Posting in full because it's quite short and may not persist long ...
Kansas supreme court to hear gender identity case
The Kansas Supreme Court intends to hear an inheritance dispute between a transgender woman and her late husband's family.
When Marshall Gardiner died, his wife J'Noel Gardiner thought she would inherit the $2.5-million estate. But Marshall Gardiner's son by a previous marriage sued, alleging that his father's marriage was not legal because J'Noel Gardiner is a male-to-female transgender. A district court found in favor of the son, but in May the Kansas Court of Appeals reopened the case. "We can no longer be permitted to conclude who is male or who is female by the amount of facial hair one has or the size of one's feet," the court ruled.
I mean, aside from the shock that such a case could have come from Kansas ... well, OK, that is pretty much the thing, isn't it? From the land that wanted to abolish evolution, from the state that is trying to jail a teenager for 20 years for having gay sex (which, to be sure, is illegal in Kansas, but still ...) -- from this area, we get a decision that says, "Maybe gender is more than the sum of our physical parts. Maybe we should look at this issue."
Mind, I don't expect this to go anywhere. This IS Kansas, after all. Any decision in favor of J'Noel Gardiner would have to do a delicate tiptoe around their antigay marriage laws, and the Kansas Supreme Court is not known for its delicacy. (Actually, if they simply rule that J'Noel Gardner's legal sex is female, they don't even have to reach the antigay marriage laws -- and a good thing, too. I'm surprised that such a case hasn't risen in Kansas before, but this litigation suggests that the issue of the legal sex of postoperative transsexuals hasn't come up.) And more detail on the facts of the case suggests that things are not as clear as they may seem. (A 40-year age difference plus a late-life marriage tends to make courts ... twitch, whether justified or no.) And somehow attorneys fees are in the mix.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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