’t dependent on the law changing….

Imagine if you could fill out those forms to for new paperwork that represented your true self and you didn’t have to add a divorce decree in order to do so….

Imagine if you could just be your true self without the government tut tutting that true self and believing it to be the arbiter of the legitimacy of that true self….

Oh right, you’re a cis heterosexual person so you can very easily imagine this, actually you don’t have to imagine it even because it is in fact your reality.

For the LGBTIQAP+ community, in Australia and elsewhere it is only something we can imagine.

It hurts everyday, every time, on each and every occasion we see the opinion expressed we are not entitled to these basic human rights. We’re actually real people you know, not just theoretical sides of a theoretical problem to be solved. Yes real living breathing actual human beings.

My story, not completely typical in the LGBTI community, but certainly not isolated. I fought against the reality that I was trans for many years. Until I could no more.

I kept reading myself, hearing my reality being expressed as I continued to meet and read the stories of trans people online and in real life. I could no longer pretend.

I’d done a pretty good job pretending, I’d married; twice; had kids played the boys game no matter how foreign it always was to me. I tried really really hard to be what I was told I was; what I was assigned at birth. What my parents enforced upon me.

My relationships with my partner was in the death throws, I thought maybe being true to myself to her, might just save it somehow. It appears I am wrong on that front, but I hold out hope, however small and resist the idea of divorce.

But, not being divorced means, because of our archaic legal definition of marriage under law, means I can’t have my true gender appear on my Birth Certificate. There are some other barriers to that too, like surgical procedures.

Marriage equality is a huge issue, and my story is just another one of those reasons why it is far more than just gay marriage or same-sex marriage. It’s marriage equality, not only is it about people being able to get married but also about being able to stay married.

Perhaps my marriage is truly over, but I know there are many that are not, and yet, the couples in them have to make a choice about having a legal marriage or having legal paperwork reflecting their true gender.

We need marriage equality, we really do, so people can get married and people can stay married.

The archaic heteronormative legal view of marriage in this country and others needs to be blown out of the water permanently. All humans need to have the legal right to marry as two consenting human persons, regardless totally of gender or sexuality.

Vote yes for equality. Please, our human rights are counting on it.

Imagine if all humans were see equally ….

Now wouldn’t that be grand!