Unintentional legalization of gay marriage when one partner is trans?

March 19, 2025 7:30 AM

I read a long time ago (pre 2015 at least) about a state that did not allow you to legally change your gender. Therefore, a cis woman and a trans woman were permitted to marry. I can't find any sign of this on the Internet. Help?

Maybe it's too funny and ironic to be true but I feel like I saw it in a reputable source.

posted by wnissen to Law & Government (7 answers total)

A female friend of mine was in a gay marriage before they were legal in our state because her husband transitioned during their marriage and became her wife. This would have been about twenty years ago. It meets your "unintentional legalization" question but gets there a different route.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:06 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Sarah McBride talks about this in her book - she is a trans woman and her late husband was a trans man.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 8:10 AM on March 19

Response by poster: I meant to say, "cis woman and a trans woman", apologies and thanks to the MeFite who pointed it out. Flagged for editing.
posted by wnissen at 9:09 AM on March 19

Jennifer Finney Boylan transitioned in the early '00s after she married her wife and they remained legally married. She wrote an article about it in 2009, "Is My Marriage Gay?" (archive link), which goes into some detail about the patchy legal landscape for gender recognition and same-gender marriage at the time and how that affected a lot of couples. That article names Ohio, Kansas, Texas and Florida as states where she would only have been allowed to marry another woman.
posted by fifthpocket at 9:11 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Changed a link in the question to "cis woman and a trans woman" as noted above.
posted by loup (staff) at 9:20 AM on March 19

I am helping with a wedding in a few months in exactly the same circumstance, so yes....it does happen, and is a weird loophole in terrible laws.
posted by griffey at 9:59 AM on March 19

There's this essay from 2008, when there was noise about a California state constitutional amendment defining marriage as straight marriage: Kudzu and the Marriage Amendment. It is all about the law of unintended consequences. It mostly looks at the problem of definitively saying who is male or female, and discusses a case in Texas where a couple with a trans member got gay married long before that was legal.
posted by adamrice at 10:59 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]