Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson are a British lesbian couple who lobbied to have their relationship recognised as a marriage in England.
[citation needed] She has a career in academia, having published nine books and contributed over 100 articles relating to language, feminism and homosexuality.
[1] Currently, Kitzinger is using conversation analysis to explore the ordinary mundane reproduction of heterosexism in everyday talk-in-interaction, and aside from her work at the University of York she is also an associate editor of Feminism & Psychology.
[citation needed] Wilkinson is an emeritus professor of feminist and health studies in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University in Leicestershire.
The following year she took special leave to take chair as the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Professor of Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
[2] The couple married in Yaletown, Vancouver, in August 2003, a few weeks after same-sex marriage became legal in British Columbia, where Wilkinson had been working as a visiting professor at Simon Fraser University.
The couple sued for the recognition of their marriage, the trial beginning on 5 June 2006 before Sir Mark Potter, President of the Family Division.
In a 21 September 2005 press release issued by Liberty,[3] the British civil rights organisation which supported their case, Kitzinger and Wilkinson said: This is fundamentally about equality.
[4] In handing down his ruling, the President of the Family Division, Sir Mark Potter, gave as his reason that "Abiding single sex relationships are in no way inferior, nor does English Law suggest that they are by according them recognition under the name of civil partnership"[5] and that marriage was an "age-old institution" which, he suggested, was by "longstanding definition and acceptance" a relationship between a man and a woman.