There was a piece in the New York Times recently about the debate in the lesbian community over gender-reassignment surgery. Lots of formerly butch lesbians now identify as “transmen.” The strangest revelation was that after one member of a lesbian couple became a man, they were able to get legally married in California. Doesn’t the fact that a marriage is legal if one partner gets a sex change kind of turn all the antigay-marriage arguments on their head? I mean, how do you think the Bible-thumping Republicans would take to the reasoning? “No, you can’t get married–well, I guess if one of you has a sex change it’ll be OK.” That’s pretty fucked-up, no? –Loyal Reader
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Damn straight it’s fucked-up, particularly when you read all of Paul Vitello’s piece [“The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack,” August 20] and learn that many transmen don’t bother getting their genitals swapped out. Building a reasonably functional penis is a hell of a lot more complicated than building a reasonably functional vagina, so there’s not much incentive for transmen to get an “ersatz penis,” to use Vitello’s term. Which means there are lots of double-vagina marriages in California and other states. That a lesbian couple is able to legally marry and keep on grinding their glazed donuts–as long as one of the women gets a double mastectomy, a few hormone shots, and a soul patch, of course–only goes to show how absurd our marriage laws are.
However, I’ve known lots of lesbians who later decided that they were and always had been men, and many more lesbians who decided they were and always had been heterosexual. At the risk of being burned in effigy at the next dyke march, the fluidity of female sexual identity sure does make me appreciate the solidity of male sexual identity. While I have to worry about my boyfriend leaving me for another man (he assures me that my worries are irrational–but he would, wouldn’t he?), I don’t have to worry about him walking into the kitchen one day and announcing that he’s always been a woman, or that he’s only just realized that he’s straight. A guy that’s sucking cock at 18 will be still be sucking cock at 28, 38, and 108, but it seems that a woman can be eating pussy at 18, sucking cock at 28, and having her cock sucked at 38.
