Visible Man: Transmen on trial

Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion, advice, and information from an internationally respected leader of the FTM community.

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Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Shakespeare could have been writing about Linda Kantaras, the 33-year-old wife of Michael Kantaras, a 42-year-old bakery manager and FTM transsexual. After nine years of marriage, one adopted child (she was pregnant when they met, he adopted the baby) and a second child conceived using sperm from Michael's brother, Michael fell in love with Sherry Noodwang, one of Linda's best girlfriends. She asked him if he was attracted to Sherry, and Michael told the truth: yes. They split up. It wasn't pretty. Sherry divorced her husband to be with Michael, and Michael started divorce proceedings against Linda. That was over three years ago.

Linda was furious. According to Michael, she dragged the process out and poisoned the two children against him. Now she has pulled out all the stops, claiming he is not entitled to child custody because he is a woman and therefore their marriage was never valid, so he should have no parental rights. Oh, by the way, he should still pay alimony and child support. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Lesbian mothers have used the same tactics to prevent nonbiological parents from having access to their children.

This is not the first time a woman has attempted to publicly emasculate her FTM husband. But it is the first time such a case has been nationally televised on Court TV. Well over 120 hours of testimony, analysis and commentary about the validity of FTM identity and civil rights has been broadcast into millions of homes across America. The Rev. Jerry Falwell has made his typical pronouncements. Doctors have declared that the size of a penis isn't what defines a social man or a fit parent. A court-appointed psychologist testified that Michael should have custody because he was the better parent. Linda's sister testified that she and the rest of Linda's family felt compelled to tell the children "their father wasn't really their father, but, in fact, he was a woman" without consulting Michael or inviting him to be present. Another doctor described the phalloplasty procedure in such a demeaning way as to make Michael seem absolutely reasonable in his decision not to have that surgery. Jeb Bush's Florida courts will soon make a proclamation about legal maleness in a state where only a man and a woman may wed. In an unprecedented number of public polls conducted on the Court TV Web site, Michael has won popular approval day after day. All in all, the coverage has been quite fair, in spite of the inept, ignorant remarks and questions that have occasionally spewed from reporters or commentators in their effort to understand or explain such a complex phenomenon as transsexualism in fragmentary sound-bites, and in spite of how painful it has been to watch Michael have to explain how he has sex and how he urinates.

People ask over and over about the validity of marriage between an FTM and a nontrans woman (or between a transwoman and an nontrans man, for that matter). The willingness to honor the agreements made by the two people involved, in the spirit in which they were undertaken, is the clearest indicator of respect that a partner or a family (or any other potential party to the agreement, by extension, for example, children or other heirs to an estate) can extend. Marriages involving transpeople don't always have to end in the deliberate invalidation of the person. Dissolving a marriage or distributing an estate does not inherently necessitate disclosing a transperson's trans status. When that happens, it is usually because of tremendous anger.

Linda Kantaras is expressing the pent-up anger of all women against partners who leave them, and against "best friends" who "steal their husbands." Linda Kantaras is attempting to use her children as weapons against the man who disappointed her. She is not all women, nor does she represent all women who form relationships with men or transmen.

Michael Kantaras is not all FTMs. He is not all husbands or all fathers, or all FTM husbands or fathers. But he has been dissected and scrutinized in a way that no other FTM ever has before, and to many people who have watched Court TV from late January through early February 2002, he does, for better or worse, epitomize female-to-male transsexual people. There is a way in which all transmen are on trial here.

While there have been cases like this before in other states (the Vecchione case in Orange County, California in 1997 and 1998 comes to mind, in which an FTM's maleness was upheld in court, his marriage validated and dissolved and joint legal custody of his child was established), the weight of case law is against transpeople, who have repeatedly been held prisoners of narrow, unscientific, stereotypically binary views of the universe, and patriarchal notions of the divine right or manifest destiny of prominent penises.

As I write this, the case is still before Judge Gerard O'Brien, who is faced with the daunting task of determining (first) what constitutes a man in the state of Florida, (second) whether Michael and Linda Kantaras' marriage was valid and, if so, whether (and on what grounds) he should grant them a divorce, and (finally) what custody arrangement should he allow? The eyes of a nation are upon him: a religious nation, a secular nation, a homosexual nation, a homophobic nation, a trans nation. Many "special interest groups" have a legitimate special interest in the outcome of this case. And, as in any family law case, no matter what Judge O'Brien decides, someone is going to get hurt.

Whether or not Michael Kantaras prevails, the FTM community will have to grapple with the principles of law that will be invoked by the decision, and if we are advocating for justice for all regardless of gender, we may find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Uncontested divorces without rancor, stipulating joint custody, with the welfare of the children's relationships with both parents treated respectfully and no ugly resorting to personal invalidation on the part of nontrans parties to disputes would be so much easier on everyone. Judges wouldn't be forced to rule on matters of social identity and functioning that are beyond their expertise, and we might be able to move toward a world in which all relationships are honored. People should be free to love who they love, form relationships as they choose, and make and honor the commitments they feel are right for them, regardless of sex or gender. In Florida, I'm afraid, the battle of the sexes will still rage on, but I'm hopeful that this case will call some assumptions into question, and that will ultimately help us in the long term advance toward freedom from binary and arbitrary notions of right and wrong in relationships.