The couple walked
into a Norfolk courthouse on a spring day, exchanged a
few words, and within 10 minutes, were seemingly husband and
wife. It was an unremarkable ceremony -- except that
several weeks later, officials realized the shapely
bride might not have been a woman.
Now authorities
in Virginia, where same-sex marriages are illegal, are
weighing whether to file misdemeanor charges against the
couple, Antonio E. Blount, 31, and Justin L. McCain,
18. An announcement is expected this week.
A prosecutor says
the decision to press charges could turn on whether the
pair knowingly misled officials when they applied for a
license and later traveled to a courthouse for a
ceremony. If the bride is transgender and identifies
as a woman, it is unclear whether the marriage would be
considered illegal.
The pair went to
Newport News circuit court on March 24 to obtain a
marriage license -- McCain appearing as a woman and saying
the name ''Justine'' before a deputy, said Newport
News circuit court clerk Rex Davis.
McCain produced a
Virginia driver's license, but a design quirk -- the
'm' or 'f' for male or female appears directly against a
darkened state seal -- meant nobody noticed McCain's
gender, Davis said.
''When things are
rolling along and you don't have any reason to suspect
that somebody is not being completely forthright with you,
you might not take the time to check,'' said Davis,
who issues about 2,200 licenses a year.
The same day, the
couple traveled 19 miles south to Norfolk, where local
marriage commissioner Al Coward performed the ceremony.
''They pawned
themselves off as a man and a woman, and they did a very
good job,'' he said.
Davis said
officials became suspicious around May 12, when McCain
returned to court to apply for a name change. The new name,
Penelopsky Aaryonna Goldberry, ''raised a red flag,''
said Davis.
Paperwork later
revealed McCain's legal name of record was Justin, not
Justine. Davis said vital statistics officials in McCain's
home state of North Carolina later confirmed McCain
was born male, though they would not provide actual
records.
When McCain
called to check on the name change application last month,
Davis said the teen confirmed the birth gender.
The couple has
not commented publicly since the ceremony, and the
Associated Press was not able to locate either person. Davis
said it is considered illegal because both individuals
are legally considered to be men.
A man who
answered a door at a Norfolk address linked to McCain late
last month identified himself as McCain's grandfather.
But he said the teen had moved and wasn't in touch
with the family. Calls to a phone number listed for
the teen went unanswered.
Activists say the
case highlights the difficulty in trying to fit
transgender individuals into rigid legal definitions of what
makes one male or female. Less than 1% of Americans
are transgender, a fluid term that can apply as much
to a person who has had gender reassignment surgery as
to those who take hormones or wear clothing to resemble
another sex.
Most state courts
have been silent on the issue of whether marriages
involving a transgender person are valid, transgender rights
advocates say. Most case law involving transgender
rights, meanwhile, surrounds discrimination, not
marriage.
Transgender
people are increasingly recognized by courts as matching
their ''gender identity,'' or internal sense of gender, said
Cole Thaler, an attorney with gay rights legal group
Lambda Legal, an LGBT rights group.
That means ''it's
not deceptive for a transgender person who lives their
life as a gender different from the gender they were
assigned,'' said Thaler.
Complicating the
issue is a confusing system for how a transgender
individual changes gender on legal documents. All but
Tennessee, Ohio, and Idaho typically change one's
gender on their birth certificate following gender
reassignment surgery, according to the National Center
for Transgender Equality. But local, state, and federal
agencies have their own standards for defining male or
female, according to Paisley Currah, founder of the
Transgender Law and Policy Institute. The result: One
person's sex may vary from birth certificate to passport to
doctor's office.
''You could have
a driver's license in New York State that says you're a
male and have a birth certificate from New York City that
says you're female -- there's no simple answer to the
question of someone's legal gender,'' Currah said.
How a court might
view the case isn't clear. In 1999, a Texas court threw
out a wrongful death lawsuit a transgender woman filed after
the death of her husband, ruling that while the
plaintiff had undergone a sex-change operation, she
was actually a man and her marriage invalid. But in 2004,
a Kansas court ruled in favor of a male-to-female
transsexual who identified as a woman to apply for
marriage.
Newport News
investigators will decide whether there was false
information on the marriage license application, said
Newport News Commonwealth's attorney Howard Gwynn.
Though Davis said applicants must swear to the truth
of the information on their marriage license, the
application mentioned ''groom'' and ''bride,'' not male and
female.
That has been
changed to say ''male applicant'' and ''female applicant,''
Davis said. (Dionne Walker, AP)