Before marriage equality, LGBTQ+ couples wanting to make health care and legal decisions for one another needed to take special steps, like adopting their partners.
Some queer Americans in the Tampa Bay area worry that now that the conservative Trump administration is back, they’ll lose the rights they won in 2015 when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states.
That includes Vince, a transgender man in Tampa. We are not using his last name to protect his privacy. The day after the election, he and his spouse, who have been together for nine years, got legally married at a local courthouse.
"Even if I can't necessarily guarantee everyone's safety, I could at least take precautions to protect my partner and have her protect me,” Vince said.
More recent attempts to codify marriage equality and interracial marriage into law have failed.
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And because Vince is a trans man and there are inconsistencies in the federal and state laws around changing gender markers to match a person’s identity, certain documents he can’t get changed consider his relationship a same-sex marriage.
Vince's says he knows of other couples like them also rushing to get married — this time before Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration. Other folks have taken to social media to say they’re also rushing to have babies, adopt children, and change their names and gender markers on official and legal documents.
Vince says even that may not be enough.
“I am aware to a certain degree that this legal protection we may have taken for ourselves may somehow become invalid in the next few years," Vince said, "but for right now, I think it's what we needed to ensure that we would be there for one another.”
That same day — him in a white lace top and her in a white lace dress — filed papers to get passports in case they want to leave the country.
Advocacy group GLAAD, which maintains a Trump Accountability Tracker, keeps a detailed log of Trump’s policy decisions and rhetoric dating back to 2016. On Fox News that year, he told reporters he would “strongly consider” Supreme Court justices who would overturn marriage equality and has supported potential federal legislation to allow federal contractors to circumvent protections against discrimination for LGBTQ workers.
The American Civil Liberties Union has also said a Trump administration will significantly escalate the removal of anti-discrimination policies like protections for transgender students, federal regulations, rules, and other policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Trevor Project reported an increase in calls of nearly 700% on Nov. 6, the day after the presidential election, compared to the weeks prior, and suicide attempts and successes have gone up as more state’s adopt anti-trans policies.
Advocates say Florida will likely serve as a model for more discriminatory federal laws.
“We're grieving all of the steps we've taken on the soil of Florida, all of the experiences we've had, finding community and finding ourselves here in this state," Vince said. "You can feel the pressure of people an ideologies telling you to leave and it makes you feel, one, unsafe and two, incomplete.”
