Consider writing a will

Do you trust your family to not bury you under your dead name? To invite your friends and partners to you your funeral? Do you trust that your family members who have the decency to do those things won’t allow themselves to be browbeaten by those who don’t?

Recently I had a reminder of something that every queer person was painfully aware of during the height of the AIDS crisis: If your partner dies and you have no legal relationship to them then you have no legal rights over what happens to them. That is perhaps a tautological statement but one that is worth internalising. When you die what happens to you is up to those that the state considers to be your family and in the absence of any legal documents saying otherwise that is generally your blood relatives. And of course there’s the matter of inheritance if you want to leave things to anyone other than your relatives.

What’s funny is that myself and Ellie had been discussing this. We had talked about looking into the process of getting wills written, etc. Her family did not take her transitioning well. Her brother refused to let her into his house to drop off Christmas presents for her niblings last year because he did not want his children to see her as a woman. We knew what would likely happen if she died, we just did not expect it so suddenly.

I don’t have any actual advice to offer for how to go about this. We hadn’t gotten around to it ourselves and if we had anything I could say would only apply to the Republic of Ireland.