A Personal Reflection on Pride and Our Work at VOW for Girls

I end each week at VOW for Girls by sharing a reflection with our internal team. In celebration of Pride Month, I'm sharing this week's reflection with you as well. Happy Pride!

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Happy Friday – and happy Pride month. As June comes to a close, I want to share a personal reflection, and how it fuels my passion for our shared work.?

55 years ago today, the movement for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. was brought to public attention a few blocks from where I’m sitting this morning, at the Stonewall Inn, as hundreds gathered in protest of aggressive police raids on safe spaces for my community to gather. The following year, 1970, marked what is widely considered the first official Pride celebration. I was born during Pride week eight years later. This weekend, I’ll gather with my friends from across the country who have traveled to New York to continue the tradition of Pride and celebration.?

Since 1969, the fight for equality in the U.S. has taken many forms: pushing to repeal any manner of discriminatory laws, fighting for access to life-saving HIV/AIDS medications, the push for marriage rights, and so much more. A brief read of the news certainly shows that the fight for LGBTQ+ equality still continues today, both in the U.S. and around the globe.?

For so much of my own life – from birth until my mid-twenties – I lived with an assumption about marriage that I thought would never change: that I would not be able to legally marry a person that I loved.?

And then slowly but surely, that began to change. Progress was slow at first, geography by geography (Massachusetts in 2004; DC in 2010; New York in 2011; California in 2013; on and on); and then it was swift, with the Supreme Court decision during Pride week of June 2015.?

That victory didn’t happen by chance. It was thanks to the tireless work of advocates at the state, local, and federal levels. They altered the conversation, pushed for change, and bucked my assumption that I could never marry. Zach and I married in 2010, just after it became legal in DC.?

There are girls today in so many places around the world who are living with their own assumptions about marriage: that they will be married against their choice, well before they are adults, to someone they do not know and do not love. And as we all know, that’s happening right now, as you read this, to far too many girls.?

We are some of the advocates working tirelessly to alter that conversation, to push for change, and to buck the assumption that a girl can be married against her choice. That’s what we’re doing: building a network of partners who believe that every girl should be able to choose if, when, and to whom she marries, being an active decision-maker in charting her own future.?

Happy Pride, and thank you for all you’ve done in the first half of this year to create a world where every girl has value as a person, not just as a bride. I’m excited to accelerate this work with you as we head into the critical months ahead.