One Man And One Woman

The desire of some to define marriage as a relationship between "one man and one woman" is problematic for all sorts of reasons. On a concrete level, even in states that prohibit same-sex marriage, policing the boundaries of such a rule is all but impossible in a world where gender and sexual identity are so fluid. 

Once one accepts that gender and sexual identity aren't binary categories, the whole "one man and one woman" marriage regime is revealed as fiction. As this male to female transsexual writes on the Times op-ed page: 

Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me.... I’ve been legally female since 2002, although the definition of what makes someone “legally” male or female is part of what makes this issue so unwieldy. How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?... Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be....

A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, determined that marriage could be only between people with different chromosomes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that jurisdiction were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, paradoxically, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. 

The man/woman binary, just like the black/white binary of Jim Crow, is based on a fiction. Accepting it requires erasing certain people who don't fit into either category and/or who arguably fit into both. Highlighting the (admittedly exceptional) cases of people who fit into neither category helps to demonstrate that the system that places so much emphasis on those categories is not only not natural and unchangeable, but not even an accurate description of the world.