Texas Attempts To Limit Marriage Rights of Trans People

Unlike President Obama, my birth certificate has very little to do with my life. I’m not 100 percent sure I even know where it is. (Note to self: FIND IT.) It’s easy to forget that, for some, the information found on a birth certificate has incredible consequences, like whether you can be legally discriminated against in marriage, housing, and a host of other areas that most people take for granted.

For most people, gender and biological sex match up. But it doesn’t work that way for everybody. When this happens, a person may live as their gender, and not their biological sex. The ability to change one’s birth certificate to reflect one’s true gender is important, especially for purposes of marriage.

Not every state allows trans people do this. In my home state of Kansas, for example, your biological sex at birth is always your sex. (Which, incidentally, leads to some absurd results. For example, two women can marry if one of the partners was originally male. But other than that, no gay marriage for you!) Texas, perhaps counter intuitively, is a state that allows a trans person to change his or her birth certificate through a court order.

But, maybe, not for long.

The Texas state senate is considering SB 723, which would bar district clerks from accepting a court order recognizing a sex change as legal documentation for marriage licenses. This law would reinstate a 1999 court decision that says, like Kansas, a person’s sex at birth is their sex forever.

The Texas legislature tried to do this in 2009, but state Democrats refused to pass a bill that eliminated the acceptance of a “court order of sex change” for purposes of obtaining a marriage license.

But now they are trying again, and it could have catastrophic results. An attorney for the Transgender Law and Policy Institute told Raw Story that this could nullify the marriages of trans individuals in the state (because same-sex marriage is icky!).

Even if this didn’t nullify past marriages, this is clearly just another attempt to stick it to the LGBT community. I’ve written before about Texas’ attempt to make sure public universities promote the heterosexual lifestyle. I guess they needed a way to make trans people feel like crap, too.

The message that this bill sends to trans people of Texas is that their struggle means absolutely nothing, and condemns trans people to live a life for which they are not designed. It’s incredibly cruel to acknowledge the right to define one’s sexual identity, only to take it away.

Please sign the petition encouraging the Texas legislature and governor to abandon the bill.

Image credit: David Herrera