'Pregnant man' Thomas Beatie in legal limbo
Judge in divorce case questions gender, legitimacy of marriage
By Michael Kiefer The Republic |
azcentral.com Wed Dec 12, 2012 11:31 PM
http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/20121211pregnant-man-beatie-legal-limbo.html?nclick_check=1Thomas Beatie became a man in 2002, based on notes from his doctors, and shortly thereafter, he became a husband and a parent.
But now a Maricopa County Superior Court judge is questioning his gender and the legitimacy of his marriage, because after being legally declared male, Beatie performed that most female of miracles: he gave birth to three children.
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But the family court judge assigned to his case, Douglas Gerlach, is not certain he has jurisdiction. Arizona marriages, after all, are by law between a man and a woman. Same-sex marriage is forbidden, and the state of Arizona will not recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
Beatie was legally allowed to change his birth certificate and driver's license to say he is a man. He was legally allowed to get married as a man. Gerlach gets all that, but as he wrote into the court record, "In other words, it appears that, by any reasonable standard, (Beatie) was the biological mother of those children at the times they were born. As such, parties' marriage was between a female and a person capable of giving birth, who later did so."