Sunday, May 16, 2010

It Is A Mixed Up, Muddled Up, Shook Up World - Kinks' Lola

When man tries to put things into nice orderly boxes, nature rebels, case in point, gender. Most humans like to think that in nature there is only male and female, but in reality, there in an infinite number of combinations of male and female. The Intersex Society of North American list sixteen different categories and when we as a society tries to label people to fit into only male and female, it will disenfranchise intersex people. With the conservatives pushing to have marriage defined as only between a man and a woman. They then are defining a man as a person with XY chromosomes and a woman as a person with XX chromosomes, intersex people will never be able to marry anyone.

In Texas, the Texas Tribune wrote,
Anatomy of a Controversy
by Brandi Grissom
May 14, 2010

The two women are hardly the typical Texas married couple, yet their union has been blessed by the courts. That's because Hill is a transgender female: She was born with both male and female genitalia, and her father ordered surgery to make her a male. Three decades later, she would surgically reverse his decision. Today, Hill's driver’s license and a judge’s order say she’s a woman — but her birth certificate and now her marriage license say she’s a man. The county clerk in San Antonio gave Hill and Bur a license to wed, putting the couple at the center of a decade-long fight over whether unions like theirs are legal in a state that has overwhelmingly opposed same-sex marriage in polls and at the ballot box.

In a complex and ironic twist of Texas politics, a 1999 conservative court ruling actually sanctions unions like Hill and Bur’s — though they are, by their own definition, a gay married couple. That's because the ruling, which sought to establish gender as unchangeable, established a person's birth certificate as the legal document that defines his or her gender, regardless of later sex-change operations. And so it had the odd side effect of allowing transgender homosexuals to legally marry. It’s a conundrum that dismays social conservatives, confounds some county clerks and has advocates for gay and transgender rights calling for clarification. In perhaps their sole point of consensus on social issues, some conservatives and gay and transgender advocates agree, for different reasons, that people like Hill shouldn’t be allowed to identify as one gender in daily life but another when getting married.

“It’s all screwy, and the reason why it’s screwy is because people are worried about same-sex marriage,” says Houston lawyer Phyllis Randolph Frye, a transgender woman who represented the plaintiffs in the 1999 case.

State Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, the author of the 2005 constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage in Texas, believes, as many Texans do, that sinful men and woman choose homosexuality and God chooses gender. So the case of Hill and Bur presents something of a Hobson’s choice. Prohibiting both gay marriage and legal recognition of sex changes means accepting something potentially even less acceptable: the gay marriage of transsexuals.
It is time that we stop labeling a person gender for them and instead to allow them to define their own gender and to be able to marry the person that they love.

1 comment:

  1. I hadn't heard about this; it's a really fascinating political story. I wonder how much time will pass before conservatives in Texas come up with some convuluted solution that makes things worse for transsexuals.

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