I applied for a marriage license in Seminole County, Florida a few months ago. All I had to show was proof of identity (my driver’s license) and sign some stuff in front of a notary.
because your post attempted to prove, with the help of an incorrect assumption, how there’s no logical reason to ask for gender surgery disclosure on any kind of marriage license - I took your post to apply in the abstract, which is the driving focus of the OP, especially since you wrote “As for the OP”
AFAIK in jurisdictions that reissue birth certificates for transexuals there’s nothing different about them that would indicate a sex (or even a name) change and the releated court records are sealed.
IMHO, a *better * way to make sure these kind of situations don’t happen is equal marriage laws, where the genders, assigned or acquired, of the spouses are irrelevant. But hey, it’s Texas, little hope of that happening anytime soon.
Anyway, in all similar cases that I’ve heard of, the marriage has been “challenged” by either vulturous relatives or exes trying to prevent their partners gaining custody of kids. Doesn’t really leave me very sympathetic to them.
Well, as previously hinted, it seems to me that all you (rhetorical) gain by being entitled to conceal your birth gender from your intended partner is that it enables you to marry the bigot of your choice. If you’re trans and looking for a partner who isn’t bigoted, full disclosure would be the way to go; and that looks to me like a better way to make sure these kind of situations don’t happen.
Uh, no, it didn’t. What I did say was that I did not see how it was in the interest of the state to require people to make such a disclosure. Your only semi-coherent response has been basically “Well, people don’t like being lied to by their intended spouse”, but this is not normally the sort of thing the state gets involved with.
If we did decide the state had a duty to protect people from marrying unwisely then there are plenty of issues more common than secret transsexualism. But asking the state to get involved in people’s personal business in that way is such a terrible idea that I have difficulty even taking it seriously.
Caveat emptor
You can’t legislate honesty and integrity. Why is this type of dishonesty warrant legislation where other’s are not. What about financial disclosures? You might marry someone that is loaded down with tons of debt.
People need to do their own due diligence regarding the people they want to marry. You should not rely on the state to protect you.
I think it could certainly be argued that a person has an ethical obligation to disclose such a history, but you could argue that about all kinds of personal history that the state has no interest in.
In this particular case, the state did have an interest, since such a disclosure would probably have prevented an (unfairly) illegal marriage from occurring.
Setting aside the unlikelihood that someone who was willing to enter into an illegal marriage would admit to the state that this was what she was trying to do, why should the state have TWO laws to prevent transsexuals from marrying?
One law prevents transsexuals from marrying members of their original gender as a consequence of the fact that it prevents same-sex marriage.
The other, hypothetical law ostensibly prevents transsexuals from deceiving people into marrying them.
Not at all the same thing (not that I agree with the first law, or would agree with the second assuming the first didn’t exist).
I fail to see the need for yet another law here. Why is the case of transsexuals special? As other posters have pointed out, there are all kinds of things I can legally lie about to a potential spouse. Why make a law specifically for the transgendered?
Again, because in Texas a postop transgendered person is still legally their original gender.
Then no new law is needed (unless I missed it and same sex marriage was legalized in the Lone Star State). If a postop is still considered the gender on their original birth certificate, then the law already prevents them from marrying.
They’re not the same law, but in a state where the first law is on the books and a transsexual person cannot legally change their sex then the second law is redundant. It’s just saying one isn’t allowed to do something one is not legally permitted to do anyway. The only thing I can see that the second law actually does that wouldn’t be covered by the first law is that it would allow additional legal charges to be brought against transsexuals – and transsexuals alone – if they attempted to enter into an invalid marriage.
I can see why some people might think this is a good idea (not putting you in that category RNATB), but the OP was suggesting such a law to protect transsexuals. In a state where the transsexual person couldn’t legally marry a person of their same birth sex anyway, such a law makes them more rather than less legally vulnerable.
Now, I don’t think the OP had that kind of situation in mind. I believe he was thinking of places where the marriage would be legal, and was suggesting documentation of disclosure to protect transsexuals from being accused of marrying under false pretexts or from marrying people who didn’t truly accept them. This is not the sort of thing the state usually concerns itself with, though. I doubt many transsexuals are eager to tell the city clerk all about their gender reassignment surgery either. While I think it’s a bad idea for transsexual people to marry without first informing their spouses that they are in fact transsexual, it’s an even worse idea to make it the government’s duty to prevent people from making bad romantic decisions.
Right. As far as I can tell from looking at the marriage laws in my state (not Texas), people aren’t legally required to tell their potential spouses a damn thing prior to marriage. Bigamy is a crime and invalidates the later marriage, but failing to tell your fiance/e that you’re already married apparently isn’t in and of itself illegal. There are several things that, if a spouse learns about them only after the marriage, are grounds for annulment – a past felony conviction is one example – but there’s no requirement that these facts be disclosed before a marriage can occur.
No.
Morally, ethically, yes, you should disclose your former gender status if you ever manage to get to the marriage stage without it ever, er, coming out - which doesn’t seem likely; you’d meet each other’s family, talk about childhood, share all sorts of secrets.
Intentional concealment of gender reassignment surgery should definitely be a factor in divorce proceedings, or possibly annulment if the religion of one spouse required annulment rather than divorce.
[quote=“Ferret_Herder, post:36, topic:547973”]
In some countries in the Middle East, same-sex people are not allowed to marry, but transgendered people are accepted as the sex they identify with (after some surgery or legal recognition; I’m not sure; I really am hunting on Google but I can never find old cites these days).
[quote=“Malacandra, post:45, topic:547973”]
Me neither; all the same, it could go the other way, and that the husband’s sons are being cheated by a late marriage achieved by false means; mendacious arseholes exist in every gender, quite literally.
Are transgendered people who are still legally (in that state) their birth gender prevented from marrying at all? If the trans woman in the OP had fallen in love with a CIS (female on birth certificate, basically) woman, would she have been barred from marrying her too?
Well, in the case under discussion the victim is currently grieving for the death of her husband while being screwed over by a bunch of harpies…
However, in Magical Obliviousland where people can transition genders while married and successfully hide it from their significant others, sure why not. If you’re that unaware, I don’t think I’m that sympathetic.
Damn those wily transexuals and their bids to capture unaware straights. Why will no one help them?
Sure, disclosing to a prospective partner is (IMHO) the best idea. But should you have to disclose to their entire family as well, just in case a bigot lurks among them? Or how about just someone who wants a bigger slice of an inheritance?
A good idea to protect against this and similar issues might be a sealed document, maybe attached to a will, attesting that both spouses were aware of each other’s medical and legal histories, but even something like that is imperfect protection against busybodies with agendas–and it seems an awful lot of added hassle just to ensure people don’t try to dissolve your marriage without your consent.
Such a document would be worthless in this case. Texas state law ignores SRS. Regardless of who was aware of what, the marriage was invalid in Texas.
Which is why equal marriage is the only real solution, though at least with such a document the family couldn’t try to make a legal issue of whether or not the husband “knew”.