Some theories about humor use the notion that we laugh when incongruous connections occur, as maybe, when the judge enters the courtroom dressed as a clown. Our laughter may be a result of surprise. But what is a surprise to us may be well-known and painful to others.
My friend in a nuclear family of two women and two young children has described the burden of needing to inform a lawyer of any visit to the hospital so that legal advice, counseling and persuasion of others are available. Without it, one parent may be barred from visiting the other’s hospital room on the grounds that she isn’t a member of the family.
There is also the burden of worrying about inheritance. Again, what would be normal, typical, expected, and right between a deceased male and his surviving female marriage partner is legally questionable in other relationships. It happens that we are familiar with a case where one of the two partners in a marriage underwent a medical, physical and psychological change of gender. My attention has been directed to this Op Ed piece in the New York Times
For me, the most arresting paragraphs in the Times article are these:
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.”
I had no idea that the law in some places was behind the times or had gotten mixed up or something on the new subject of a human being who was one gender and then was the other. I am not surprised that some states don’t yet recognize a change in gender but I can see that gender change and marital status are both undergoing modification and that the two matters interact.
Remembering the all-consuming fury of my need to be with my chosen partner, I would not have felt it was funny to find society and its law trying to stand between us.
