Love and Unmarriage

A bit of advice to any post-op transsexuals out there who think they can just go out and enjoy civil marital bliss without legal superplanning.

Never get your civil marriage in the same county you changed your name in when you were Pre-op, never never never,... Unless you live in California or New Jersey.

I made this mistake, and 3 months, 750$ in lawyer fees, a great deal of heartache and rage, and one anullment later, I am without civil marriage.

But I am currently living in Florida, and we have screwy laws here, like the Kanteras v Kanteras appellate case law which states "For the purposes of marriage, sex is immutable at birth."

That's right, I am legally female, my driver's license says I am female, my birth certificate says I am female, all of my government records say that I am female, and yet, for purposes of marriage, I am considered male.

Which to me means that I can only have legal samesex marriages in florida.

Some people need a good knee capping.

An excerpt from a forum post:
"It's over now, the marriage has been anulled (Void ab inito), we were able to find legal counsel, and the joint petition for anullment that we needed to sign was rephrased several times (to remove any references that I was currently male, the original document apparently had male pronouns in it referring to me) the alternative to signing this joint petition was possibly being charged with perjury (for saying I am female on marriage license), a charge which they had little basis for according to our attorney, the other possibility is that they would have a judge rule for an anullment without our consent, and the wording in their ruling would be far worse than it is. (e.g. a public-records document stating that I am male is BAD)
The marriage license as well as the anullment must be filed at florida vital statistics, we are hoping that thatdoes not provoke florida vital statistics to change my gender marker in my birth record AGAIN.
The fact that post-operative transsexuals in florida can have their gender marker on identification douments changed is a legal gray-area, statute says that these government offices (vital stat., DMV, SSA) has the responsibility of handling amendments, the statute then goes on to list examples of amendments to documents (name change, address change, etc), and sex/gender marker is NOT included in these examples, meaning that whatever future case law would change the current protocol, probably for the worse.
Certainly fighting this could cause legislation to pass or case law stating that what these government offices are doing is illegal, at which point transpeople in florida will be f****d.
Essentially because the legal framework is hazy and mostly nonexistent, transpeople are at the mercy of government office protocol( and more often at the mercy of government officers), and their status as legal members of their chosen gender can be revoked at any time.
For those of you who may not know, Kanteras V. Kanteras is a case between a FTM transsexual man and his wife, it was a nasty custody battle where ms. kanteras was claiming that because Michael Kanteras was born as a female, their marriage was invalid and his adopting of her child, and the child borne from his brother's sperm and his wife was not allowed under Florida law ("homosexual" adoption in florida is illegal), the court case was pretty explicit, and Michael kanteras put up with a lot of stupid questions from the judge (physical examinations happened), but in the end, the judge made the right decision and in his 800 page court ruling he stated that Michael kanteras is a man, this decision was overturned by an 11 page appellate court decision saying basically "You're wrong, Michael kanteras is a female, god says so. The courts are not supposed to make law, but we will anyway, for the purposes of marriage in florida sex is immutable at birth, god pwns you, go to hell you f***ing faggots. Ms. Kanteras gets full custody and Michael kanteras gets no visitation rights because they are not legally his children and because god says so." Of course the real appeal decision was not put so bluntly with the god and stuff, but that's basically what they were saying."