Nikki Araguz of Wharton, Texas (population 9,000) is suing the town where she and her husband lived: she was denied workers’ compensation benefits because she is transgender. Her husband Thomas Araguz, a volunteer firefighter, was killed while fighting a fire in 2010. A judge voided their marriage and denied death benefits because the state does not recognize same-sex marriages (this isn't one), or recognize trans people as the gender to which they've transitioned. (thanks, Antinous!)

  • Brainspore

    A horrible travesty of justice to be sure. I’m curious, though: is this on the judge or does Texas law recognize transgender people? The article doesn’t seem to say.

    Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of hateful stuff in the comments section for the story. I can’t imagine how much courage it must take for a trans person to make such a public stand like that.

  • thaum

    This is old news, isn’t it?

    • http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin

      She’s been in the news before, but the linked-to story is new, and details of where her case stands are new.

      • thaum

        Thanks for the update!

    • travtastic

      Damn, you’re right!

      That article is two days old!

    • Andy Simmons

      If you’re talking about the news that Texas is a civil rights backwater dominated by ignorant, hateful asshats, then yes.

      • Brainspore

        Second sentence from the City of Wharton’s official web site:

        “Wharton is a very progressive city located 55 miles southwest of Houston, Texas.” (Emphasis mine.)

        Yeah, keep telling yourselves that.

        • Andy Simmons

          To be fair, even if every person in the city of Wharton is on Ms. Araguz’s side, any judge in the state would still be compelled to pass the same verdict, given that these laws come from the state level.

          I guess a town can only be as progressive as its state’s laws allow it to be.

          • Brainspore

            If the city was truly progressive they could voluntarily choose to pay those benefits even if a judge ruled that they didn’t have to.

  • eldritch

    To be fair, this technically is a same sex marriage.

    Biological sex is genetic. It is the expression of your chromosomes. Being male or female has nothing to do with your personality, behavior, beliefs, identity, or even physical form and appearance.

    Gender is something else entirely – a social construct, a complex set of interactions between an individual and society. It’s all the various expectations for behavior that are foisted on individuals by society at large, determining what is and is not acceptable behavior from, and toward, a specific type of person. Arguably, gender is arbitrary and constrictive, a cultural artifact of our historical development as societies. But it is NOT the same as sex.

    The problem here is a conflation of the two issues.

    While I’m all for “gender rights”, and in fact personally advocate the abolition of gender as a social institution, I have to admit the plain physical fact that, as the laws are written, this marriage was not valid. Same -sex- marriage doesn’t care for your gender, nor does it care for the current appearance of your body. It cares about your genetics – and those can’t be changed (short of gene therapy of the sort that is still firmly science fiction). If you are born a man, you are biologically always a man. And if the basis of your laws is physical, biological sex, then that’s all that counts.

    Should the laws be different? That’s another issue entirely, completely unrelated. The law has been executed appropriately as it stands, no matter what anyone else personally feels concerning transgender issues (note: not “transsexual”, such a word is arguably a misnomer, describing something currently impossible).

    • Saul Pwanson

      Some people are XXY.  Would they be allowed to marry a member of either sex, or not be allowed to marry at all?

      Can this “man”, who presents as a woman, takes female hormones, has natural breasts, and may have a reconstructed vagina instead of a penis and testicles, marry a woman in the state of Texas?  

      It sounds like you believe that, in the eyes of the law, this person is a man and should be treated as such.  But she isn’t, and the law doesn’t.

      • Stooge

        XXY is technically male.

        The condition I believe your argument is looking for is 46 XX/46 XY mosaicism, which means some of the body’s cells are male and others are female. It’s pretty rare, though.

        • http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

          It’s “technical” because the “technicians” have defined it that way, get it?

    • thaum

      I won’t bite, but I’ll take a nibble.

      ‘not “transsexual”, such a word is arguably a misnomer, describing something currently impossible’

      Right, because sex is such a precise thing to define, right? Intersex people are totally impossible too, huh?

    • atimoshenko

      I think the main complaint is not that the law is being misapplied, but that it is outdated (in that it does not even reflect the latest biological understanding of sex and gender) and stupid.

    • http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

      Biological sex isn’t purely genetic. Biological sex can refer to genetics, or to genitalia, or to hormones, or to any other sexually-dimorphic biological trait. And there are a few sexually-dimorphic aspects of the human brain, mostly involving the midbrain; there are some studies which compare the brains of trans people with those of non-trans people of either sex and most of these show that trans people’s brains tend to be more similar to our identified sex than to our assigned sex.

      Now genetics, genitalia, and hormones match 98% of the time but they don’t match the other 2% of the time, and intersex people face systemic discrimination for it, including denial of legal rights, of medical care, etc. Some quack doctors still cut up the clits or penises of intersex babies.

      If genetics, genitalia, and hormones match, then maybe 99.9% of the time, the identified sex will also match. When they don’t match, with some conditions, there’s only about a 70% chance the identified sex will match the assigned sex. It’s hard to be sure because there is very little data on the prevalence of either ‘classic’ intersex conditions or transsexualism, although there are a few studies of sex identity among people with specific intersex conditions.

    • http://twitter.com/ethicalcannibal Ethical Cannibal

      So are we basing sex on genitals or chromosomes. In your paradigm, where do people with ambiguous genitalia fit? Do they not get to marry either? Does that mean you are not born a man or woman? What about chromosomal differences. 

      Just where in the Texas laws does it define sex and gender as it pertains to marriage? Does it really nail it down to what your genitals or chromosomes are doing, or are you just pontificating? 

    • http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

      While I’m all for “gender rights”

      Stop! Hammer time

    • unit_1421

       bzzzzzzzzzzt WRONG. A Y chromosome alone does not a male make. Nikki IS biologically female, as she has a female’s brain. What is called “being transgender” is actually Harry Benjamin’s Syndrome, named for the doctor who coined the misleading term transsexual, but still worked to promote awareness of the condition. It is similar to Swyer syndrome, but it affects primarily the brain’s early development while leaving the reproductive system unaffected. A detailed MRI of the brain can show the structural differences between male and female brains, so it is a quantifiable condition. Remember, we all start out as female and it’s only the successful execution of the needed genes in the Y chromosome that results in a bouncing baby boy. The Y chromosome only carries SOME of the genes that handle masculinization of the fetus. The current assertion is that in women with Harry Benjamin’s Syndrome, the gene(s) that handle the growth of the hypothalamus trigger it to grow into the size for a female, so even though the Y chromosome does its job properly, the brain grows into that of a female. In men with the condition, the hypothalamus grows to that size for a male, so you have a male brain in the otherwise fully functional body of a female. I know this all sounds really complicated and sciency, but it’s not. It’s just been very hard to verify until MRI scans and detailed anatomical studies of male and female brains came along.

      But wait, there’s more!

      Gender and orientation are handled by different genetics, so you have people with the condition with different orientations.

      There are other conditions out there that are just as hard to detect, like Chimerism, where someone has two or more sets of DNA, because of twin fusion in the womb. There was a paternity case where a woman temporarily lost custody of her child, because the DNA set in her reproductive system was different than that of the tissue and blood samples that were taken. Samples were finally taken from other organs that proved the child was hers.

    • Charles Céleste Hutchins

      Really? Sex is the same as chromosomes?  I supposed you’ve had yours tested then?  Otherwise you have no idea what sex you are and are using some other criteria to determine what you think your sex is.  As the vast majority of people do not have these tests, I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of people are using a non-chromosomal criteria.

      There are natural variations in chromosomes vs physical development and there are more XY women and XX men than you would guess. (Indeed, being XX is one of the more common causes of male infertility).  If somebody had a genetic test and found a different result than what they expected, it would not reveal their ‘real’ sex, it would just reveal an unexpected configuration of chromosomes.

      However, it’s nice of you as a cis person to tell trans people that their identities are impossible.   You kind of fail at being a happy mutant, though.

    • monopole

       Actually 10% genetically male or female individuals are of the opposite  physical gender.

  • That_Anonymous_Coward

    So he was good enough to die defending your town, but because of who he loved you refuse to do what you would do for any other firefighter.
    I’m glad the imaginary friend you all hide behind to justify your bigotry isn’t real.  He has a history of doing things to towns that are full of bad people.

    • awjt

      They just want to keep their money.  It’s what all greedy Republicans want.  They will look for any and every way to keep from giving you your own money.  That’s why they have so much of it, because they are greedy, thieving, violent, lying bastards.  They’d call her a man because she wore jeans, if it came to it.  It wouldn’t take all this transgender debating.  They are much smaller minded than that.  It’s greed.

  • douglips

    The logical conclusion here is that same-sex marriage is LEGAL in this town, provided that one of the parties is transgendered.  So, lesbian and gay couples where one member is trans should head there and get married en masse.

    • billstewart

       Texas has in fact had cases like that before.  I think the case I saw in the news a few years ago was a MTF woman marrying a regular woman, and they were able to get a marriage license because Texas considered them to be a man and a woman, not two lesbians, so they were ok with it.

  • eldritch

    Damnit – I could have sworn I hit the proper reply button. Too late now.

    @billstewart, replying to douglips

    Well the laws may be outdated, inflexible, and arbitrary, but at least they’re consistant.

  • Palomino

    At one time, about 1950, people like my mother who were born left handed, were forced to write with their right hand, she told me her left hand would be  strapped behind her. Same with sexual identity?

    Don’t forget too, that it can take a circumcision gone awry or sexual ambiguity to ruin a child’s life. Per Wikipedia, about 1 in 5000 births require “assignment” by the physician. So how many “reassignments” are simply reversals of an incorrect “assignment”?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment