Jan 23, 2004  |  By: Gwen Smith  | COMMENTS     

IT MAY SEEM odd for a transgendered woman to write about same-sex marriage.

After all, most states allow transsexuals to get married when we change our sexes, and many of us are even able to skirt the issue altogether and live in perfectly legal same-sex marriages by simply getting married before beginning gender transition. Unfortunately, it is not nearly as simple as all that.

A friend of mine is a transgendered woman in a relationship with another transgendered woman. They are very deeply in love. This friend of mine ended up in the hospital, and could have lost her life. As I sat in the hospital, it suddenly dawned on me. Her partner has no more right to visit her than I do. For that matter, if her condition had deteriorated, her partner would have no rights to make medical decisions.

They aren’t married, and as they are both the same sex in physical appearance and on their birth certificates, they have no legal right to get married in their state.

MY PARTNER AND I are legally married, and we are both women. We married back in a time, nearly 12 years ago, when we still looked like a nice heterosexual couple.

Unfortunately, things get sticky now that we are a legal same-sex couple, existing on the fringes of matrimony during the great marriage war of ’04.

When we tried to get insurance coverage for me on her company benefits, we faced a merry-go-round. You see, for spousal coverage, they require a man and a woman. The company does provide coverage for domestic partners, which is great — except for us to take advantage, we had to file DP paperwork that we cannot legally fill out. There is no third option.

Another transgendered woman friend of mine recently tied the knot, to a non-transgendered woman. The latter was also immigrating to America to be with her lover.

Of course, this led to all sorts of trouble since, again, they both are seen as women. After months of struggling through the baroque rules from the Immigration & Naturalization Service, they had to go to their county clerk and obtain a marriage license — and were denied.

Undaunted, they waited a while and went back, and a different clerk was willing to issue the license, but only after my friend had her parents sign an affidavit that she was who she said she was, and had been born male.

IT ALMOST FEELS like more of a struggle for those of us in this gray area of transgender marriage than if we knew simply that we had no marriage rights. Not that any of us above would willingly give up what we may have.

You see, just as a myriad of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are having to struggle against those who would deny this basic right to marry, so too are transgendered people of all sexualities facing the loss of marriage rights both desired and long held.

Those who are crafting Defense of Marriage Act-type legislation would just as easily deny me and my partner our decade-plus of wedded bliss as they would any other same-sex couple. They’d also deny it to a mixed-gender couple where one or both are transgendered.

In Texas in 2000, a woman known then as Christie Lee Littleton was denied her right to sue the doctor who may have played a part in the death of her husband. The judge determined that her marriage was invalid because she had been born male.

The tide turned in 2003 with major transgender marriage victories in the United States and abroad, but that didn’t stop the worst case yet: Jacob Nash and Erin Barr.

Nash, a transsexual man in Ohio, and Barr went to court when they were denied a marriage license. Judge Diane V. Grendell, the wife of an Ohio lawmaker working on a “super DOMA” for their state, stated that granting the license would violate Ohio’s “clear public policy” against same-sex marriages. She even cited the “legislative history” of her husband’s bill, which had not even passed into law.

As long as legislators work to define marriage as between one man and one woman, not only will same-sex couples be left out of the loop, but transgendered people will be forced to live in no man’s land.