Homophobic KY County Clerk Pwned By Trans Couple

The county clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, Kim Davis, has become a darling of the religious right for refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Davis, for those who don’t know, contends that issuing a marriage license amounts to “approving” the marriage. As an Apostolic Pentecostal–a member of an uber-strict offshoot of Pentecostalism that bars women from having short hair, jewelry, makeup or pants–she believes she would be violating her beliefs if she “approved” such marriages. She is being defended by religious right law firm Liberty Counsel, who continues to stand by her even though she’s hedged on whether she’d grant a license to an interracial couple.

Well, it turns out that a transgender couple from Morehead rooked their county clerk into granting them a license earlier this year. At a protest held outside the Rowan County courthouse earlier today, Camryn and Alexis Colen revealed that in February, Davis granted them a marriage license without asking to see either person’s birth certificate. It turned out that while she thought she was granting a license to an ordinary straight couple, she’d actually granted a license to a transgender couple. Camryn has been a trans man since 2010.

Camryn was born as Cathy Colen, and grew up in Zanesville, Ohio. However, Camryn was attracted to women for most of his life. He told The (Ashland) Independent that he had to jump through a number of hoops at the VA in order to cover the costs of sex-change surgery. He and Lexie, who had been “close” for some time, moved to Kentucky in 2014 because they thought it would be “beautiful and quiet.”

When Camryn and Lexie applied for a marriage license, they saw Davis, but never spoke to her. She did, however, advise the deputy clerk who serviced them. They received the necessary paperwork later that afternoon, and were married that night. Apparently the woman who has become the most infamous county clerk in the nation doesn’t know that she unwittingly cleared the way for a transgender couple to get married.

The Colens told The (Louisville) Courier-Journal that when Davis stopped granting marriage licenses altogether in protest of the Supreme Court making marriage equality the law of the land. However, they feared for the safety of their six-year-old daughter, KaKoda; Lexie conceived her via sperm donation shortly before they moved to Kentucky. Ultimately, Lexie said, they had to come forward because “stuff had just gotten ridiculous” since the county clerk refused to grant any marriage licenses at all. Since then, Camryn said, they have received “massive” support.

This episode lays threadbare the blatantly discriminatory stance that Davis has publicly taken. From a distance, Camryn and Lexie look like an ordinary straight couple. As Lexie put it, Davis was “judging a book by its cover.” The more I think about it, it’s a bit of poetic justice.