This Week in Sex: Porn for Prisoners

Is sexual-reassignment surgery a right?

Sam Adams, the mayor of Portland (not the Revolutionary War Hero/beer maker), wants to offer coverage of surgery for transgendered employees seeking sex reassignment. There is a committee assigned to review such policies, but for the second year in a row, they could not reach a decision on the topic of sex reassignment surgery, so Adams is overriding them.

Portland isn’t the first major American city to cover this surgery — that honor goes to San Francisco, but it's still a major move of support for transgendered citizens. This won't cost the state much money (they’re estimating about $32,000 more per year), but the support it shows for equal rights among all residents is priceless. Imagine the kind of morale this must stimulate in Portland — when you live here, you’re taken care of.

And then Texas has to come along and ruin the high I just got.

A judge in Wharton, Texas has declared not only that marriage is only viable if it’s between a man and a woman, but also that a “man” and a “woman” are determined at birth, not by what they choose to become with the aid of surgery, counseling, hormone-enhancing drugs, or other such methods.

This ruling comes after the case of a firefighter who was married to a woman, until he found out she’d been born biologically male and divorced her. In an effort to legally annul that marriage, the counsel stated that “a person’s sex is a biological fact, not a state of mind, and altering one’s outer appearance doesn’t change that.” While in this case, it might make sense (since allegedly, the guy was deceived about his wife's gender), this is the sort of legal precedent that could have nasty ramifications for transgender people across the state.