What's happening is that computer systems are being updated to cope with a divorce following a same gender marriage.
This means there are changes around whether both spouses may have the same gender or not, whether genders must be different if the type of marriage is different gender and so on.
Unfortunately it is a reality that a lot of marriages come to an end as a result of one party coming to understand their gender issues so it is possible that these changes will have an effect on members of this community.
Personally I feel that there is enough of a struggle attaining and maintaining a sense of identity that to have official documentation insist you are a gender other than the one you identify with, or unspecified, or unidentified stands a chance of adding extra stress during what is likely to already be an extremely stressful time.
From the SOs point of view I can see how it might be a bit insensitive to insist that a marriage be classified as same-gender when the whole reason for the divorce is because the different gender marriage they thought they had signed up for turns out to be something else.
It would be interesting to hear what others think about this.
As far as I'm aware, the gender of a married person in the UK is taken from their birth certificate. That's why, for many years, it was impossible for, say, a post-op transsexual woman to marry a man - even if her sex had changed on their passport, driving license, etc - because her birth certificate still listed her in her birth sex, ie. male. So when transsexuals managed to get marriage legalised, the way it was done was to allow them to change the gender given on their birth certificate, so for legal purposes they were now born female and could thus marry a man (and vice-versa for FTMs).
The fact that marriage depends on birth certificates also, however, means that an MTF who stays with her wife can still legally be married, in the old-fashioned man-and-woman sense until such time as she chooses to change her birth certificate. Because if she doesn't change it, then she's still a male husband of a female wife, so far as the law is concerned.
But if an MTF changed her birth certificate to female and THEN married another woman, that would constitute a 'gay marriage'.
Confusing, huh?! :)
That is one of the things that changes with the equal marriage act. It used to be that a married transexual would need to get their marriage annulled (as in legally considered never to have existed) if they wished to have their birth certificate changed. With the equal marriage act this requirement disappears.
Instead we end up with a tanglement of possibilities as Nikki outlined.
Rosie
Thanks for the replies girls.
Just to give a bit of background, from my point of view, and I should also say my partners point of view, as much as it would have been nice to change my birth certificate, we were not prepared to change the marriage record in order to accomplish this. As far as I was concerned the important records such as passport, bank, employment, doctors and driving licence etc have been done. The only other record that would have remained 'male' would have been my death certificate and I wouldn't have been around to complain about that.
Now that the Equal Marriage act has arrived, I can get a 'full house', so to speak, without any undue stress (on myself or my partner) as the important thing for us is that we got married and, luckily, we intend to stay that way. An annulment would have been catastrophic for our relationship.
Would adding gender and sex, or, 'acquired gender' and 'birth sex' to cater for the whole load of genders and the biological sex assigned at birth on these records be helpful? Would it be better to simplify things and offer just 'Man' and 'Woman' or 'Male' or 'Female' as genders and leave it up to the individuals to apply to change this if they want. For some, this would be a case of one partner/spouse persuading the other that this is what they want etc.
Anyhoo, thanks again.. :)
Nikki