Now In Court Nikki Araguz Fights For Her Dead Husband's Benefits, Though Her Opponents Call Her A Lying Man

http://www.queerty.com/nikki-araguz-deserves-her-dead-husbands-benefits-her-opponents-call-her-a-man-20110523/

When 30-year-old firefighter Thomas Araguz died in a blaze at a Texas egg farm southwest of Houston, he left $600,000 in benefits, property, and insurance to his 35-year-old wife Nikki Araguz. Nikki married Thomas in 2008 and says that her husband fully supported her gender reassignment surgical process which occurred two months after they wedded. But Thomas' mother Simona Longoria has filed a suit claiming that Thomas' side of the family only learned of Nikki's gender history just before his death, and that after he found out, he moved out of their home and planned to end the marriage. Now his family is suing so she doesn't get any benefits because she was born a man and Texas doesn't recognize same-sex marriage.

Unfortunately for Nikki, she and her husband has already testified in a custody hearing that he didn't know about her gender history prior to the hearing and that she did not tell him. Also Frank Mann, the lawyer representing person representing Thomas' family and ex-wife, is facing investigation by the State Bar of Texas's disciplinary office for a possible ethics violation in publicly disclosing Nikki Araguz's [gender history], during her mayoral campaign.

It is a shame.
The lady is just that, a lady.
Kinda criminal what has happened to her in this fiasco.

The lady is just that, a lady.

In fact she is being treated no different from the no-doubt millions of other women who are in court today fighting over what was left in some dead guys bank account.

And marriage was never based on love, that's a modern construct.  It's really about property.

Just because a thing is a modern construct does not invalidate said thing.
Personaly I have never maried for property and have only married for love.
Geting married for property is an old outdated construct.




(see what I did there?)

Had Araguz been born female, this thing would have never made the papers and it's possible her husband's family would never have taken this to court, unless they thought she was a gold digger or something.

In another case, Steig Larsson, the author of "The Girl....." trilogy lived with his girlfriend for almost 30 years but never married.  In Sweden they don't recognize common law marriages.  So when Larsson died at the tender age of 50 (just months after he turned the manuscripts over to the publisher), his father and brother became the heirs of his estate.  It took a few years for his books to become best sellers but his estate's value grew to $20M and his girlfriend got nothing.

In the Araguz case, it seems Texas law says she is male in their eyes and Texas doesn't permit same sex marriages.

So do you think maybe we ought start screaming for federal recognition under law or should we just keep doing what we are doing?

BTW, the state of Tennessee has sent a bill to the governor to sign that will take away any municipality's power to pass anti-discrimination laws.  Only the state can pass those laws.  How's that for returning to the dark ages?

I fail to see how the transgender umbrela decontructs gender.

The 'umbrela' as it were, is just a political construct that seeks to bring togather various disimilar groups, who are for similar reasons disenfrancised from the mainstream of society.

A group of people claiming kinship and similarity with eachother in no way erases anouthers identity.

The transgender umbrela in no way chalenges or invalidates anyones identity.

Basicaly what I am hearing here is a classic 'please stop' argument. Which is invalid on its very construction.

Quote from: Valeriedances on May 25, 2011, 08:56:10 AM
Yes, I do. This case is very upsetting.

The problem for me is how are we going to reconcile the transgender umbrella concept with how we determine Male/Female. The advocates pushing for Same Sex marriage (which I am for, but for different reasons) tie this with the umbrella concept, which deconstructs gender. As long as the community goes in this direction, I cant advocate for it.

The secondary problem I can see coming very quickly from holdings like we see in Nikki's case is that there could be a reticence by Court's to be willing to change a sex marker via Court Order in the absence of actual surgical intervention.  While this tends to be the case with birth certificates, the backlash would come with other ID such as driver's licenses and voters registration. 

At the moment, Texas law allows the DL to be the ID used to prove identity for a marriage license.  The birth certificate IS NOT required under the Family Code.  BUT, a court order changing the little letter on the DL without surgical intervention can give a result that mirrors what is at issue in cases such as Nikki's (and 15 years ago with the background in Littleton). 

The blurring of the 'gender' lines that exist vis a vis the 'transgender' umbrella push creates a legislative conundrum in cases of marriage.  The ruling has the potential practical impact of saying legal /= physical appearance and given the increase in people changing documents prior to surgical intervention, of having a asterisk in the databases of various ID files.  Do you really want the cop who stops you at the side of the road to be able to look at the computer and see that there was a change made to your DL to correct a birth defect?  Do you really want to risk being booked into a jail under a former name just because it existed in a database even though it also ignores a legal name change? 

 

QuoteThe 'umbrela' as it were, is just a political construct that seeks to bring togather various disimilar groups, who are for similar reasons disenfrancised from the mainstream of society.

Disenfranchising from societal mainstream of some groups does NOT mean that those of us who subscribe to a binary concept WANT to share space under an umbrella.  I remember in the early days of 'transgender' being forced upon the community as a replacement of 'transsexual' that the TG concept was to incorporate EVERY person who did not present as their birth gender.  I'm sorry but I don't have a damned thing in common with a heterosexual cross-dresser or a drag queen or, to be honest, someone who will never have surgical intervention to remedy a medical condition present from birth.  But because that 'umbrella' political construct of 'transgender' exists, we now see the media continue to describe people like Nikki as a 'transgendered widow' instead of just as a 'grieving widow' who happens to be a transsexual of heterosexual orientation.  And if people will recall, her blog of April 26th expressly asked that the media QUIT REFERRING to her as a transgender or as transgendered.  She identifies as a heterosexual woman.  If pushed on the medical background, she will recognize the transsexual terminology.

Cases such as have a factual situation like we see in Nikki's court battle require, by their very nature, a narrowly defined view, not some giant umbrella construct that encompasses people who have no desire to marry in a heterosexual fashion or who may find the very idea of surgical intervention to be completely abhorrent.

While politics can make for strange bedfellows, there are some fellows I do not want to share a bed with...   

But the genie is out of the bottle. Not all TS folks agree that TS should be removed from the umbrela. The argument seems to be that because a group of TS do want to be removed from the umbrela it should be so. That doesn't work for me. I see being divided a certain path to failure.
Being a woman of transsexual history has nothing to do with being a cross dresser. Granted. 100% agree. But the bigots see no diferance what so ever. We are all the same in their eyes. Removing TS from the TG umbrela will not change the bigots opinion at all. All separation does is make us weaker.

It would not matter what TS call themselves. No amount of wordsmithing is going to change the way society see us. They see us as deviant freaks and only by working togather with as many allies as we can muster can we hope to change society.

As for legislators....
It doesn't matter to them how they vote so long as they get re-elected. Many of them are recognising that the LGBT/T is a voting bloc. We need to have as many people in that bloc as possible to sway the law maker.

Its all politics.

The ONLY way it becomes palatable for a conservative legislator to support legislation that would prevent another situation like Nikki's is for them to think in binary terms.  They NEED to grasp that marital benefits for the post-operative transsexual are, in fact, all about maintaining the traditional notions of marriage.  The efforts need to necessarily be separated from the arguments regarding same-sex marriage. 

And yes, I realize that by separating the two, it could delay the ability for me to legally marry a lesbian partner while residing in the State of Texas...well, ok, I could marry elsewhere (I refuse to stoop to the absurdity that followed Littleton), but divorce is problematic as another friend in Travis County discovered last year (the Atty General tried to intervene to stop the divorce and was bitch-slapped by both the trial court AND the 3rd Court of Appeals at Austin).

I guess I have to concede that it is more than mildly ironic that the very issue that drew me back to the board vis a vis the reactivation of the account and that could result in my working for some revisions to the Family Code in the 83rd Session (next Session, not the current one) will also result in my pissing many people off here precisely because my efforts would seek further codification and recognition of the binary structures of marriage.   

 

Quote from: Valeriedances on May 25, 2011, 10:44:34 AM
How are gay organizations tied to heterosexual transsexual people? I dont see the connection.An ally is one thing, but adding a T to an acronym, GLBT, is more than allying.

But that is a side argument compared to direct representation.

Because the bigoted class do not see any diferance in a transwoman and a gay man.
We know that is rediculous and near sighted. But those who would like to erase us from existance all togather could care less. A trans woman and a gay male are the same to the bigot. A trans man and a lesbian are the same to a bigot.
This is the tie that should bind us.
I completely understand not wanting to be equated to a man. I was just strugling with this today because I will be attending a gathering in a month that will include alot of gender queer and asorted non binary people. No I do not like the idea that someone might read me and peg me as a male due to the company I am keeping. But that is not on me. I am not in control of what others think. I can not live my life worrying what others think and I sure as hell am not going to ask my gender queer peers to alter themselves for my comfort. What kinda hypocrit would that make me?
As for the the various alphabet soup groups like I said already.... The genie is out of the bottle.

Quote from: Ann Onymous on May 25, 2011, 02:42:38 PM
I guess I have to concede that it is more than mildly ironic that the very issue that drew me back to the board vis a vis the reactivation of the account and that could result in my working for some revisions to the Family Code in the 83rd Session (next Session, not the current one) will also result in my pissing many people off here precisely because my efforts would seek further codification and recognition of the binary structures of marriage.

I'm thinking if the end result of your efforts are that anyone who transitions genders will be legally recognized at the state and federal level as being of their identified gender, there won't be a lot of people here pissed off at you.  Anyone paying attention to how government works knows we have to accept taking things with baby steps.

My big worry is that the laws will be made so that we can't marry anyone. And that my marriage which is between two trans folks will be somehow invalidated somehow in the future.
I worry about this big time.
I worry that if I tinker with my documents in regards to my legal sex somehow that will be ussed to invalidate my marriage as that makes it a same sex marriage.

Quote from: cynthialee on May 25, 2011, 10:59:47 PM
My big worry is that the laws will be made so that we can't marry anyone. And that my marriage which is between two trans folks will be somehow invalidated somehow in the future.
I worry about this big time.
I worry that if I tinker with my documents in regards to my legal sex somehow that will be ussed to invalidate my marriage as that makes it a same sex marriage.

I do not envision a situation where we 'cannot marry anyone.'  The Courts have ruled in the past that marriage is a fundamental right.  So to say that we could not marry ANYONE would carry with it Constitutional implications at the federal level if not the State level. 

Additionally, an act that serves to invalidate an existing marriage would carry with it other Constitutional implications related to the prohibitions related to ex post facto elements of law.  As a good example of why we don't see such issues occurring, take a look at the language in the much-discussed Texas SB723- although I did not agree that it was the gloom and doom legislation some made it out to be, it also expressly stated that it only would apply to applications made on or after the effective date of the legislation.  It would not have been retroactive.