In 1999, Texas declared couples can only get married if one partner is male and one is female. In 2004 the state banned gay marriage. And then in 2009 the state insisted a post-operative transsexual’s newly assigned gender overrides the gender stated on their birth certificate. So how’d the state handle a male-to-female transgender woman who wanted to marry her longtime girlfriend? They let them wed, but no one’s sure if they should have.
Virgil Eugene Hill Jr. was born with both male and female organs, yet the birth certificate listed Hill as a male. Hill, after discovering she had ovaries, had a sex-change operation and legally became Sabrina Jeanne Hill in 1991. Then in 1993, Hill met her current girlfriend Therese Bur and the two have lived together ever since. In February, Hill decided to marry Bur so that Bur would receive Hill’s spousal military benefits. El Paso denied the union and County Attorney Jo Anne Bernal wrote State Attorney General Greg Abbott to ask WTF she was supposed to do—pay attention to the birth certificate or to the driver’s license.
Instead of waiting for an answer, Bur and Hill hightailed it to San Antonio and got hitched there. Bexar County Clerk Gerard C. “Gerry” Rickhoff granted the marriage license based on Hill’s birth certificate. He said, “As I recall, he (the judge) said you are what you are at your birth. I don’t care what they appear to me or what manner of dress. We are familiar with them, and they are well received when they come to our office.”
A video interview with the couple says that they’re not looking to change same-sex marriage laws in Texas, but the case will definitely force the state to have to re-examine its contradictory and outdated transgender laws.
[image via]
Tina
Not exactly good news for trans people – this is fairly routine. Getting both people on the marriage license as female WOULD be good news.
Donald
How are Texas’ transgender laws “contradictory and outdated” if they’re declaring that the newly-assigned post-op gender is the one recognized, overriding the gender declared at birth? Seems like that would be surprisingly progressive for Texas, as opposed to *not* recognizing the post-op gender.
What it sounds like actually happened was an individual County Attorney (El Paso) wasn’t aware of or wasn’t listening to state law…but that doesn’t mean that the state laws themselves are “contradictory and outdated”.
Missanthrope
@ Donald
This story is confusing as Queerty wrote it as they left out some important facts. The law is contradictory in some parts of Texas because of infamous Texas appellate court ruling in the Littleton case as outlined here:
“Rickhoff said Bexar County’s decision is based on the Littleton vs. Prange court case out of San Antonio in 1999.
In that case, Christie Lee Littleton (born Lee Cavazos before a sex change) was married for seven years until the death of her husband, Jonathan Mark Littleton. Christie Lee Littleton filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against a doctor. A judge ruled against the lawsuit, deciding that Littleton, based on the original birth certificate, was a male and therefore could not be the spouse of another man….”
The fallout from Littleton is that the judge ruled the chromosomes decide sex, not genital arrangement. So even if you get SRS, the state cannot consider you legally female on a birth certificate. But since Littleton has not been heard by higher court (the Texas Supreme Court) it is the law of the land in most of Texas.
The contradictory part:
The state is issuing changed gender markers on driver’s licenses with proof of surgery (doctor’s letter) while because of the Littleon it cannot change birth certificates under any circumstance. So Hill is female on her drivers license and male on her birth certificate. Unfortunately this is the situation in most states, there are many trans people out there who are forced to have mixed-up identification papers because of contradictory laws like the situation in Texas.
And Hill being intersex completely upsets the judges ruling in Littetion since she probably has an xxy or mosaic chromosome, which means if she challenges this in the court she can argue that chromosones are an inherently unreliable and unscientific way of determining sex because there are people with multiple types of intersex chromosomes who might not even know they are intersex because they haven’t had a karyotype test.
Therefore, if the courts are going be serious about saying that chromosones determine sex; and that only a man and woman can get married, then they would have to introduce chromosone testing to see if you have the right chromosones to get married. That’s an example of how arbitrary and ridiculous the manner that states usually legally determine sex or gender status are.
Frankly, I’d like a system like California has were gender can be changed with a psychiatrist’s letter and not a doctor’s letter so pre-op or non-op people can get their identification in order without surgery since the surgery requirement is very arbitrary as we can see in Hill’s case*
*Most people who are intersex are chromosonally intersex, and are not the classic idea of “hermaphrodites” in popular culture. BTW, hermaphrodite is usually considered a pejorative term by most intersex people as I understand it.
**ie. did her ovaries make Hill female in the first place if your using physical attributes? But if you do that, then what about her male parts? It’s a conundrum by the usual standards we think of a correct.
Missanthrope
Amendment to my last post.
I’ve done a little research and Queerty was right in saying that the Texas Legislature changed the law, my apologies to Queerty.
Since the Appellate Court in Littleton was ruling on family law, that family law can be amended by the legislature and has been changed, so the Littleton ruling is now invalid.* So now Hill can get her birth ceritificate changed before
The issue here is that Hill probably didn’t know about the new law and never got her Birth Certificate appealed despite having had SRS. So she showed a drivers license that said female and a BC that said male and the clerk used the Littleton ruling as a guide for what to do in spite of the new law (which he probably didn’t know about either).
Sadly, in the end the marriage will probably be annulled under the Texas state DOMA once everything is sorted out.
tl;dr version: Donald was right and I was wrong with that confusing monster post. My apologies, there is no contradictory law here.
* Source: (http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/FA/htm/FA.2.htm#2.005.
Donald
@ Missanthrope
No worries on apologies – both of your comments were interesting and insightful reads. The chromosome aspect hadn’t come to mind. Your two comments combined were a lot more informative than the article and provided a great background to “how we got here today, legally, in this case”.
Heck – it was a better job than the original article! I doubt the Queerty author did much work toward crafting a full and informed article – it seems like that last line of theirs was slapped in just to make a snappy dig at Texas.
Hyhybt
I don’t think *birth* certificates should be amended for any reason other than an error made in drawing it up in the first place. Not for adoption, not for sex change, not for any reason at all. A birth certificate ought to be accurate according to how things were when the birth occurred; when changes in sex or parentage or whatever occur, they ought to be done either separately, or as an addendum.
marla
At Hyhybt:
A trans woman is not born male and then becomes female. A trans woman is born female, assigned a male gender based on doctors assumptions about her body and later has to jump through hoops to try to get all of her documents corrected. So, if a females birth certificate reads male, then there “was an error made in drawing it up in the first place”
A surgery is not what makes a trans woman a woman. She is born female. We cis folk (cis gendered= not trans gendered) have got to change the way we view our trans comrades. The whole idea that a person can not be respected as their correct gender until they have spent several thousand dollars getting really intense surgery is totally transphobic and classiest.
Pitou
@marla: I think I have to agree with you. I’m Gay and not the “norm”, but I don’t have to have any intense surgery that will officially classify me as “Gay”….like maybe the installation of a big shiny tiara..? lol.
But for real though, I agree that T-folk shouldn’t HAVE to have gender reassignment surgery in order to make his/her documents reflect what they are, and their documents should reflect who they are.
Devil’s advocate here too though….what would prevent a person from scamming the T-process system? IE: Male pretends to lose documentation, whatever, follows steps to get opposite gender identity (whatever that process officially is), and is now a total creeper running around using dual identity? If the man had his male information and didn’t turn in say a license in order to get a new one as female…what will stop him from using both ID’s? Just a thought.