Judge rules that transsexual
did not lie on marriage application
STEVE BRISENDINE, kansascity.com November 16, 2004
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. -- A transsexual who signed a marriage license application as a woman did not lie, even though she is legally considered a man, a judge ruled Tuesday.
In his opinion, issued from the bench immediately after attorneys gave their closing arguments, Leavenworth County District Judge Frank Stewart said it was impossible to determine whether Sandy Clarissa Gast had intended to lie on the application or whether she truly believed herself to be female.
Gast was on trial on a misdemeanor charge of false swearing, which carries a $500 fine.
Prosecutors said she should have been listed as a man on the marriage license application, filed in February.
Gast, 48, was born Edward Gast and underwent sex change surgery in October after living for several years as a woman.
She had planned to marry George "Georgi" Somers, who is a man but lives as a woman.
Gast, who hugged Somers and other supporters after the verdict, said she was not sure if she would apply for another marriage license, which would require another court challenge.
She surrendered the first application at her initial court appearance in March, and she and Somers went through what they called a "holy union" ceremony in Topeka on March 20.
"I don't know what my next step is going to be," Gast said, holding Somers' hand outside the courtroom.
"Right now I'm just going to kick back."
Defense lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray, who represented Gast on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, acknowledged that he had been prepared to take the case to a higher level.
"We would have loved to have had the (Kansas) Supreme Court address this, but clearly the evidence in this case showed that the determination of sex and gender at birth can be flawed," Irigonegaray said.
"This is a tremendous victory for transgendered people everywhere," he said.
Prosecutor Frank Kohl, who contended Gast is still legally male despite the sex change surgery, said the court "had a solid foundation for making its finding because it took into account the thought process."
"By law she's still defined as male, but he couldn't find a way to tell what she was thinking," Kohl said.
In 2002, the state Supreme Court invalidated a transsexual woman's marriage to a man, even though J'Noel Gardiner's sex change was recognized in her home state of Wisconsin.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review that decision, effectively upholding it.
Kansas recognizes marriage as only between a man and a woman, although a proposal to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage failed in the last legislative session.
Gast testified Tuesday that she never felt comfortable being born a man, even through three marriages and a stint in the Air Force.
She said her sense of identification as a female went back to her childhood, when she dressed in girls' clothes, often while playing in the woods with her older brother.
"We would pretend that he was Tarzan and I was Jane," she said.
When her father discovered she had been dressing in girls' clothing, she said, he raped her
-- and continued doing so for about seven years, until she was around 14 years old.
Topeka psychologist George Hough testified that Gast should have been considered a woman even before her sex-change surgery because she suffered from what Hough called "gender identity disorder," in which a person defines him or herself as belonging to the opposite sex.
Hough also testified that Gast was repeatedly abused by her father in an effort to "rape this idea out of her head."
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