"Male functions": four trans marriages of the 1970s

Two tricksters, a lesbian mom, and a diaper fetishist are summoned to family court

In the 1970s, couples learned each other’s sex after the wedding.

Social justice lawsuits are often staged. The aggrieved parties may have been chosen by the lawyers, instead of the other way around. They have their ducks in a row, at least. Even in defeat, these tactical trailblazers come off dignified in the courts’ opinions.

But then there’s family court.

The 1970s matrimonial lawsuits I’ll show you in this post had social justice implications when they were decided, but they don’t seem staged. They’re raw and weird. The “transsexual” party doesn’t want to be in court; technically, they’re being sued. As far as I can tell, no advocacy group is aiding them. These lawsuits – which I only know about through the judges’ written opinions – are real life.

I’m using the term “transsexual” as the judges used it in these cases: to refer to individuals who medicalized or wanted to medicalize in order to resemble the opposite sex. In some quotations I replace terms like “plaintiff” with the party’s name, in brackets, to make the story easier to follow. 

Reading this post, keep in mind that family law was totally different in the 1970s. The first no-fault divorce law in the US was adopted in 1969 in California; in states that still didn’t allow it, people had to talk judges into letting them out of their marriages. Alimony was frequently ordered back then, and in meting out awards, judges took into account whose fault the divorce was. So spouses really had to sell the judge on their version of events.

Anonymous v. Anonymous (Queens, NY, 1971)

An anonymous army officer met “the defendant” on the street in Augusta, Georgia, and believed this person to be female. Then:

“[Army Officer] went with the defendant to a house of prostitution where they spent a short time together, but [Army Officer] did not see the defendant unclothed or have any sexual relations. Thereafter … the defendant followed [Army Officer] to his new duty station at Fort Hood, Texas. On February 22nd the parties took part in a marriage ceremony in Belton, Texas. They returned to [Army Officer’s] apartment. Being intoxicated, [Army Officer] went to sleep. He awoke at 2 o'clock in the morning, reached for the defendant and upon touching the defendant, discovered that the defendant had male sexual organs. He immediately left the bed, ‘got drunk some more’ and went to the bus station.”

Army Officer was then shipped overseas for a year, during which time the defendant sent him surgery bills and received an allotment from Army Officer’s pay. Once he returned, the defendant told him he’d become a woman, but Army Officer still wanted out. They traveled together from California to New York City – Army Officer’s hometown – to get a divorce. The defendant then ghosted, but Army Officer kept getting bills for merchandise he charged.

Thanks to some “medical articles,” the judge was able to muddle through:

“The court finds as a fact that the defendant was not a female at the time of the marriage ceremony. It may be that since that time the defendant's sex has been changed to female by operative procedures, although it would appear from the medical articles and other information supplied by counsel, that mere removal of the male organs would not, in and of itself, change a person into a true female.”

The court ruled that the marriage was a “nullity” because the defendant was male at the time of the ceremony. Legally, the two were never married. The defendant remains an enigma.

Christian v. Randall (Colorado, 1973)

Gay Christenson Christian and her husband, Duane, divorced in 1964. The divorce decree granted Gay custody of the couple’s four daughters. Several years later Duane found out that Gay, now known as Mark, was “going through a transsexual change.” Duane petitioned for custody and won in the trial court, but an appeals court saw it differently. A state statute required a good reason to disrupt kids’ status quo with a new custody order, the appeals court noted, and there wasn’t one here – the girls were thriving:

“[T]he evidence shows that the children were happy, healthy, well-adjusted children who were doing well in school and who were active in community activities.”

Christian v. Randall is a modern-sounding opinion. You can forget it’s fifty years old, especially when it mentions in passing that “subsequent to the filing of the petition [Gay/Mark] married a woman.”

Same-sex marriage wasn’t legal in Colorado or anywhere else in 1973. Gay/Mark must have pulled it off by having her legal sex changed to male. (A New York case decided the same year noted that 11 states allowed post-operative transsexuals to have their birth certificates amended to reflect their “new sex.”)

Gay sounds like a bold, practical woman. She apparently succeeded as a single mother in the 1960s and early 70s, a time when divorcees and lesbians were pariahs in many communities. Did she “go through a transsexual change” because she was anguished by having a female body? Or did she brave the wilds of 1970s trans medicine because she thought her partner would be better off with a husband than a girlfriend?

B. v. B. (Brooklyn, NY, 1974)

Frances B. sued her spouse, Mark B., for an annulment after realizing Mark had formerly gone by Marsha. The judge quoted Frances’ complaint:

"[Frances] endeavored to cohabit with defendant as defendant's wife, but was unable to have normal sexual intercourse with the defendant by reason of defendant's physical incapacity … defendant was and still is incapable of normal cohabitation or sexual intercourse or of entering into the marriage state by reason of the fact that defendant does not have male sexual organs, does not possess a normal penis, and in fact does not have a Penis"

According to Frances, Marsha/Mark told her that she’d married Frances “for the sole purpose of alleviating [Marsha/Mark’s] distressed mind.”

Marsha/Mark now wanted to counter-sue Frances for divorce on the grounds that Frances had “abandoned” her.

Rejecting Marsha/Mark’s request, the judge found:

“Assuming, as urged, that [Marsha/Mark] was a male entrapped in the body of a female, the record does not show that the entrapped male successfully escaped to enable [Marsha/Mark] to perform male functions in a marriage.”

I initially read that line as cheeky, but then I found a New Jersey appeal decided a few years later, MT v. JT. In surveying precedent from other states, the New Jersey panel earnestly described Marsha/Mark as “a female transsexual [who] had had a hysterectomy and mastectomy but had not received any male organs and was incapable of performing sexually as a male.” The New Jersey appellant, according to that court, was different from Marsha/Mark because he could have sex with his spouse, as a surgeon had dug a hole in his pelvis that was "the same as a normal female vagina after a hysterectomy." (Yeah, 1970s gynecology was wild.) 

I assume that at some point, New Jersey started allowing transsexuals to change their legal sex, which would have taken courts out of the business of deciding which ones could marry whom. Until then, the state’s matrimonial law held that trans women were women … and so were trans men.

Steinke v. Steinke (Pennsylvania, 1975)

In 1971, a 16-year old girl named Cecilia married a 20-year old man named Robert. Neither Cecilia nor her mother “noticed anything unusual about Robert at the time.” But soon after the wedding:

“Robert informed [Cecilia] that he never wanted to grow up and he started wearing diapers and rubber pants. On occasion he would request [Cecilia] to change the soiled diapers, which she refused to do.”

Within a year the couple had a baby and Robert stopped wearing diapers. Unfortunately:

“A few months later he expressed a desire to dress as a woman, and thereafter would wear women's clothes around the house. He obtained some information by mail regarding transexualism which detailed the treatments and surgical possibilities available to effect a complete change in sex. As the idea of becoming a woman grew on him, he began to visit doctors and psychiatrists with the view of developing himself as a woman. To this end he began taking hormones. Eventually doctors determined he was ‘not a fit subject’ for genital surgery and he resumed living as a man.”

Nevertheless, Cecilia sued Robert for divorce on the grounds that he had caused her “indignities,” a Pennsylvania legal standard describing “a course of behavior which is humiliating and degrading, inconsistent with the injured individual's position as a wife, making that condition intolerable and life a burden to her.” 

The court denied Cecilia’s petition for divorce:

"The evidence in this case falls far short of showing settled hate and estrangement by [Robert] toward [Cecilia]. At the hearing … he protested his love for his wife and child … [Robert] worked hard, supplied his wife with what he could afford, purchased a new car and furniture for her, did not want her to work preferring [sic] that she stay home and care for their child. Their home was open to friends.

"[Robert’s] bizarre conduct was the product of a psychiatric disorder. The conduct was not directed at [Cecilia] and was without any intention of hurting her."

Cecilia appealed. The appeals court reversed the lower court, finding that Robert had indeed imposed indignities on Cecilia:

“That the appellant-wife in the present case has come to find life with her husband intolerable and burdensome does not indicate unusual sensitivity or extraordinary delicacy on her part. It is certainly to be anticipated that a reasonable woman might react to her husband adopting not only the clothing, but the full physical appearance of a woman, by becoming shocked and repelled.”

As to Robert’s claim that he had a mental illness:

“In this day of growing acceptance of transvestite and homosexual behavior, with sex change operations a commonplace occurrence in many areas, we hesitate to accept the view that mental imbalance is displayed when an individual experiments with one of these concepts.”

And so, because of the growing acceptance of homosexuality, young Cecilia was allowed to divorce her diaper-fetishist, surgery-reject husband, even though he bought furniture for the family home.

This post was lightly edited on Sept. 27, 2024.