On Mother’s Day, I wore a necklace symbolizing womanhood that a friend brought back from Australia. I joked to my aunt that I thought it was appropriate, since it was Mother’s Day: A Day For Women! She responded, “What about ‘the pregnant man’?” I was schooled. (And glad for it) We spent the next couple of minutes wondering if Thomas Beatie celebrated Mother’s Day or Father’s Day - if he even celebrated his parenthood on these Hallmark holidays. I was thrilled at the possibility of a man being honored on Mother’s Day - thrilled at the fact that a man is a mother; that a man experienced a natural process of giving birth after carrying a child in his womb for nine months. I envision drops of shaving cream landing on his bare and pregnant belly as he lathered up for a morning shave.

We have discussed gender identity a few times on this site. Explored it in our own lives, turning the rules end on end. It never ceases to be fascinating, beautiful and irrelevant. NY Times online published an Op Ed piece a couple of weeks ago called “Is My Marriage Gay,” written by transgendered female Jennifer Finney Boylan. Before her legal gender status changed in 2002, she and her wife, Deirdre, married as man and wife. Though same-sex marriage has only recently been legalized in Maine (their home state), no one came to break up their union after Jennifer’s transition. She points out that if they had ever gotten a divorce, she would have been able to remarry a man in Maine, but in states like Ohio, where sex changes go unrecognized, Jennifer would be only able to marry a woman. As a woman. Same-sex marriage… right?

Jennifer also shares the story of J’noel Gardiner:

Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

Apparently there are similar situations all around the country, and Jennifer points out that in these jurisdictions, lesbian couples, for example, can marry if “one member of the couple ha[s] a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome.” So I guess same-sex marriage is somewhat legal in places, but if a transgendered person wants to honor their love with another via “opposite marriage” (thank you Carrie Prejean), they are just out of luck (in certain states).

The fact that gender is a legal issue baffles my mind. Why the hell does Johnny Law insist upon defining the undefinable? Is our society really that narrow-minded? Jennifer suggests, and I agree, that the legal scholars should devote their energy to a more worthy cause and embrace the “elusiveness of gender” instead of trying to categorize it as the usual black or white.

Read the full article here.