Transgender Marriage Struck Down By the Great State of Tennessee
By Brian FairbanksMay 14th, 2009, 2:08 pmComments (0)
In November 2007, a man and a woman walked into county clerk's office in Davidson County, Tennessee. Both had driver's licenses identifying them as "opposite marriage people"-- or, in logical land terms, a man and a woman. They were quickly married and promptly forgotten about by the state...
...until this past March, when a woman named Jo T. Rittenberry was arrested in a different county for assault and fraud. The police determined that she was actually a man and notified the state's marriage board, which this month invalidated the marriage from November 2007. In their announcement to the press, the state said that it doesn't matter if Rittenberry is male or female-- she was born a male, and thus this was a same sex-marriage, which is illegal...
While we strongly disagree with the judgment by the state-- there are more both-sex babies born in this world than people know and there's no valid reason to stop a gay marriage in the first place-- it couldn't have helped that Rittenberry, well... didn't really have sexual reassignment surgery, at least not successfully:
Rittenberry was born a man but identifies as a woman and claims to have had sex reassignment surgery. Although Rittenberry's Tennessee driver's license and Kentucky birth certificate say "female," both the Montgomery County Jail and the clinic where Rittenberry claims to have had surgery insist that Rittenberry is still biologically a man. [The clinic claims no operation was performed, according to the AP.]
"The marriage is real to me," Rittenberry said in a jail interview. "I could care less about the system. I just wanted me and Jeff to be together. He wanted to marry me and I said 'yes.'" [Leaf Chronicle]
Meanwhile, there's this story out of China:
Fu Shitou met Wei Jinhua through his sister-in-law and eventually the two got married. Recently, after three years of marriage, the couple had a doozer of a fight and Wei stormed out. Wei wandered the streets of Zhechuan in China until, by a series of unfortuate misadventures, she was picked up by police and strip searched! Hmm, that’s when the police discovered Wei was a he and not a she! Oh dear, I don’t know who broke the news to Fu but he was just as surprised as the police. Fu later confessed he had never had sex with his wife. OK, surely the fact that the toilet seat was never down…???? [Friggin' Loon]
Yes, if you're not going to ever consummate the relationship, you should at least peek at her when she's in the shower to find out for sure...
Seriously, though, we don't know what to make of either of these stories... more via the Nashville Post.
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