Describes the husband's action.

From Okrand's email to Lieven (7/13/2017)

First of all, he said that Sawchuq and naychuq are perfectly good words and would be understood to refer to same-sex marriage.

But he went on...

Though Saw and nay are defined in terms of male/female and when used in this way everything is fine, the idea is not simply that when men get married they do something that's somehow different from what women do when they get married. The concept is more of a yin-yang thing. That is, there are two people joining together in marriage who are not the same as each other. They complement each other, complete each other – all that kind of stuff people say at weddings. It all goes back to the relationship Kahless and Lukara had. So one of the people getting married brings one set of values, strengths, abilities, etc., to the marriage, and the other brings another (complementary, overlapping, enhancing) set. And vice versa. That's why, when they get married, they're not said to do the same thing.

Now, you may say, if using two words for "marry" is because there are two different but complementary partners, shouldn't the word for "marry" when both people getting married are the same gender also be two different words? If so, Sawchuq and naychuq don't accomplish that.

And, if you said all of that, you would be right. But the association of Saw with "husband" and nay with "wife" has been around for so long, the "complementariness" notion has been lost for many people. That's why Sawchuq and naychuq are easily understandable when used for same-sex marriage.

In addition, though, at least in some places, people are dealing with gender in a way that goes beyond simple "male" and "female." So if one of the people getting married doesn't identify as either "male" or "female" – or if both don't - then what do you do? Theoretically, both use nay or both use Saw or one uses nay and the other uses Saw, but how to choose and which is which? This is particularly tricky because these two words are tangled up with "female" and "male," exactly what those identifying as neither are wanting to not express.