The state of Utah in the United States has no citizenship requirements for marriage licenses, and Utah County is the only place there that allows international couples to register their marriages online. Since the county rolled out virtual weddings during the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a wedding haven for same-sex couples who are not able to officially marry in their own countries.
As sexual minorities in China face suppression at home, Utah County is allowing them to officially marry and celebrate their love — all for around $100. Although the marriages aren’t recognized in China, some 200 same-sex couples from mainland China and Hong Kong have gotten married via the county’s digital marriage license system since 2021.
For authorities in Utah County, the influx of international couples came as a surprise. The Utah County and Auditor’s Office moved its marriage licensing service online, as part of a digitization initiative in 2019. At the start of the pandemic, a number of couples requested Zoom ceremonies, and the county made those available as well.
The service first attracted couples in Utah, followed by people from across the U.S., and later, from all over the world. From May 1 to September 20 this year, at least 77 same-sex couples with mainland Chinese addresses have been married there, said county deputy clerk Russ Rampton, who oversees marriage licensing, to Rest of World.
Although same-sex marriage remains illegal in Hong Kong, under a different set of laws to mainland China, residents who get married in other places are able to apply for dependent visas in the city for their partners. Married gay people are also able to mark themselves as married in tax filings.
In his vow, however, [one marriage certificate applicant] Zhu said he was looking forward to getting married a second time — in China. “If one day our country allows this, I hope we could get married again in this country,” Zhu said to his husband before they kissed.
**
Marriage equality does not stop in the West.
[ Article title: Same-sex couples from China are getting married in Utah over Zoom
Utah County introduced weddings over Zoom during the pandemic, unintentionally providing a valuable service for China’s LGBTQ+ community. ]
[ Original alt ID: Two men set up a camera and decorations before their wedding ceremony inside an apartment in China. ]
ah, i’m so bad at posting here. acknowledging this Day of Mourning from the lands of Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Potawatomi, Myaamia & Ochethi Sakowin people, aka Chicago, derived from a native word for garlic (mmm…) which is really suitable for me because I live here now 🌱🧄✨
whose.land are you on? talk about it over dinner this weekend with your fam & what it means to give the #landback.
considering everything, listening & learning from indigenous people is the least you can do.
Asian Americans tell a stock story about well-meaning people continually asking us the same question: “Where are you from?” And if one says California, or New Jersey, or Ohio, they say, “No, where are you really from?” This question, “Where are you from?” presumes that we are obviously not from America. Such a presumption is a racial one. It can be positive, reflecting openness and curiosity about other cultures, but there is also a darker side, which appears when the questioner is somehow disappointed to learn that the subject of the question is “just” an American. It is now a well-developed theme in Asian American legal scholarship that Asians in America are legally and socially constructed as racially foreign. Foreignness is itself a construction developed in conjunction with nationalism. Being designated foreign means that as foreigners, we do not belong, that our allegiance lies elsewhere, and that we are not members of the same team. Foreignness suggests that when push comes to shove, in war, or politics, or economic or military competition, we are presumed to be disloyal. Thus, the necessity arises in times of national distress for Asian Americans to continually prove our loyalty.
[ … ]
It is not my goal to present Asian Americans as victims of racist acts by individual judges, a government or a society. The search for innocent victims highlights the purity and innocence of the victims who do everything right, who become more trustworthy and more patriotic than everyone else, and thus, by their victim-hood, earn the right to be considered fully American. That is the wrong lesson. American heroes ought to be the ones who fight injustice, and fight, by default, makes you an opponent of the system you are fighting. The accusation therefore becomes self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing: Asian Americans who fight injustice become opponents of the American system.
One of the first books I read in English as a kid, maybe 1 year after I started learning English, was a booklet with a title like, How to Have a Great Time at Summer Camp. I don’t remember the exact title and I know I only picked it up because the other books in English in my school’s library looked way beyond my level, stuff like Austen and Dickens. The summer camp booklet didn’t look too interesting but it was small with simple sentences. I ended up being fascinated with it because it was the most American thing I had ever got my hands on and it felt impossibly exotic
all the kids had cool American names like Jill and Mike. One of them at one point talked about the “chipmunks” in the woods near the camp, a mysterious word that didn’t exist in my tiny English dictionary, and for some reason I pictured them as scrawny wolves. I had read Little House on the Prairie so I knew wolves were a major concern for Americans
camp “counsellors” were often mentioned, and my pocket English dictionary only defined that word as “psychologue”. I thought it was weird how American summer camps had dozens of psychologists roaming the premises, one for every 5 to 10 kids. That felt like a lot of psychologists
I had no idea that the word “pet” could mean “favourite”. When the booklet said one kid might become “the camp counsellor’s pet”, my dictionary helpfully led me to believe it meant that a psychologist would pick one unfortunate kid to be his domestic animal for the summer. Slightly disturbing. I moved on
the kids slept in “bunks” and my stupid dictionary only defined this word as “couche”. Which is not wrong, but we would probably say couchette instead, or better yet lits superposés, and couche is also our word for diaper so you can see why I continued being deeply intrigued by every new detail I learnt in this booklet. American kids are excited about camp because they get to sleep in diapers
I had never encountered the word “baseball” before but managed to guess it was some kind of sport, but when the booklet mentioned the “baseball diamond” (in the context of a kid saying the baseball diamond was big) I of course assumed it was an actual diamond that you could win if you won a game of baseball at camp. For some reason I had a debate with a classmate over the plausibility of this. I say for some reason because I didn’t really question the diapers or the wolves or the psychologists with their human pets. A diamond though? Doubt. I just remember that we were queueing up for lunch and I was like “What do you think?” and my friend said hesitantly, “Maybe if it’s a small diamond?” and I insisted “No! The book says it’s big!”
among the basic items the book said every kid should bring to camp were “batteries”. I didn’t bother looking up that word in my dictionary seeing as it’s the same in French. I didn’t know it was a false friend, and I was impressed to learn that most American kids own a drum set and bring it to camp as an essential item
on the same page, in the list of things every kid should put in their suitcase for summer camp, another item was “comic books”. I wasn’t sure what those were since in French we call them BD, but basing myself on the word “comic” I assumed they were books of jokes and puns. I loved learning that in the US all kids bring humour anthologies to summer camp, presumably because they worry about running out of funny things to say. I thought American kids sounded nervous and sweet. But also really cool, because of all the drums
This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!
my girlfriend has been talking about this since ancestry kits became A Thing
Privacy advocate Allie Funk was surprised to learn that her Delta flight
out of Detroit airport would use facial recognition scans for boarding;
Funk knew that these systems were supposed to be “opt in” but no one
announced that you could choose not to use them while boarding, so Funk
set out to learn how she could choose not to have her face ingested into
a leaky, creepy, public-private biometric database.
It turns out that all of Funk’s suspicions were misplaced! It is as easy
as pie to opt out of airport facial recognition: all you need to do to
opt-out is:
* To independently learn that you are allowed to opt out;
* Leave the boarding queue and join a different queue at a distant information desk;
* Return to her gate and rejoin the boarding queue; and, finally
This whole idea is obviously a Trumpian nightmare, but more interesting to me is that coeliac disease is acknowledged by the ADA as a disability. I have coeliac disease and because I live in the UK, it is dealt with for free and with due diligence but it’s never referred to as a disability.
Well, what’s important about it being a disability in the US is how it covers access to public spaces, and how tax deductions work for more expensive food and so on. For example, because it is a disability, and because food is necessary for life, I cannot be banned from bringing ‘clean’ food into anyplace that doesn’t serve food that wouldn’t make me sick. So even if there’s a policy for a movie theatre to not allow outside food, because I have celiac, I can bring my own food in from the outside because they don’t serve food that is safe for me to eat.
It makes it illegal (at least for right now) for me to be discriminated against in housing on basis of it, and means that an employer must provide me with accommodations to be able to eat safely at work if necessary.
It also means that companies which provide services must take that disability into consideration. For example, when we were displaced from our house by an insurance claim in 2016, because celiac is a legal disability, the insurance company putting me up had to put me in a hotel with a kitchen so that I could safely make my own food, since I can’t eat takeout, and instead of covering my takeout receipts they had to cover my groceries during the time we were displaced.
In the US, you can deduct from your taxes the difference between the cost of gluten-free food and regular food, because it counts as medication under the tax code. So if you are spending $6 for a loaf of bread that in glutenated version costs $1, $5 is tax-deductible as medication. It’s a pain in the ass to track but it really adds up.
All that said, given the restrictions that celiac places on a person’s life and the life-shortening potential for the disease, I never considered that it was anything other than an invisible physical disability. :)
the shadiest fucking thing about the American Pledge of Allegiance in schools is they force you to do it with varying penalties in elementary school and never, ever explain to to you what the Hell you’re doing when those words come out of your mouth. Then, when you get to middle school and you’re at about the right age to really question those words, they mysteriously stop doing it in the mornings, so you never get a chance to question those words and the fact they forced you to memorize and say them every morning for a fair chunk of your life ages 6-12.
And then of course you have kids who are seniors or in college and haven’t had to say the pledge in school in years except on, like Veteran’s Day, but can still recite it word for word when asked on the spot, but even then, don’t really know what they’re saying.
A history teacher once asked my class last year what government the US had. Everyone said “democracy”.
“No, specifically we’re a republic. It’s in the Pledge. How do you not know this?” He replied.
And there was this dawning moment of realization on everyone’s faces and even the teacher’s face that none of us had ever once really considered what we were saying when we recited the pledge. They were just meaningless words we didn’t know the meaning to and were forced to repeat time and time again.
I feel like I should add that not every region stops in middle school. There has never been a single public school at the elementary, middle, or high school level which didn’t make us stand for the pledge of allegiance every morning. In fact, when I got to middle and high school, they actually had a specific film clip of a waving flag that they played on the tv in homeroom every single morning.
But the didn’t do it in my private schools. See, up until the 3rd grade, I went to charter schools that were technically non-public. They never had us stand for the pledge. So in 3rd grade, on my first day of school, the bell rings to starts the day and all of a sudden every one of my classmates stands up and just starts chanting, but I have no idea what they’re saying. I was a pretty insular kid from a vehemently leftist family. We didn’t go to Saturday night football games, we went to Saturday night protest rallies. We didn’t watch cable tv, we watched nature documentaries. So I’d literally never heard the pledge before. It was frankly kind of terrifying.
I ended up talking to my mom about it and she taught me some history about it, what it meant to people, why it was “required”, and that if I, like a lot of other, wanted to protest some of the political stuff going on, I didn’t have to speak or stand. So I didn’t. Throughout my entire school career I would make a daily choice whether to stand or sit, speak or stay silent, and whenever I chose not to, people were alternately horrified and enraged.
Here’s the other piece of context. The year I went to public school for the first time was the year after 9/11. We were just entering into the Iraq war. “Patriotism” was at an all time high. “It’s solidarity” people shouted, “it’s respect for our troops” they argued.
I’ve been out of school long enough now that I don’t really know what’s common practice wrt the pledge anymore. But I can tell you with certainty that for a long time in an awful lot of places, it wasn’t about not giving you the chance to ask questions. It was about making clear you had no ~right~ to questions.
I think I did it during my brief spell at a private school? My public school system also did it in from K-12. If you took a foreign language in middle school or high school, you would also learn how to say the pledge in that language. Specifically in one of my Spanish classes, a different person would lead the Spanish pledge every day, in addition to the daily school-wide English pledge that we all did during that class period (because I happened to be in Spanish class during the daily announcements time). And, like, correctly memorizing the pledge in Spanish was part of your grade.
At some point I googled whether I actually had to stand and say it and the law said no. So I went to school and didn’t stand. And my (English) teacher got up in arms about it and said I had to stand. We fought about it and eventually he gave me some bullshit about how the “official school policy” was that you didn’t have to say it, but you still had to stand, and you also couldn’t do other things while everyone else was doing it, for example reading or doodling, because that was disrespectful to everybody else (despite being silent??). Anyways, I know this is bullshit because I already knew the entire contents of the school’s student handbook and I even went through it again afterwards to confirm that it said nothing of the sort.
Also this was a point in my life where I could barely walk down the hallway properly because of knee pain, so I absolutely resented it any time I was forced to stand for no good reason (and still do). And I was super obnoxiously atheist and protested the word God being a thing we had to say. Aaaaaand I was hella queer and disillusioned by America’s (and Christian culture’s) treatment of queer people (and anybody else who never saw heads nor tails of “liberty and justice for all”) and I was really not about being forced to acknowledge America or God or fake equality. Also, I had tons of Calvin and Hobbes books and I especially liked this strip:
Like… if you don’t do the pledge the right way, teachers and peers alike will tell you that you’re disrespecting the troops who fight for our freedom and other generic platitudes designed to shame you into guilty compliance. They straight up act like its a sacred thing and that by opting out, you’re being disruptive to others engaging in the holy tradition.
Although what’s probably the worst part is that I don’t think the pledge is anywhere near as insidious as some of the other things that go on in public schools.
i recently saw someone say that americans misuse ‘wanker’ by thinking it can be used as a term of endearment, but that, in fact, it cannot.
my british friend, anything can be a term of endearment to americans.
i’ve used ‘glue-huffing turd pilot’ as a term of endearment. ‘motherfucker’ no longer even carries a negative connotation with us, it’s just a metasyntactic variable. you have to add an adjective to ‘motherfucker’ to make it mean anything but ‘the subject of this sentence’.
compared to your standard street-level american vocabulary, ‘wanker’ is butterfly kisses on a may afternoon.
How Much of My Ignorance is My Own Fault and How Much Can I Blame on the American School System? A Memoir, by me.
Alternative Title: Spain was Ruled by a Dictator for 36 Years, Apparently.
Alternative Title 2: If It’s Not About America or Britain Saving the Day, then I have No Fuckin Clue.
I went to school in Spain and this was my reaction and my professor was like “why do you know nothing” and I was like “I’m from America, I was taught one year of World History in high school by a racist.”
The PRIDE Study is the first large-scale, long-term health study of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ), or another sexual or gender minority.
By participating in The PRIDE Study over time, your unique story teaches us about the health and well-being of LGBTQ people like you.
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD, @rivergst and I just went to our name change court dates and we got to witness THE FIRST FOUR GENDER CHANGES TO NONBINARY IN OUR COUNTY
The judge said he’d already had two nonbinary people who changed to a different binary gender to get their passports in the gender they would be presenting as while traveling, who are going to come back to then change their state docs to nonbinary.
But the four today were apparently the first to actually get that done. The first one was Tom/Miss G., who is intersex and plural, and the second was @epochryphal, who is nonbinary and says they’re probably around the tenth+ in the whole state of California, and then Uriah is a nonbinary trans woman and Noelle is a nonbinary person.
Tom/Miss G are 77 years old. The judge said, “It took a long time, but the world has finally caught up with you and the reality of how life is.”
we’re definitely going to do this as soon as we get our own federal documents taken care of!! Toby, the director of the Intersex and Gender Recognition Project (IGRP,
) says if any of you want to get your federal documents changed to nonbinary, DON’T DO IT BY YOURSELF, contact IGRP so that they can make sure to do it with a large group and make sure everything is done correctly! They’re working on that really hard and on a lot of other amazing stuff!! They can also help with your state/county stuff in the US, but you can potentially take care of those on your own too.
:>!!!!!
one correction, uriah is a nonbinary woman who specifically does not identify as a trans woman and talked about that feeling like a different experience than theirs? but YEAH
psyched to get my birth certificate!!!!
IGRP is amazing, and a non-profit and entirely donation-funded and mostly volunteer work done by toby, so if you can please please please consider donating OR volunteering - especially if you can coordinate volunteers or help organize fundraising!!
