When Harry became Sally: Charlotte Allen gets really confused when she goes to a symposium on the legal requirements of the transgender community

Women's Quarterly, Summer, 2002 by Charlotte Allen

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY'S law school decided to devote its annual symposium on gender and sexuality this year to the legal problems of transsexuals. No, wait, the word "transsexual" is out of fashion these days with the political correctness police. Make that the legal problems of "transgender people."

And yes, it was that Georgetwon University, the Catholic school in Washington, D.C., the one with the brouhaha a couple of years ago over whether crucifixes on the wall are oppressive. Georgetown's law school sponsors the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, which in turn sponsors the symposia. This year's was titled "Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Gender: A New Front on Equality." Oh well, I thought as I settled into a seat in Georgetown's moot courtroom to listen to the keynote speech, at least I'll see some glam drag queens. You know, Holly Woodlawn types: stiletto heels, mascara to die for. Instead, I got Phyllis Frye.

Phyllis Frye had once been a male civil engineer in Houston, Texas, but now she is a female lawyer in a power suit and no-nonsense gray hair, except with a fiat chest, a beer belly, and kegshaped calves stuck into sensible laceup brogues. This was low-church transgender, where you don't bother with the fancy 'dos and the silicone. Call it the Mrs. Doubtfire look. Frye was onstage talking about the unfairness of parents' assigning their children at birth to the male sex or the female sex solely on the basis of their "clothed genitals that no one can see."

Frye had been the lead attorney in a recent case in Texas involving one Christie Littleton, whose parents had made that very mistake in 1952, deeming their baby girl to be a baby boy and giving her the name Lee. As soon as she grew up, Christie changed her name and her birth certificate and had a sexchange operation--except that we don't call them "sex-change operations" anymore, Frye explained: "That was the medical thinking of thirty years ago. The proper phrase nowadays is "corrective genital surgery."

CHRISTIE EVENTUALLY married a ( m an named Jonathan, who died an untimely death in 1996-- but a Texas appeals court ruled in 1999 that she could not bring a medical malpractice suit as his surviving spouse against his physician because, surgery or no surgery, Christie's chromosomes made her a man, and under Texas law, which recognizes as valid only marriages between a man and a woman, she was not a surviving spouse. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Christie's request to set aside the ruling. That was the end of her legal case, although not of her story, which can be perused on-line, along with several photographs of Christie in her wedding dress, at christielee.net. "Intersex people need to come out, step out, and not fight what they are," said Frye.

After Frye finished her speech, a lawyer friend of hers named Alyson joined her on the stage. Alyson was a middle-aged blonde with wire-rimmed glasses and an exceedingly receding hairline, from which her locks flowed down her back. "If there are a hundred people in this room, there's one intersex person and one female with a Ychromosome," said Alyson. I looked around at my fellow audience members, but most, dearly Georgetown law students, looked as though they had clothed genitals of the sex their parents had assigned them, although there were a few members of the Sisterhood of the High Scalp present. Eventually, a tall broad-shouldered woman in the back stood up and identified herself as probably that Y-chromosome female. "Humanity doesn't come in two mutually exclusive genders," she said.

Earline Budd, identified in the program as "an openly transgender woman living with HIV/AIDS" and a motivational speaker and transgender health empowerment manager for Us Helping Us, People Into Living, Inc., in Washington, also spoke up. "I'm totally about the African-American transgender community," said Budd, an imposing figure with multiple braids and curling purple fingernails. Budd opined that poor black transgender people with drug problems didn't have the same concerns about how to get married as fancy white lawyers like Phyllis and Alyson. "I ask what can be done for the intergender community right here," she said.

There was more talk about the "trans community" (another name for it) as well as "MTFs" (male-to-female transgender people), "FTMs" (female-tomale transgender people), and transitioning transgenders" (those are people who wear the clothes but haven't gotten around to the surgery). Then Phyllis Frye introduced her wife, who, unlike Christie Litdeton's spouse, turned out to be a biological female left over from Phyllis' days as a male. "We're both heterosexuals," Phyllis announced proudly. "Same-sex marriage has been around for a long time."

There was a break, and I wandered around the hallway outside the moot courtroom, wondering whether I could pass for a transgender person, as I'm 5' 10" (MTF) and was wearing slacks (FTM). I looked at back issues of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law on a display table. The articles had titles like: "Breaking the Line Between Biology and Parental Rights in Planned Lesbian Families: When Semen Donors Are Not Fathers" and "Children's Interests and Information Disclosure: Who Provided the Egg and Sperm? Or Mommy, Where (and Whom) Do I Come From?" A flyer invited me, had I been a law student, to enter a $1,000 competition sponsored by the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association for best essay on a "cutting edge legal issue affecting the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and/or Transgender community." If I won, my article would be published in Tulane University's journal of Law & Sexuality (I guess every law school must have one of these journals), and I would get free registration, airfare, and lodging for Lavender Law 2002 in Philadelphia. It was a genuine case of: first prize, a week in Philadelphia.