Let’s say Jane wants to become Jim. Jane’s married to Adam and would like to remain married post-op. Adam is looking forward to a lot of gay sex, the naughty boy. 
Is this legally possible assuming the state does not recognize same-sex marriage but hasn’t passed anything explicitly defining marriage as being between one man and one woman?
You’ve also got to take into account whether the state in question records the person as now being a man or still being a woman.
Well, yes. That’s part of the question.
Another one, which may be probative: Would Jane-turned-Jim have to register for the draft, assuming age isn’t a factor?
Don’t we (or didn’t we) have a poster who was M --> F and still married to her wife? I think there was some mention that in TX, she was still legally male.
I don’t remember the name. I think she’s a schoolteacher and Asian (the kids were asking if she knows karate.)
Ruken: I don’t remember her handle but I remember she was banned. I don’t know if she was lying but I’d like a little more substance in this thread, if possible.
Yeah, I’ve heard of one or two couples secondhand who did this. They were both MtF, and I think one of them was in Maryland.
Err, and I didn’t hear of any legal ramifications for them.
That story was determined to be a fabrication.
I can answer this definitively: No. Jim would send the Selective Service a letter explaining his situation. Selective Service would then send Jim a letter in reply stating “based on the information you have given us, you were/are not required to register.”
It depends on the jurisdiction, and a surprising number of jurisdictions have already been presented with this fact pattern. The New York Times had an article on the topic a while back. States differ as to whether sex reassignment terminates a marriage as well as what sex is marriageable following a single person’s sex change.
Ah. This is a little difficult to understand, especially given that I’m certain Jim could volunteer for combat duty and be assigned to such duty.
I guess it does go to show that Jim isn’t really a full-fledged male in the eyes of the law in this country, though.
You snuck in with the best reply so far. Thank you.
Oh well. I guess I missed the excitement.
Just from looking at the wikipedia article, it looks like if your state doesn’t recognize sex change, you’re still a female and I’m assuming you can marry a male. They have some examples of people marrying as their post-tran sex. I didn’t see anything about marrying as one’s pre-tran sex.
I didn’t follow any of the cites through to see if they’re legit.
I don’t know the rationale for Selective Service’s attitude toward transsexuals. Perhaps the military simply doesn’t want to deal with people who require maintenance medication (such as hormones) or perhaps it’s an extension of the institutional distaste for gay people.*
A “status letter” may be useful or necessary when applying for certain kinds of scholarships or financial support, because registering for the draft (if male) is a requirement for eligibility. The letter doesn’t give details as to why one wasn’t required to register - it just says that this person didn’t need to register.
*Please don’t jump on me. You and I both know that “transsexual” and “homosexual” aren’t even close to being the same thing. However, people who are offended or squicked out by one tend to be made uneasy by the other. It’s all about the genitals, don’t ya know. :rolleyes:
Far from being offended, I suspect you’re quite right. The military doesn’t handle “individual differences” well when they stray too far from “normal” (said “normal” being more-or-less arbitrarily defined by the services).
This webpage:
http://www.hrc.org/issues/1544.htm
suggests that a transgendered person is between a rock and a hard place if s/he wants to join the services:
Of course, if someone is not qualified to enlist in the service, they would not be qualified to be inducted into the military were conscription ever re-instated.
I’m mildly surprised that the status letter from Selective Service doesn’t have some sort of bland explanation, like “Subject need not register because he is medically disqualified from military service.” Maybe they’re trying to exercise discretion, though that’d be the first time I’ve ever known the government to be discreet.
Cheers,
bcg
There is a certain amount of mixing: “The LGBT Community” is a reasonably common entity in these discussions and it explicitly mixes homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals.
The genitals and the generals don’t always mix.
This is quite a worthwhile question.
As you might expect, prior to the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2004, Quebec required a person to be unmarried in order to obtain legal change of gender. It has subsequently quietly revised the rules so that being unmarried is no longer required.
In other news, a court in Austria ruled that a trans woman who was married prior to transition would not be required to divorce her wife in order to have her gender legally changed, resulting in Austria’s first same-sex marriage. I believe such a question has also subsequently arisen in Germany.
I previously raised the problems that can arise with failure to recognize gender change and same-sex marriage. Suppose Alice is a transsexual woman who has her gender legally recognized in Illinois. She then marries Bob. For reasons best known to herself, she then lights out to Texas, which does not recognize legal change of gender, and being legally considered male, she marries Judy. Now, she has gone through a form of marriage with two different people, however the state in which each took place does not recognize the other (considering it to be a same-sex marriage). Is she guilty of bigamy or not?
You realize that you’ve just explained (by example) why some lawyers are paid a prince’s (if not a king’s) ransom.
Cheers,
bcg
A few years ago I heard a presentation in Ohio from woman who had gone through the male to female change, and had been married at the time. She said that since Ohio did not recognise her sex change and regarded her as still a man, the marriage remained legal, even though Ohio did not recognise same-sex marriage.