A Man and A WomanBy Hebe Dotson (reprinted with the full agreement of the author. This article first appeared in TgForum.com)
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How Will the Gay Marriage Amendment Confuse Our Placid Lives?
The Gay Marriage Amendment (GMA) will be only the second amendment intended to reduce the rights and freedom of the American people (the first was the 18th amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages). Prohibition, which affected every adult in the country, was a failure and was repealed in 1933 after 14 legally dry years. The GMA, however, will affect only a minority of the population and may not meet with majority disfavor. If the GMA fails to pass the House and Senate by the middle of 2006, it could become the major issue of the 2006 mid-term election. The 2006 campaigns could then make the acrimonious 2004 elections look like a lovers’ walk in the park. If the result is a still more conservative Congress, we can expect to see the amendment go to the states in 2007, with prompt ratification a serious possibility.How will the GMA affect transgenders? This is a complicated question, and I can’t pretend to know the answer. It all depends on where you are. Please refer to my March 2004 column ("Old Granny Dotson’s Egregiously Unsound Advice for the Terminally-Confused Lovelorn" – my apologies for the titular flippancy). There I noted that in 2003, Maryland had nullified the marriage of a male-to-female post-op transsexual woman and her genetic-female wife on the grounds that it was a two-female same-sex marriage, prohibited under Maryland law. Not too long before that, a Texas court had ruled that a marriage between a male-to-female post-op transsexual woman and her genetic-male husband was invalid on the same general basis – a same-sex marriage involving two men. Interestingly, the Texas marriage would presumably have held up in Maryland and the Maryland marriage might have been acceptable in Texas. Although I have no statistics, it appears anecdotally that some post-op TGs stay married to their pre-op spouses. Depending on how GMA-related legislation is written, some of these marriages may become illegal. Post-op transsexual women may or may not be allowed to marry genetic males and post-op transsexual males may or may not be permitted to marry genetic females, depending on what gender category they are put into by the laws of the state in which they seek to marry. Anecdotally again, some post-op TS women prefer to engage in lesbian relations with genetic females and some post-op TS men prefer genetic males. The GMA may very well permit gay marriages in which one partner has had gender reassignment surgery, even if both partners wear wedding gowns (or tuxedos). Again, it all depends on how GMA-supporting legislation defines "male" and "female" – and that’s more complicated than I’ve indicated so far. Oh, to be young again – I’d go to law school and get rich! It’s possible, of course, that TGs will be untouched by the GMA and the legislation it spawns. Even if we believe that, and I certainly don’t, we still need to consider the impact on the country as a whole. How Will the Gay
Marriage Amendment Be Enforced? break to free up space for illegal would-be marital partners. The first question, of course, is "How do you know who’s a perpetrator?" In small towns, where everyone knows everyone and you can’t get away with anything, the law enforcement folks can easily nail anyone who attempts to seek unholy matrimony in an unconstitutional marriage. In our sin-ridden major metropolises, however, it’s going to take a determined effort to root out the perps. That nice young couple entering Gotham City Hall to obtain a marriage license – they look all right, but looks can deceive. Appearance is no longer enough. But they both have birth certificates – the groom’s says "Male" and the bride’s says "Female." That’s not good enough, either. Birth certificates can be incorrect. Even worse, they can be doctored. Am I going too far here? Presumably, gays are seeking legally sanctioned arrangements – marriages or civil unions – because of the rights and protections afforded to the partners. Therefore, they probably wouldn’t cross-dress for sham marriages – but they might if that were the only possibility open to them. Hence, the GMA will require enforcement processes. If we can’t judge by appearances and we can’t rely on documents, we’ll have to turn to science. Once the constitution limits marriage to a man and a woman (no other combinations need apply), the supporting legislation will have to define "man" and "woman." That will be fun. The most likely enforcement procedure will involve genetic testing to determine gender. The most likely definition: "Marriage is the union of a person with XY chromosomes (male) and a person with XX chromosomes (female)." How well will the tests work? What are the limits of XY and XX thinking? How many people will be hurt by DNA testing? We know that there are chromosomal possibilities other than XX and XY (for example, XXY and X). Will people with these non-standard chromosomes be denied the right to marry? There are other individuals with XX or XY chromosomes but with ambiguous genitalia, who were assigned a chromosomally incorrect gender at birth and were raised in that gender. Will a chromosomal male who looks like a female and who was raised as a female be denied the right to marry a male? Will all pre-GMMA marriages be grandfathered, or will couples who arouse suspicion among the marital-purity zealots be subjected to testing? What about the often-confusing legal precedents for recognizing gender changes? Will post-op TS women who are legally recognized as women in their home states now be granted such recognition by all states, or will their legal rights continue to depend on where they live? What other tests may be necessary? And what are "males" and "females" anyway? Who do you suppose is the most
female person in the world? It should be possible to find her, whoever she may be – not practical, but possible. First, we’d need to assemble a panel of experts: biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, endocrinologists, sexologists – every relevant variety of -ologist you can think of. We would then put them to work identifying and quantifying female traits, attributes, and characteristics. When they’d reached a consensus on what constitutes a female, we’d turn them loose on the human race to measure everyone and identify the most female person of them all. The feminine and masculine traits, attributes, and characteristics that our experts have considered could conceivably be laid out on some kind of multidimensional spectrum. A sample physical dimension: penis equals male, vagina equals female. A psychological dimension: aggressiveness suggests male, submissiveness suggests female. What about the dominating owner of a vagina or the passive bearer of a penis? What about the passive, sympathetic person with an artificial vagina? Things get complicated rather quickly. Our research team would have to conduct multidimensional measurements of appearance, chromosomes, gonads, mental attitudes, etc. Each dimension could be rated on a scale ranging from -100 (as male as one could imagine) to +100 (perfectly female). The scores could then be weighted and consolidated, and the person with the highest overall score would be acclaimed as the most female person in the world. She might even be an XX genetic female – or she might not. But even our scientifically determined most female person would very likely not have a perfect score. Who do you suppose is the most male person in the world? The person who comes out of our search with the lowest total score. Let’s hypothesize that our experts have identified the most female person and the most male person in the world. Well, perhaps they haven’t exactly identified them, because that would be an enormously expensive and rather pointless task. What they have done is agreed that these two people do exist and established a methodology by which they could be found. Everyone else is in between. Everyone else, no matter how seemingly masculine, has at least a touch of femininity – or, apparent femininity notwithstanding, at least a smidgen of maleness. Someday, one supposes, the courts will sort out the various points on the vast F-M spectrum. "A marriage consists of one (1) penis and one (1) vagina," could perhaps be their Solomonic conclusionWhat Will John
Ashcroft Do Next? He’ll probably spend the next four years getting tanned, rested, and ready to assume the position of first United States Gender Commissioner in the Jeb Bush administration. It will be a messy job, but someone will have to do it. Comments or criticisms? Please send them to hebedotson@tgforum.com. This article is a reprint from www.tgforum.com
As always, be happy, be safe, and think pretty. Brianna Austin
© 2004 - Brianna Austin - All Rights reserved |
ith George W. Bush and a Republican
Congress returned to power, and with a more Republican Supreme Court
lurking in the near future, we can all look forward to the next national
circus – a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as the legal
union of one (1) man and one (1) woman. There seems no doubt that this
amendment, if passed by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and
subsequently ratified by three-quarters (38) of the states, will mean
guaranteed employment for thousands of lawyers, lab technicians, and
bureaucrats for decades to come.