What we talk about when we talk about transgender identity.

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A few days late to this one, but author Jennifer Finney Boylan had a great essay in Monday's New York Times about how complex the gay marriage issue becomes one when of the partners is transgender. Because different states have different regulations as to who "counts" as male or female—i.e., whether the determination relies on the gender you were assigned at birth or the gender you self-identify with, and whether or not surgery affects that determination—the landscape can get very muddled very quickly. Boylan quotes a lawyer from a 1999 case concerning a transgendered woman, Christie Lee Littleton, whose biologically male husband had passed away. See if you can manage to follow along:

... 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.

Confusing, right? Even Boylan—an incredibly lucid, intelligent writer—sometimes has a tough time pinning down these complex concepts into simple language. Originally I'd wanted to pull out this paragraph for my blog post, but then for the life of me couldn't understand the last sentence:

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.

What does "anatomically female" mean here? Someone who was born female, or someone who was born male and has had sex reassignment surgery? After consulting with a friend who works at an LGBT organization on precisely these kinds of language issues, he confirmed that Boylan probably meant the latter. The fixation on surgery and genitalia as some kind of marker for what "makes" a man or a woman is inherently problematic, but it's not likely to go away any time soon—the concept is too culturally hard-wired for most of us to abandon completely. Until then, let's just hope we have more people like Boylan, helping us parse things out, one step at a time.

Tags: same-sex marriage, transgender

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Nina Shen Rastogi California native, theater and comics fan, Slate "Green Lantern" columnist

Comments

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By: Caerolle | Thu, 05/14/2009 - 19:40

Nina said:
Caerolle--duly noted. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single Double X contributor--straight or otherwise--who thinks her chromosomes are what make her a woman.
Then why call it Doubl--um, nvm...
it never really bothered me much when it was 'The XX Factor' 'cause i thought of that a more like 'x as unknown' or 'x as interesting,' but i hate the way the new title seems to me to mark off the territro...
oh, and not it matters, but:
It seemed pretty clear to me when i read the original NYT that anatomically female meant 'having the external sex organs of a woman'
and
to me personally, if someone representing as a female and considering themselves female, esp if they have transitioned completely (gender-reassignment surgery) marries another woman (let's say she is a genetic 'female' having at least two X chromosomes, just to simply things), then they are gay (we'll keep it binary here too, and leave out bisexual ppl) and it is a same-sex marriage--of course, if we add in that both are MTF, or intersexed, or all the other combinations, then you can see where that goes...
i wish that the article had been written to make the point that maybe all this shows how silly and useless the 'man marries woman' and such rigid constructs become, rather than whether or not this or that is a 'gay' marriage...i feel this was more the point of the original article than to say, "Well, lots of places have same-sex marriage already and it is silly how different things are across various government entities"
i know of course lots of ppl disagree, but i feel that genetic sex, identified gender, none of that should matter, and ppl should just be allowed to marry who they pls...
and, finally, OMFFG, it SUCKS to not have formatting for comments unless you want to become a computer geek!!!!!

@Talfer_001, @Caerolle

By: Nina Rastogi | Thu, 05/14/2009 - 18:18

Talfer--I wholeheartedly agree that the ideal situation would be a general expansion of marriage rights to all couples. (Or a wholesale abolishment of the term "marriage" when it came to state-sanctioned unions ... but I flip-flop on that issue.)

Although when you think about it, can you really, entirely separate the two concepts? After all, a marriage involving a trans person is always going to be seen as "a gay marriage" by some people, right? If a trans-male marries a biological female, then those who ascribe to an essentialist/biological notion of gender will see it as a gay marriage ... but those who see gender as something that is NOT biologically determined will see it as a hetero union. (Or, well, maybe a "queer" union, but you get my point.) Take a trans-woman who marries a biological woman, though, and those two groups flip-flop their readings.

Caerolle--duly noted. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single Double X contributor--straight or otherwise--who thinks her chromosomes are what make her a woman.

women other than those with 2 'X' chromosomes

By: Caerolle | Thu, 05/14/2009 - 15:39

The appearance of this article on a site that calls itself 'Double X' to mean 'women' is pretty ironic, especially the last paragraph!

The site name seems to pretty clearly indicate who you feel to be legitimate women.

I think part of our culture's

By: HiggsSearcher | Thu, 05/14/2009 - 13:11

I think part of our culture's difficulty with these sorts of issues our obsession with matching gender and sex. Technically, sex is a simply biological. Many cultures recognize many more genders than sexes, most commonly a "third gender", which can be neutral, or transgender. The Bugis of Indonesia even have five genders, including a feminine male, masculine female, and neuter.
I don't claim there wouldn't be transgender people with more genders in our society, but I think we would do well to realize acknowledge that gender is much more nuanced and complex than we assume.

Clarity of concepts

By: Talfer_001 | Thu, 05/14/2009 - 07:47

I'm not entirely easy with the assumption that marriage statutes for transsexuals should be equated with "gay marriage" (para. 1), although they are clearly related.

Marriage statutes tend to be based on relatively elemental and essentialist views of biological sex, not gender, not sexual orientation (and even sex is not, of course, binary XX / XY).

Hence the challenge identified in Finney Bolan's NYT column.

But can this be collapsed into "gay marriage", or is yet another challenge to so-called traditional marriage (which in itself is an erroneous category from an historical and global perspective)?

I think not -- it would be better placed as the extension and rationalisation of marriage rights and protection for all persons.

“Is My Marriage Gay?”