A Personal Reflection on Equal Marriage and the Right to Choose in Northern Ireland 

It’s hard to put into words what this means for people who grew up in the North of Ireland. I feel it’s important to share a few of my experiences at this time.

I grew up with no sex education. Not bad sex education. No sex education. The only time sex was mentioned was during a full day long conference called ‘Icebergs and Babies’. If you remember the scene from Mean Girls when the PE teacher shouts ‘Don’t have sex, you will get pregnant and die’, you’ll have a some idea of how that day went.

Those who said teenagers couldn’t cope with sex education were more than happy to have us watch videos of late term aborted foetuses twitching in buckets. It’s still seared in my brain. At the end of the day we were given badges with tiny feet, and told those were the size of a 22 week old foetus that were ‘murdered’ in England.

I am a bisexual woman but lived in denial until well into my 20s. Any time I felt something for a woman or had a romantic experience with a woman, I wrote it off as a ‘phase’ or ‘rebelling’. I saw my bisexuality as something shameful that couldn’t be true. I felt it was the ‘bad’ part of me coming out. So many people in my parents’ generation say they don’t know any gay people, but even as a child this confused me. I know more than one same sex couple living together. They’re known to their friends and family as ‘good friends’ who live together to share expenses.

I share these personal stories for an important reason. We have made amazing progress and the people of the North of Ireland woke up this morning with more rights than they did yesterday. But the cultural stigma runs deep. Many family members of mine changed their profile pictures to a black square with the hashtag #DarkestDay. I was sickened to see that both students and teachers put up a #DarkestDay notice board in my former secondary school’s corridors.

Women and pregnant people won’t face prison for seeking an abortion but they will still face the scorn of their closest friends and family members, because laws may change, but culture takes longer, much longer.  Same sex couples can legally get married but that doesn’t mean their parents will attend their wedding. The internal stigmas can’t be cleaned away with legislation change.

When I first got elected as LGBT+ officer to the Open Labour executive, my plan was to use the role to support the Equal Marriage Campaign back home, and work with organisations like Alliance for Choice to finally deliver bodily autonomy to women and pregnant people in my corner of the world. I’m so pleased that the first step of the fight is over. But we cannot get complacent now.

Those who argued against the right for pregnant people to have a choice over their bodies and equal marriage are not going to give up. They will continue to shame those who want progress. I’ve been watching the Twitter profiles of those engaged with NI style social conservatism recently and it is also vey clear that they have a new target – trans people, particularly trans women. Those who fought against the hard won progress this week have increasingly been sharing transphobic articles and it’s clear where their energy will go next.

We need to fight to ensure that the progress made is protected and solidified. We need to hold those in power to account to ensure that the policies are enthusiastically promoted and cultural stigma is tackled. We also need to be on the lookout for the next target. Those who seek to denigrate rights will not accept they have lost. They will never cease undermining progress and they will throw their weight and considerable money behind a new fight, but for now let’s join together in celebrating and, more importantly, don’t give up because those who seek to undermine us will never give up. Keep fighting to solidify these hard won rights and be prepared to fight new battlegrounds.

This was the work of tireless grassroot campaigners. I am so proud of MPs like Conor McGinn and Stella Creasy for taking the steps needed to make legislative change. I’m even prouder of the fact that they both recognise and praise the hard work of the campaigners in the North of Ireland who got us here. As with the referenda in Ireland, many of those fighting for basic rights were involved with those campaigns before they hit The Guardian think pieces. They fought in times where it was difficult and even dangerous to put themselves on the line.  Today is a new dawn, but the detractors still remain and the wider fight for equality continues.