It's a good one. --J
On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Henry Reynolds <henryfreynolds_at_gmail.com>wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12boylan.html?em
>
>
> Not surprisingly, this was written by an English professor.
>
> H.
>
>
>
> The New York Times
>
> May 12, 2009
> Op-Ed Contributor
> Is My Marriage Gay?
> By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
>
> Belgrade Lakes, Me.
>
> AS many Americans know, last week Gov. John Baldacci of Maine signed
> a law that made this state the fifth in the nation to legalize gay
> marriage. It’s worth pointing out, however, that there were some
> legal same-sex marriages in Maine already, just as there probably are
> in all 50 states. These are marriages in which at least one member of
> the couple has changed genders since the wedding.
>
> I’m in such a marriage myself and, quite frankly, my spouse and I
> forget most of the time that there is anything particularly unique
> about our family, even if we are — what is the phrase? — “differently
> married.”
>
> Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in
> Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of
> changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her
> life was better with me than without me. Maybe she was crazy for
> doing so; lots of people have generously offered her this unsolicited
> opinion over the years. But what she would tell you, were you to ask,
> is that the things that she loved in me have mostly remained the
> same, and that our marriage, in the end, is about a lot more than
> what genders we are, or were.
>
> Deirdre is far from the only spouse to find herself in this
> situation; each week we hear from wives and husbands going through
> similar experiences together. Reliable statistics on transgendered
> people always prove elusive, but just judging from my e-mail, it
> seems as if there are a whole lot more transsexuals — and people who
> love them — in New England than say, Republicans. Or Yankees fans.
>
> I’ve been legally female since 2002, although the definition of what
> makes someone “legally” male or female is part of what makes this
> issue so unwieldy. How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By
> genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?
>
> We accept as a basic truth the idea that everyone has the right to
> marry somebody. Just as fundamental is the belief that no couple
> should be divorced against their will.
>
> 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.”
>
> Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately
> frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed
> and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus
> on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. Whether
> a marriage like mine is a same-sex marriage or some other kind is
> hardly the point. What matters is that my spouse and I love each
> other, and that our legal union has been a good thing — for us, for
> our children and for our community.
>
> It’s my hope that people who are reluctant to embrace same-sex
> marriage will see that it has been with us, albeit in this one
> unusual circumstance, for years. Can we have a future in which we are
> more concerned with the love a family has than with the sometimes
> unanswerable questions of gender and identity? As of last week, it no
> longer seems so unthinkable. As we say in Maine, you can get there
> from here.
>
> Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College and
> the author of the memoir “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted.”
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
--
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Received on 2009-05-12 15:49:33