seattle put your throuple in the civil rights code. the line nobody is quoting deletes “male or female”

via the Seattle City Council legislative record, a Council Central Staff memo, The Advocate and LGBTQ Nation.

Buried in the footnotes of a Seattle City Council staff memo, right where a normal city government would cite a normal thing, is a 2023 paper from the journal Sexuality & Culture titled "Monogamy? In this Economy?" It is real, it is peer reviewed, and the city used it to explain why it was about to rewrite its civil rights code.

On Tuesday it did. Council Bill 121278 passed at full council, the council president signed it the same afternoon, and LGBTQ Nation reports that not one member voted against it. Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck sponsored it. The Housing, Arts, and Civil Rights Committee had sent it up six days earlier.

what the bill actually does

Three changes, all of them to the definition of "sexual orientation" where it already appears in the Seattle Municipal Code. It deletes the phrase "male or female." It adds pansexuality and asexuality as named orientations. And it clarifies that the protected "attitudes, preferences, beliefs, and practices" pertaining to sexual orientation include, in the code's own words, "actual or perceived consensual relationships involving multiple partners such as non-monogamous relationships."

Ten sections of the code get amended, which means the protection lands everywhere the phrase already lived: hiring and firing, housing, business licenses, public accommodations, bias-free policing requirements, and the right to use a Seattle park without being discriminated against. A separate recital states the council's intent that "cohabiting" covers multigenerational families, so grandma in the back bedroom is now a civil rights matter too.

The staff memo is careful about one thing the headlines are not. This does not make non-monogamy its own protected class. It makes non-monogamy a protected way of expressing an orientation you already had, which is a smaller door than it sounds and a sturdier one. Seattle has done this before, most recently adding caste in 2023.

the part nobody is quoting

Every write-up of this leads with polyamory, because polyamory is fun to write about and we have done it ourselves this month. But the ace people just got written into an American civil rights code, which is not a thing that happens often, and neither did anyone throw a parade for the two words that got struck. "Male or female" is gone. A sentence that had quietly assumed there were two of us now does not.

The memo's own footnote on the marital status definition is the most municipal sentence ever written: the code says "cohabitating" in two places and "cohabiting" in two others, the reason is "unknown," and staff believe it to be "an unintentional historical drafting error." Somebody's typo has been load-bearing in Seattle housing law for years.

the money nobody appropriated

Nothing takes effect until June 1, 2027, which is the part worth watching. The Office for Civil Rights, the agency that has to enforce this, told Central Staff it needs $46,000 above its current budget as the bare minimum for outreach and $121,000 to do it properly. Neither number is in the bill. The memo suggests the council "may wish to consider" the 2027 budget process.

A protection nobody knows about is a press release with a footnote. Seattle has nine months to turn this one into something a person can actually use, and roughly $0 currently assigned to telling them.