The State of Maryland has invalidated the marriage of Georgie
and Angie Mauler, just as they were about to celebrate their first
anniversary around Valentine's Day,
the Washington Post reports:
After pronouncing Georgie and Angie Man and Wife, the State of Maryland Found Out Otherwise. Now It's Put Their Marriage Asunder
As you might have guessed, the question of gender and marriage
is again at issue. Georgie Mauler is a male-to-female transsexual
who was legally wed to Angie, a woman-born-woman (Georgie had
produced a birth certificate identifying Wayne George Mauler as
male, and received a marriage certificate in return). Before
undergoing sex-reassignment surgery, Georgie (as Wayne George) had
been legally married and divorced from another woman. Although
Georgie identifies now as female, Angie, interestingly, says she is
not a lesbian and views Georgie as male:
"I'm never going to make you happy," Angie would tell Georgie before they exchanged rings, "because I'm not going to see you as a woman." Georgie would answer, "Then I'll go back to living as a man." Angie would shake her head. She knew Georgie's story.
When the state revoked the marriage's legality last November, "it also erased the couple's legitimacy - at least for Angie," the Post reports. A sad story. But you might also remember that last May the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that male-to-female transsexual J'Noel Gardiner was still legally a man and thus not entitled to the estate of her late husband, Marshall - in effect, invalidating the marriage after Marshall's death. If you combine the Maryland and Kansas rulings, a transsexual wouldn't be able to marry anyone!
Of course, this is all statist nonsense. If, in Maryland, Georgie could marry a woman before surgery, but not after, does this mean male paraplegics shouldn't be allowed to marry since they, too, don't have functioning male anatomy? Had Georgie remained married to the woman who was then his first wife, and subsequently had reassignment surgery, would that marriage have been invalidated after the fact? And if, in Kansas, J'Noel can't marry a man, can she marry a woman? Wouldn't that be validating a lesbian union?
Eventually, the federal courts will have to sort this out. But the obvious best solution would simply be to allow unmarried adults to marry other unmarried adults of their choosing.
Has Beens.
That gay men and lesbians (or, more to the point, men and women)
have a very different experience of sexuality is highlighted by Amy
Sohn in her New York Magazine piece "Bi
For Now":
If the lipstick lesbian was the gay icon of the nineties, these days she's been replaced by her more controversial counterpart, the hasbian: a woman who used to date women but now dates men.
Though Anne Heche is the most prominent example, many hasbians (sometimes called LUGS: lesbians until graduation) are by-products of nineties liberal-arts educations. Caught up in the gay scene at school, they came out at 20 or 21 and now, five or ten years later, are finding themselves in the odd position of coming out all over again - as heterosexuals.
It's dangerous to overly generalize, and many lesbians are
unwavering in their homosexual orientation. But it has to be
acknowledged that more lesbians are sexually far more fluid in
terms of which gender they're attracted to than are men. And for a
significant number of women, lesbianism is an expression of
feminism for a defined period of their lives, rather than a fixed
aspect of identity:
Some hasbians identify as bisexual, while others say they're straight and describe their lesbianism as a meaningful but finite phase of their lives, like listening to a lot of Morrissey or campaigning for Dukakis.
(Just imagine a guy offering a similar explanation!) How this
plays out in the "LGBT community" and its internal dynamics is at
least something that might be discussed, but in general it
isn't.
-Stephen H. Miller
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