Talks on Love Playlist (4/5): A queer vision of love and marriage | Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin

**Elise Hu** (0:00)
June is LGBTQ Pride Month for many around the world. It's a time to celebrate the fight for rights and the many forms love and relationships can take. In honor of this, today we're dropping five of our favorite TED Talks from the archive on love and relationships. Happy listening.
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What if love itself were a revolutionary act? What if when we strip away every assumption about how a person is supposed to exist in their body, gender, or skin, and truly make space for each other, we don't just change our relationships, but change the world? In this talk from 2016, activist Tiq Milan and writer, educator, and actor Kim Katrin took to the TED stage as a married couple, a transgender man, and a cisgender queer woman with infectious joy and radical honesty. Together, they question our misconceptions about who we are and offer a vision of an inclusive, challenging love that grows day by day, a model of possibility for people of every kind. And while the two are no longer together, this talk remains a beautiful testament to what love can look like when you build it from scratch on your own terms. That's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Tiq Milan** (1:33)
Our first conversation was on Facebook, and it was three days long.
We shared over 3,000 messages between us, and it was during those 72 hours that I knew she was gonna be my wife. We didn't rate any pre-weakness in amount of time for our courtship. We told each other the vulnerable truths up front. I am a transgender man, which means the F on my birth certificate should have stood for instead of female. Walking around as a woman in the world felt like walking with pebbles in my shoes. It took the rhythm out of my swagger. It threw me off balance. It pained me with every step I took forward. But today, I'm a man of my own intention, a man of my own design.

**Kim Katrin** (2:15)
I am a cisgender queer woman. Cisgender means the gender I was assigned at birth is still and has always been female. This doesn't make me natural or normal. This is just one way of describing the many different ways that we exist in this world.
And queer is a cultural term, but in this case, it refers to the way that I'm not restricted by gender when it comes to choosing partners. I've identified in a few different ways, as a bisexual, as a lesbian, but for me, queerness encompasses all of the layers of who I am and how I've loved. I'm layers and not fractions.
And for me, the fact that he was queer meant that I could trust this courtship from the very beginning. As queer and trans people, we are so often excluded from institutions and traditions. We create spaces outside of convention, including the conventions of time. And in those 3,000 messages between us, we collapsed time. We queered it. We laid it all on the table with no pretense at all. And this meant that we were able to commit to each other in a profoundly different way.
So often, what we're told is this idea of the golden rule, that we should treat other people the way that we want to be treated. But the problem with that is that it assumes that we are the standard for other people, and we're not. We need to treat other people the way that they want to be treated, which means we had to ask. I couldn't assume that the kind of love that Tiq needed was the same kind of love that I needed, so I asked him everything about his fears, his insecurities, and we started from there.

**Tiq Milan** (3:52)
I didn't know what kind of love I needed. I had just come out of a year-long fog of being rejected and utterly depleted.
I had someone look me in my eyes and tell me that I was unworthy of their love because I was trans.
And there's a culture of lovelessness that we've created around transgender people. It's reasoned, justified, and often signed into law, and I was a heartbeat away from internalizing that message that I wasn't worthy. But Kim said that I was her ideal, the heartbroken mess that I was.

**Kim Katrin** (4:21)
He totally was my ideal.
In more ways than one, both poets, writers, creatives, with a long history of community work behind us, and big huge dreams of a family in front of us. We shared a lot of things in common, but we were also incredibly different. I've been a lifelong traveler and a bit of an orphan, whereas he comes from a huge family and definitely stays grounded. I often sum up the differences in our strengths by saying, keep me safe and I'll keep you wild.