Trinity College JCR has voted to change the College’s student marriage system to a less heteronormative model, following the defeat of a similar motion earlier this term.
The Trinity marriage system originally worked by a ballot system whereby the year group was split into men and women and names were picked at random from each group, meaning that every undergraduate would end up married to a random student of the opposite gender.
A JCR motion to change this to a “free marriage system” was initially defeated.
However, Trinity undergraduate Celia Stevenson proposed a new motion which read, “This JCR would continue the marriage ballot but no longer include the preference for heterosexual marriages.”
Stevenson told Cherwell, “The motion passed this time and not last time because the JCR has an attachment to the ballot system and feels it is the best way to make sure nobody is left out.”
Stevenson further added that the motion addressed “concerns raised over the gendered nature of the ballot, which the majority who were at the meeting felt had the potential to alienate and ignore members of the JCR. I did think this motion would pass because it allowed people to keep the ballot system, which the majority were in favour of doing in the previous meeting, while making that system more inclusive.”
Trinity College Vice President and Treasurer Tom Carter said that the JCR “had nightmares reaching quorum”, but the motion was eventually legitimately passed with 30 for and nine against.
Second year undergraduate Oliver Lunt told Cherwell that the initial motion amending the Trinity college marriage system failed because “there are quite a few people each year who simply don’t engage with the marriage system at all, to the point that they wouldn’t know enough about the system to even opt-out of it.”
Lunt added, “I think that this new system is preferable to the original system because it removes the prominence of gender in college marriages, which I thought was entirely irrelevant since the vast majority of support that college parents seem to provide is either about general living arrangements in Oxford, or about academic issues.”
