Tenn. nixes marriage of transgender woman, man

Tenn. nixes marriage of transgender woman, man

(Clarksville, Tenn.) Tennessee authorities have invalidated the 18-month marriage of a transgender woman and a man, saying the state considers them both men.

Jo T. Rittenberry, 46, was born a man and claims to have had sex reassignment surgery in Canada. The Clarksville Leaf Chronicle reported that she had officials legally change the gender on her Kentucky birth certificate and Tennessee driver’s license.

Rittenberry married Jeffery Scott Phillips, 36, in November 2007.

Kelly Farmer, director of communications at the Davidson County Clerk’s Office, said Tennessee authorities will not honor the marriage because Rittenberry was not born a woman.

http://www.365gay.com/news/tenn-nixes-marriage-of-transgender-woman-man/

The discretionary authority to decide a marriage license relies on protecting one or the other of the particants, and/or society from the outcome.

So . . . who is being "protected" by that decision? I smell another Supreme Court decision here - something like 3 - 5% of all humans born are of indeterminate gender at birth, by arrangement of their pink parts or by chromosomal irregularities.

So . . . maybe we should also deny marriage licenses to sterile people or worse, to midgets and cripples (non PC inflammatory lingo intended for the sake of hyperbole).

What if you weren't born straight? I mean WHAT IF you were a wee little gay baby and then right around puberty you went into this phase or got hit in the head and started getting obsessed with vijayjays or tallywhackers, and never came out of it? I mean if you were gay at birth, or if a gay dude married a gay chick wouldn't that be "gay marriage"?

Why oh why are conservatives so stupid? Were they dropped on their mean little bitty hard haired heads at birth, repeatedly? :shrug:

Is My Marriage Gay?

By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
Published: May 11, 2009

...For our part, Deirdre and I remain legally married, even though we’re both legally female. If we had divorced last month, before Governor Baldacci’s signature, I would have been allowed on the following day to marry a man only. There are states, however, that do not recognize sex changes. If I were to attempt to remarry in Ohio, for instance, I would be allowed to wed a woman only.

Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

Similar rulings have left couples in similar situations in Florida, Ohio and Texas. A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, determined that marriage could be only between people with different chromosomes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that jurisdiction were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, paradoxically, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12boylan.html?em