Hmm this is an interesting situation developingthanks for the heads up.

Because…The California and other cases don’t involve”trannies”.  Slur intended.
Seriously TS/TG people really do not fit the corporate image so many of the big organizations depend on for funding.
About 20 years ago LGBT/TQ ceased being simply a bunch of liberation movements and became a marketing demographic.
Hello… RuPaul, bless her little heart is what so many who are up there in the corporate sponsored National Activist Organizations think of when they hear TS/TG.
When we are.  We are you Autumn, and me and hundreds of thousands of individuals who were born TS or TG. And we aren’t a demographic people have figured out yet because TS/TG is different from G/L.

Except…

because TS/TG is different from G/L

Except when a pandering-to-christianism judge declares a heterosexual woman – who happens to be of transsexual history – to be a gay man.
I won’t mention Phil Hardberger or Donald Allegrucci by name.

Missing info…From what I’ve heard about Nikki Araguz’ story, she was born intersex, which means that the gender listed on her birth certificate was incorrect whether it listed male or female. I feel like this information makes the case unique and separate from other trans issues.
Also,it seems like to me this isn’t an issue about transfolks’ right to marry, it is an issue about transfolks’ right to declare their own gender. Just sayin.
Autumn, I sense in your recent posts (as well as in the comments) a serious animosity of trans folks against the LGBT community as a whole. I understand trans issue have typically been put on a back burner, but I get the sense that you think GLBs are generally transphobic, which I don’t see. Couldn’t we get more accomplished if we all worked together, rather than arguing about which group is more inclusive toward which other group?  

It’s sad..It’s sad to see so little support for our trans brothers and sisters. I’m so glad to have the blend writers reporting on this issue!

Sad that they don’t listenSad that they don’t listen to their own placements. Rupaul has repeatedly pointed out that drag is NOT the same as trans on the show.
I was worried about how vehemently it was pointed out until one of the contestants on the drag Race came back for a reunion episode and talked about how she had been struggling during her time on the show because she was slowly coming to realize that she was MtF Trans rather than a Drag Queen. And yes, it made some of the contestants uncomfortable, but some were very supportive, and Ru thought it was an important issue to discuss. In fact, it was one of the Serious topics, and the most memorable thing, from that episode. (The fact that the winner GREW UP was less memorable for me.)

NeitherI’ve been following these cases closely, and I think the answer to the question regarding which is the same sex marriage is simply “neither.”
In accordance with the Texas Family Code, Sabrina presented documentation (a birth certificate) when obtaining the marriage license that established that her sex is male for purposes of marriage.  She married a woman, so it’s not a same sex marriage in the eyes of the law.
In accordance with the Texas Family Code, Nikki presented documentation (a birth certificate) when obtaining the marriage license that established that her sex is female for purposes of marriage.  She married a man, so it’s not a same sex marriage in the eyes of the law.
I know that’s a purely legalistic analysis, but that is the kind of analysis that is called for here.
The answer is “neither.”

I thinkthat many people see Nikki’s case as a heterosexual marriage.  I know I do–it’s a family dispute.  Transwomen state they are women, therefore it boils down to a horrible family fight.  It’s not same sex marriage.  (I never heard about the Hill case until now and that adds a log to the fire–Ms. Hill is a woman, why is she claiming to be a man?  yes, I understand she’s trying to twist the law on itself but it still is a transwoman denying she is a woman.  Which if a non-trans person does, transwomen and transmen have a fit.)
Is this a marriage equality fight?  Yes.  But Nikki’s case seems an ugly private case.  Was Ms. Araguz an activist for marriage equality before this happened?  Does she also fight for her LGB brothers and sisters?  I support her fight. Does she support mine?   If she wins, will this bring marriage equality closer for LGB folk or will it simply help her?  I’m sure the big groups are asking themselves the same questions.  The main points in any case are usually “Is this winnable and is this the right case to take before a federal judge?”  Are these cases good cases to win marriage equality for all?

Well, its the Gender BinaryAnd that is held as THE rule in many cases. Hell, its written in many of the old text books that a IS/DSD child should be gendered as either male or female prior to even giving the child to the parents to hold. If anything is ‘different’ than male/female then it ‘needs to be fixed’ no matter what.
Saddly, there is no national movement to honor a new born’s ‘wishes’ when it comes to any sugeyy that enforces a gender determined by the medical care givers or parents. There is NO legal documentation that clearly shows a person is IS/DSD in nature in any state or any paperwork. Heck, even non-important stuff like making a log in for a kids game requires slecting gender marker.
And whats worse? If your IS/DSD and have an appropriate gender marker legal ID and marry a person of the ‘opposite’ gender the marriage is still legally nullable and in some states (Florida being one of them) an IS/DSD/TG/TS person can be charged with fraud.
It SUCKS!

I’m gonna take a wild guess hereMaybe the trans woman would know what transphobia looks like, so I’m gonna defer to her.
People see exactly what they want to see. White LGBTs have a tendency to “not see” racism in the community, straight people “don’t see” homophobia in the mainstream, “men” don’t see sexism, etc.
Our community has a shit ton of problems WRT to the minorities in our ranks, trust. If you don’t see that, it’s a symptom of your privilege in those areas, not license to use the tone argument on a marginalized person.

Yes, this.

If only it were simpleIn accordance with the Texas Family Code, Nikki presented documentation (a birth certificate) when obtaining the marriage license that established that her sex is female for purposes of marriage.  She married a man, so it’s not a same sex marriage in the eyes of the law.
If that were the case, it could make things much simpler.  While her birth certificate is now updated, she had SRS after getting married.  There are many pieces of ID one can provide; however, the birth certificate can be a pain to update in TX, and many (most?) judges wanted one post-op before they would issue an order to change the birth certificate.
I had looked into doing it legally, but was told not to bother without being post-op.
The law changed to permit a “sex-change order” as a permissible document for marriage in early 2010.  Prior to this, many judges would not issue orders in light of the Littleton case.  As the legislature recognizes a sex-change order, it follows logically that judges must be able to issue them.  That has made things much easier in many areas.
Phyllis Frye is making the case that regardless of whether the marriage was valid at the date it was entered into, she would (at the very least) have a common-law marriage from the time she was post-op.  Texas is very liberal when it comes to common-law marriages, and the lease that was signed shortly before his death makes it clear that he represented her as his wife.
While they can permit you to change your documentation, judges are unlikely to require to do so – what about cancer patients that get a penectomy, for example?  
It is quite possible to rule that one case is a marriage between a man and a woman, and that Nikki is a female for purposes of marriage, therefore her marriage was heterosexual too.  
It’s also possible to find there was a valid marriage at time of death, even if the marriage was originally void.  This would be the legally “cleanest” – by giving a specific set of rules when one’s gender changes for marriage (court order or even post-op + court order), it would clarify marriages without creating legal absurdities.  In such a case, because the law changed, and she had the court order, at that point she could common-law marry.

The 2009 change merely ensured that people born outside of Texas, in a state that will not issue a new birth certificate, still have an avenue to be recognized as the new sex.
Nikki presented a California birth certificate at the time of the marriage that said she is female.  That should be the end of it, regardless of whether she had SRS before the birth certificate was changed in California.
If we take the stnace that SRS is required for recognition in the post transition sex, than that leaves behind most FTMs, who are able to obtain new birth certificates without having to have a phalloplasty.
Nikki wins becasue she had her papers in order.  It really is, and must be, that simple.

Chovexani sums up a thought of mine.There is a angry tranny version of the tone argument — your comment seems a mildly phrased version of it.
What is the tone argument? The tone argument is one where someone objects to someone else’s argument based on the perceived tone of the argument — usually a minority group member is the subject of this argument. The identified tone is identified as too angry, too hateful, not calm enough, not nice enough, etc.
The tone argument is a logical fallacy — none of those things listed in the preceding paragraph have anything to do with whether truth or falsehood was expressed by a minority group member. It’s a “We would listen to you if you said what you said more nicely” argument; it’s a “You are so full of hate” argument; it’s a “You are too angry” argument.
The tone argument is one that at its core seeks to derail or silence minority group members.
If I were angry all the time, folk wouldn’t pay attention to what I write at all. Believe me, I get that.
I did get up on my soapbox this morning in the diary Trying One’s Hardest Not To Be A D*ckhead, But Being A D*ckhead Anyway, but I don’t get angry very often. But that said, I’m very passionate when it comes to LGBTQ youth — especially transyouth, and youth with gender expression that doesn’t conform to societal sex and gender norms. I own my anger and passion on LGBTQ youth.
And too, Pam brought me into this blog for quite a few reasons, and one of these was how I generally “play well with others.” If she saw me as being an very angry trans advocate, she probably wouldn’t have brought me in as a blogger here. And at this point, she’d literally tell me behind the scenes if my tone was angry too much of the time to be listened to. I want to be listened too — Pam and I don’t pay attention to site traffic numbers, but we do realize we’re accidental leaders in the LGBTQ community, and people pay attention to what we say.
Pam and I both are passionate about community building too, not tearing down community — but we do point out community failures and societal failures. I always was only a critic without offering any alternatives for my criticisms, well…that would be a long term fail.
I’m not angry at the majority of LGB community members in broader LGBTQ community. And too, I really do make an effort to “play well with others.” My discussion on the phone today with Prof. Gonzalez is just one example of working with others in broader LGBT community to identify issues we can work on as a community.
Anyway, please feel free to disagree with my opinions — we welcome diverse opinions here, as long the manner in which you express your differences of opinion conform to our terms and conditions of service.
But please also don’t try to derail me with tone arguments, or try to derail other trans people here at PHB with tone arguments. When trans people are angry here at PHB, we actually get to express our anger here at PHB — as long as we too stay within the boundries of the PHB terms and conditions of service.

The point I am MakingIs that actual transsexual and transgender people do not fit the image the corporate dependent National organizations are comfortable with.
We aren’t gay men except some T to Male people are.  we aren’t lesbians except some T to people are.
We really don’t fit the corporate assimilationist  party line of being just like straight people except for our sexual orientation.
The problem is we don’t fit the cis-sex/gender expectation the way L/G folks do.
Because of this we have better relations with local based groups than with the nationals.

I can attest…to the truth in Autumn’s last paragraph. =)

You sense?You sense?
Ok, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.  I’ll function on the assumption that you, like so many others, have sensed that yes, we might actually have a chance at changing things for LGBT people for the better. And as a result, you’ve become involved in the online discourse that has grown nearly exponentially over the last four years.
And you missed the part about Trans folks spending the last three years meeting a gauntlet that was thrown down. About educating the rest of those four letters and working rather hard to end a pervasive and widespread form of prejudice against the trans community born not wholly lout of malice, but out of the same thing that all prejudice stems from: fear and ignorance.
You get that.
Autumn talks about a certain kind of argument, and the term that’s attached to that argument.  I’m familiar with it in a couple of it’s racist forms, as well, personally, so I’m going to say that be aware that Trans people really and truly are angry.
That the anger they feel is justified.  That it is an anger that is broader than people realize, and deeper than people realize.  That it is easily conflated with elements within the trans community that are just as homophobic as elements in the cisLGB community are transphobic.
you sense there’s a sort of antipathy, an animosity among trans folks. And you are correct — but let me make it slightly more clear, as you may not have realized what it is you are sensing or come to grasp it fully.
There are a large and great number of trans people who are angry over 40 year old promises that haven’t been kept.  THey are angry over history being re-written.  They are angry at being told, yet again, that “they are just too difficult”.  They are angry and being lied to, outright.  At being used as pawns in a political chess game over and over again.  They are angry over being told that it is their job to educate others, when no, it is the job of others to educate themselves.  They are angry over being told that something dealing in the inalienable right to marry is suddenly not about their marriage, but rather about something else.
They are angry about the leadership of the cisGLB organizations.  They are angry over the fact that the best tools and most money go to places that often work against their needs.  They are angry about people saying LGBT when they mean L and G.  They are angry about being told that they cannot be gay or lesbian or bisexual because that is somehow separate from being being trans, when for a lot of us, it’s not all that separate at all.
They are angry that each day increases the already over 15 years on average between “we’ll come back for you” and “here we are” when, well, oddly enough, the “here we are” isn’t the same people who said they’d come back for us.  Those people are off doing something else and selling us out.
So yes, there are a lot of trans people who are very angry with the cisLGB community as a whole, and they do put effort in to holding them accountable.  That doesn’t mean they oppose LGBT folks — they are smart enough to see the writing on the wall, and they were saying a year and a half ago that the right was going to drop this marriage fight as we’re seeing displayed in the news.
Let’s not dance around that, either.  They are angry because the leadership has failed them. They are angry because the leadership leads, and those that follow that leadership have failed them — and are, thereby, complicit in that failure.
And it is not a great thing, this anger, but it is righteous, and it is deserved and well earned.
I tell you this so that you know, yes, it is there.  So that you have a vague idea of what it is and why it exists.  Details you can look up on your own, or you can ask questions about.
But it is there, and now you can say that you more than sense it, because I’m telling you it is there.
And if I seem angry in saying that, well, I’ll point out that I’m not angry as I write this.  I’m calm, I’m feeling reasonable, I’m not upset or agitated.
But for some reason, I hear the highlighted term in Autumn’s response applied to me often, and I’ll claim it if that’s what people want to call me.
Because there’s a reason that people get angry. Always.  And if you are a smart person, you listen to them.

Perhaps they want her to lose?Ms Araguz I mean.
Because her marriage was not same-sex, whereas Ms Hill’s is.
Ms Araguz is not GLB: Ms Hill is. Therefore, GLB(no t) organisations would naturally support Ms Hill, and let “Nature take its course” with Ms Araguz.
Both cases involve intersex.
Worst-case: as with Wilma Wood vs M.C.Studios, Intersexed people may be deemed neither male nor female, so may not marry, period. Both “marriages” would be invalidated.
Transsexual people may also be ruled neither male nor female. Fox Houston recently ran a poll asking whether trans people should be allowed to marry at all. This may be indicative of someone testing the political winds.

In 1987, Wilma Wood was fired. She brought suit against her employer, claiming that she had been fired after the employer learned that she was intersexed and had undergone genital surgery. The U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania found that the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act protects women because of their status as females and discrimination against males because of their status as males, but employers are not legally prohibited from terminating employees on the basis of intersex status.

That would also be of no concern to the segment of GLBT that is GLB-only.
The majority of GLBT orgs are just that – GLBT. But it doesn’t take much transphobia to cause apathy.

It’s becoming more difficultto ignore the animosity in the gay community towards transgendered people.  Maybe it’s just a few gay and lesbian people who despise transgendered people, but they certainly are vocal.  And it’s very rare for any gay or lesbain people to speak out against their brethren and sistren who behave in this manner.  On those rare occasions when they do, they get the same treatment turned on them.   Case in point:
http://www.dallasvoice.com/isr…
It seems that not a day goes by that I don’t encounter a gay man calling trans women “trannies,” or a lesbian woman inventing “female privilege,” purely for the purpose of withholding it from transwomen.
It reminds me of bullying at school, with the tormentors runnning around calling us names and ridiculing us and taunting us.  That’s what it’s like.  That’s what many in gay and lesbian people are to us, while most of the rest laugh and applaud or stand silent.
So I’m not surprised at the apathy among gays and lesbians towards transgendered people’s struggles to be recognized as the new sex in the eyes of the law.  I mean, apparently we haven’t even achieved that recognition in the eyes of most gay and lesbian people.

When ever I’m in the PHB coffee house with you……I feel like you’re one of the smartest and wisest people in the room.
A very thoughtful comment here. Thank you.

WellActually,  putting these two cases side by side shows that without marriage equality for all, people will always use that lack to try and nullify trans people’s marriages, whoever  we marry.
It’s not even about what sex we ‘really’  are, in whose mind:  it’s about us being seen as ‘queer’  and anyone with a lawyer being able to say any of our marriages aren’t in fact legal protection when it suits them.  
People wonder why there are so many ‘angry trannies:’ I think it goes beyond any one issue, or even how the LGBT community may treat us:  It’s all the damn Catch-22s we have to live with  at any given stage of our lives.  
That’s one thing we all have in common, from the most binary self-identified ‘women of history’  to the queerest of the genderqueer.  
One reason that gay rights are important is that homophobia is the basis for a lot of those catch-22s to begin with, however much one may or may not distance onesself.  
If it’s not legitimate to discriminate on the basis of something being ‘queer,’  then there’s also less incentive or basis to ‘de-gender’ us, pathologize us,  or use us for whatever agenda is handy.    

WellI do think that transsexualism is an intersex condition,  just a more subtle one: transsexualism seems most clearly to be an intersex condition of the brain, at the very least.
Some people seem to hierarchicalize things so that people born physically-ambiguous are more ‘real’  in their identified gender than are trans people:   but when babies are altered inappropriately and grow up feeling they got it ‘wrong,’ they generally report the same kind of experience as transsexuals go through.
When babies are altered so,  what we’re seeing is, in important senses, pre-emptive transphobia.   It’s fear of androgyny or not-being binary.   The funny thing is that what they do to babies with intersexed genitalia is exactly what they want to deny TSes:   they try and fix the body, …only problem is they’re basically just guessing who that person might be, or if they’ll even be ‘binary’  at all.  
Me, I’m always going to be different from typical ciswomen, in some ways:  the parts of the brain that develop before puberty are typically female:  those that develop according to what hormones your body’s putting out also have some more typically-male characteristics, too.   That’s not going to be undone,  nor should it really change anything: it’s not as though ‘brain sex’  characteristics aren’t widely-overlapping distributions,  anyway.  
But it’s been of note to me that in certain areas of these brain sex testings we often toy with,  I’ll score pretty high in some areas associated with both sexes:  in the male areas that correspond with later pubescent development,  and pretty high in the female areas associated with starting or being fixed earlier in development.  (And some things associated with male brains,  like spatial orientation and dead reckoning skills,  have certainly come down a couple of pegs after a long time post-hormones and surgery. )
Pretty interesting correlations for an ‘identity disorder,’  or a ‘sexuality,’  eh?  It’s an uneasy relation for a lot of parties to make:  TS people are generally afraid that studying it will only be one more excuse to deny us treatment or dignity,  but I think our experiences correspond to an intersex condition primarily of the brain.   Or at least I do.   I happen to know I was exposed to DES,  which is a pretty serious endocrine disruptor that does seem to be in a lot of TS people’s prenatal history.  I also know I wasn’t told about it till my cisgendered sister started manifesting some of the same non-trans-related health problems.  
There’s a huge lot of variation,  but I can’t help but note how many intersex people I’ve known thought they were ‘just trans’  well into transition:  one thing that never seems to be pretty much ignored is the simple fact that our experiences of life are so often just the same.  Intersex people hardly need trans stigma,  but on the other hand,  they seem to get it anyway.  (Neither do T people often feel we need another basis for someone to play gatekeeper, btw,  either.)   Intersex people are still subject to binary physiological determinism,   but in effect, this pushes them into a whole separate basis on which to try and assert their own identities.  
Against essentially the very same prejudices.  
Seems to me that the distinction that some make here didn’t help Nikki Araguz, whatever her classification, either, did it?  
To quote the movie SLC Punk:  ”When someone’s giving you shit like that,  it’s not that they’re wrong about you,  it’s that they’re giving you shit.”  
And I think therefore that in a world where no one could claim a basis to do so, whether you’re TS,  intersex, TG, DQ,  whatever,   it’d be easier to see TSes as essentially just people with intersex brains.  Or ‘Probably intersex brains.’  My thinking is, it’s a natural variation in the same processes that give everyone their gender and sex-associated characteristics, among others,  and it doesn’t seem to take all that much to trigger it.
In some ways, the T category is defined by our social struggles and the sexuality-related stigma that all the alphabet soup are subject to. Those stigmas don’t really distinguish between T and I and Q and LGB, as this case shows.  
As for ‘what are we?’   I think  scientific and medical understanding should look to TS being part of the I category, actually.  For the LGBTQI community,  the definitions aren’t the problem.  
It’s that they’re giving us shit.