Question about Trans Rights

The law is very unclear with transgender people, and often goes both ways at the same time, like in your example the transman would not be able to marry a man because he is legally a male, but wouldn't be able to marry a woman because he was born a woman/still has female genitalila.
Really, there are no overarching laws concerning transgender, it seems that it can be molded to prohibit any trans marriage situation.
Sometimes, if you learn about the law in a particular state, or if you are lucky, you can get away with it, but basically, marriage in general is illegal for trans people.
At least, that is what I have found out/heard about it. I might be wrong.

 

In many states, harming trans* people because they are trans* is not a hate crime.
In many states, it's damn near impossible to get the medical care you need without discrimination and sometimes abuse, if you are trans*.
In many states, trans* people have to jump through flaming legal hoops to get their IDs, birth certificates, passports, etc changed. and often it cannot be done without a note from an endocrinologist which some trans* people have no access to and some have no other reason to see.
In many states, you can be denied housing or a job simply because you are trans* and it's LEGAL for owners/employers to do so.
I could go on and on and on.
Trans* women get it the worst. Especially trans* women of color. They are even raped and beaten and murdered and it never even makes the news.

And no one talks about it.

So that's why I get so mad that the main concern (or so it often seems) of the LGB community (which claims to care about the T) is marriage.

 

OH! Good question!

It just is symbolizing that there are a lot of identities under the transgender umbrella. Transgender, transsexual and a ton of other gender identities. That's just shorthand to say I'm talking about all of them.

 

That appears to come from the *NIX world, where "*" is a wildcard matching anything, any length. You can precede the * or append after it things that must match. For example, looking for a file with the string "fil*.txt" would match "file.txt", "fillings.txt", "fil1927.txt", but not "thefile.txt", "file.pdf", (and in a true *NIX system "File.txt")

 

Most states go by what is on your birth certificate. You could change your name and every form of ID you own; but only your birth certificates little M or F marker matters for marriage. So we are forced to legally be our physical "birth" gender until completing sexual reassessment/correction surgery. After becoming post-op we're "allowed" to be seen as our correct gender by the government.

Many marriages have been annulled due to someone becoming post-op and changing their gender marker. But there are known cases where someone was a trans man who was considered "legally a woman", married another man, and then changed their gender marker without anything being done. It mostly depends on your state and how anal they are about pre/post op changes. So unless you can get your state to cough up its ruling on the issue (good luck there) you're playing a marriage version of Russian Roulette. :dry:

Funny story, I was just discriminated against yesterday at a doctors office for being trans. I went into a walk-in clinic and slipped a note to the receptionist stating that I was trans and to ignore what my photo ID said. She still called out my boy name several times, which I ignored with disgust. Another employee said something to her after she noticed me not responding, so she then called out my correct name and apologized. The doctor treated me fine; but when she left the room to get my doctors note I heard her yell "I need a note for [boy name]...oh, I mean Vanessa saying he can't go into work tomorrow.". I walk out of the office with about 10 people staring at me. So much for that hour I spent on make-up covering up my birth defect...

 

The questions here have a lot of different answers because every country has different laws. I'll be answering from a UK perspective. They're important questions; glad you're asking them, because it gives me a chance to learn too.

The Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004, and means that transsexuals can legally change their gender (and acquire a new birth certificate) after living as their target gender for two years, whether they've had sex reassignment surgery or not. This is however unusual; most places that allow legal gender changes require a sex change first.

In the UK, he could marry a woman, but not a man (yet; that'll change when the gay marriage bill thingy goes through). However, this is not full equality, because religious figures may deny marriage to him because he is transgeder although they cannot deny marriage to any heterosexual and doubley-cisgender couple.

It'd be a straight relationship, but legally a gay marriage if he hadn't officially changed his gender (so it would really be a gay civil partnership because we don't have gay marriage yet). However, because pre-ops here can officially change their gender, he could do so and have a straight marriage. I don't know anything about the laws in other places.

Yes. "A [heterosexual] married couple that includes a transgendered partner cannot simply re-register their new status [when one transitions making it a gay relationship]. They must first have their marriage dissolved, gain legal recognition of the new gender and then register for a civil partnership. This is like any divorce with the associated paperwork and costs." Hopefully, that'll change at some point, though.

 

Actually, many post-op transsexuals cannot get their gender changed on their birth certificate like they can on othe forms of ID. In many places, they will just remove the gender on the the birth certificate, meaning they have NO gender instead of the being recognised as TRUE(or birth) gender.