- Sabrina Hill and Therese Bur
Yesterday we reported that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has been asked for an opinion about whether a transgender woman can marry another woman. As it turns out, the couple has already married — on Monday in San Antonio. The El Paso Times reports:
Sabrina J. Hill and her longtime girlfriend, Therese “Tee” Bur, were legally married Monday in San Antonio after being unable to get a marriage license in El Paso.
“It’s a weight lifted,” Hill said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “Now the federal government and state government recognize our love.”
The story explains that Hill was born with both male and female organs. She was raised as a male and served in the Army, but when she was 28 a medical exam determined that she had ovaries. Hill underwent a sex-change operation in 1991, and she’s been with Bur for 17 years. They applied for a marriage license in February in El Paso, and the county attorney there requested an opinion from Abbott about whether it could be granted. So instead the couple traveled to San Antonio, where the clerk said he grants same-sex marriage licenses once or twice a year. The San Antonio clerk is relying on a Texas appeals court ruling in Littleton v. Prange, which states that one’s sex is determined by one’s birth certificate.
Hill and Bur never intended to make a social statement or seek publicity but are now receiving interview requests from as far away as England.
“It did strike me. We have been living so covertly, being careful not to express public displays of affection, and then we were standing in front of a judge saying, ‘You may now kiss your bride,'” Bur said. “A public display of affection — it is so validating.”
Watch a report from KSAT in San Antonio by going here.
The court’s ruling in Littleton v. Prange is a little more convoluted than saying that one’s “sex is determined by one’s birth certificate”.
In it’s finding the court relied heavily on English case law, specifically Colbert v. Colbert, determining that chromosomal sex is the defining characteristic for legal purposes. The court presumed (erroneously) that a birth certificate would reflect chromosomal sex. The court did not conduct any chromosomal testing as part of it’s finding.
This is particularly interesting in light of medical conditions in which an individual may have sex chromosomes that differ from their body presentation at birth, such as klinefelter’s syndrome where a person is typically born male bodied but is chromosomally XXY (or sometimes XXXY or XXXXY), and androgen insensitivity syndrome where a person is born female bodied but is chromosomally XY.
Texas law, and Texas lawmakers, pretend that gender is a simply binary system. Nature is never that tidy. The more that AG Abbot tries to impose a simplistic male/female paradigm on reality the more he’s going to be faced with the impossibility of the task.
(You can read the court’s finding in Littleton at https://www.pfc.org.uk/node/370)
great news
It’s worth noting that Ms. Littleton actually had her birth certificate amended to state that she is female, but the Texas Court insisted that the sex originally listed on the birth certificate is controlling absent evidence that it was inaccurate at the time it was recorded, such as a chromosome test.
However, even Chromosome tests are just indicative, and not decisive, as the gene that codes for male instead of female does not only ever and always exist on a Y chromosome. It is possible for an XY person to be female without being androgen insensitive, and it is possible for an XX person to be male. That’s just an example of how complicated and popularly misunderstood physical sexuality can be. I’ve little doubt that the Littleton Court would view the genetic coding, whatever it may be, as the controlling WORD OF GOD FROM ON HIGH setting one’s sex in stone.
I recall a previous news item about a post operative transwoman marrying a female in Texas. It was several years ago, and occurred after the Littleton case. In that instance, I think I recall that the transwoman actually sued for the right to marry her female spouse and won, based on the precedent of the Littleton case. It think it was a Declaratory Judgement.
And I think I should make clear that the Court applied the Texas Health and Safety code in interpreting the sex recorded at time of birth as the controlling sex becasue Ms Littleton’s birth certificate is a Texas Birth Certificate.
I’m not sure if the case is controlling precedent regarding the sex of someone born in another state who change that birth certificate and then moved to Texas and married there. In that circumstance, the argument could be made that the Littleton Case can be distinguished on its facts.
So here is an article about that previous marriage of a lesbian couple in Texas. It was in 2000.
https://www.seattlepi.com/national/marr07.shtml
A couple of other statements I’ve gleened from other articles are:
that Wick was apparently born sexually ambiguous and had sexual specification surgery at birth, so she was raised as a male even though it was later discovered that she has ovaries; and
that the Texas Legislature changed the law in 2009 to let people provide a certified birth certificate to obtain a marriage license, which might be viewed as a legislative response to Little v Prang to basically nullify that decision and allow people to get marrriage licenses if they can just produce a certified, not an origanal, birth certificate showing the proper gender.
In this case, Ms. Wick apparently has an original New York birth certificate that identifies her as male, but she has another certified birth certificate from the State of Washington stating that she is female.
This could get really interesting.
Int he previous comment, I meant Ms Hill, not Ms Wick. Sorry.
I find it the height of arrogance of those who ‘know’ that humans are simply either mail or female and that the 23d pair of chromosomes is the infallible touchstone for which gender box you’re in. And often I hear from these folks that God made it that way.
How arrogant to think that God is that simple and simplistic and oh-so-very easy to comprehend. That we are able to use our brains to devise ways to see the formerly unseen is God’s true miracle, and the farther we try to look, the more wonders we find.
And then there are the folks that say ‘boy or girl only, and a quick look at the crotch at birth will identify/confirm/classify with 100% accuracy.
How arrogant of them
OMG OMG OMG
I was just reading the letter to Texas AG Abbott from the El Paso County Attorney requesting him to rule on this issue, and she indicated that Littleton was rejected by the Legislature in 2009 when they added not only a certified birth certificate as acceptable ID, but a court ordered gender change. If that is not a clear rejection of that case law, I don’t know what is.
What’s really interesting is that Ms. Hill submitted BOTH forms of identification. She gave them a birth certificate saying she is male, and court ordered name and gender change saying she is female.
What’s a poor uber right wing Texas AG to do?
For those of you claiming homosexuality is a “lifestyle”, that is a false and ignorant statement. Homosexuality is not a choice. Just like you don’t choose the color of your skin, you cannot choose whom you are sexually attracted to. If you can, sorry, but you are not heterosexual, you are bi-sexual. Virtually all major psychological and medical experts agree that sexual orientation is NOT a choice. Most gay people will tell you its not a choice. Common sense will tell you its not a choice. While science is relatively new to studying homosexuality, studies tend to indicate that its biological.
https://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/03/differential-brain-activation.pdf
https://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/dn14146-gay-brains-structured-like-those-of-the-opposite-sex.html
Gay, Straight Men’s Brain Responses Differ
https://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,155990,00.html
https://www.livescience.com/health/060224_gay_genes.html
https://www.springerlink.com/content/w27453600k586276/
https://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/06/16/172/
There is overwhelming scientific evidence that homosexuality is not a choice. Sexual orientation is generally a biological trait that is determined pre-natally, although there is no one certain thing that explains all of the cases. “Nurture” may have some effect, but for the most part it is biological.
To those of you using the Bible as a weapon against homosexuality, you are wrong. Homosexuality is not a sin. The Bible is constantly being taken out of context to support anti-gay views. Scholars who have studied the Bible in context of the times and in relation to other passages have shown those passages (Leviticus, Corinthians, Romans, etc) have nothing to do with homosexuality. These passages often cherry-picked while ignoring the rest of the Bible. The sins theses passages are referring to are idolatry, Greek temple sex worship, prostitution, pederasty with teen boys, and rape, not homosexuality or two loving consenting adults.
https://www.soulfoodministry.org/docs/English/NotASin.htm
https://www.jesus21.com/content/sex/bible_homosexuality_print.html
https://www.christchapel.com/reclaiming.html
https://www.stjohnsmcc.org/new/BibleAbuse/BiblicalReferences.php
https://www.gaychristian101.com/
Thats why Jesus never mentions it as well. There is nothing immoral, wrong, or sinful about being gay. Jesus, however, clearly states he HATES hypocrites. If you preach goodness, then promote hate and twist the words of the Bible, you are a hypocrite, and will be judged and sent to hell. Homosexuals will not go to hell, hypocrites will.
This is very similar to the religious bigots of the past, where they took Bible passages to condone slavery, keep women down, and used Bible passages to claim blacks as curses who should be enslaved by the white man. People used God to claim that blacks marrying whites was unnatural, and not of God’s will.