That G/G entered into a marriage and attempted to leave property to a female spouse indicates intent—intent that should be respected. Whether G/G was “psychologically female” or “psychologically male” is really beside the point in this issue: G/G took a wife under the law, and tried to leave his/her estate to that wife.

As far as the other point(s), it seems to me that many who have commented here are willing to defend G/G’s right to select a different gender identity than that which “she” was born with—but nearly none are willing to allow that G/G just might have changed “his” mind about the matter or even regretted the first decision. Is such a (second) decision to be treated as invalid just because G/G did not pursue another round of surgery? Are we willing to allege that God made a “mistake” in assigning Gloria’s chromosomes, but unwilling to allow that George just might have felt he had made a mistake in “correcting” that? Since G/G is now deceased, we shall never in this world know what his/her “psychological gender” was at time of death: all we know is the chromosomal makeup of the deceased’s somatic cells, and the will expressed in various acts while living—which it seems to me we have a responsibility to respect.

What gave you the impression that this amounted to harming Mr. Hemingway in any way, Tupo? The fact that PervScan said his “gender limbo” would cause his father, the writer Ernest Hemingway, to roll over in his grave? After all, Hemingway senior had a distinctly ambivalent if not hostile attitude toward gays and lesbians, so it’s only reasonable to presume he would have felt the same way about transsexuals too. Granted, this is only speculation, but it’s hard to imagine that such a macho guy as Hemingway would have found it easy to accept his son’s gender-bending ways.

First, the conflation of the separate concepts of “gay” and “transgender” exposes the well-intentioned Supervert as less than well-informed. They are not the same, nor does one imply the other.

Second, beginning with the title of the piece and continuing throughout its text, Supervert demonstrates a (no doubt unintentional) disrespect for Gloria’s gender, which she went to great lengths to make consistent both as to her body and soul. With her post-surgery anatomy matching her identity, what “difficult questions” about her gender remain? What justifies the continued use of male pronouns for Gloria, even after sex reassignment surgery made her unequivocally female? Supervert’s purported uncertainty as to Gloria’s gender is rooted in the same deeply ingrained unconscious prejudices that cause our larger society to deny the reality that some people (through no fault of their own) are born with an anatomy that does not match their identity. Whatever trauma Gloria’s father caused her would have paled compared to an entire society’s disrespect for Gloria’s true gender, even after sex reassignment surgery eliminated any ambiguity. Just as Supervert pathologizes Gloria as a pitifully deranged “gender-bender,” so society’s ongoing rejection of her as pathological and deranged was likely one of the greatest sources of her ongoing misery.

Gloria’s father, after all, was no longer alive. The impact on Gloria of childhood experiences that lingered after her father’s death could have been greatly alleviated by a supportive and understanding society. Transgender status in itself does not cause mental and emotional difficulties or early death. Rather, the source of the problem is our fearful and ignorant society that misunderstands and oppresses transgender people.

Third, might unintended, unconscious misogyny lie at the root of an analysis that concludes that Gloria’s sex reassignment surgery “was a form of self-punishment: if he felt guilty at not being able to live up to the image of machismo, then becoming a woman might have been a way of expunging his guilt by punishing and degrading himself.” Isn’t it possible that Gloria always internally self-identified as female, and waited until after her father’s death to proceed with SRS out of consideration for his likely inability to understand? Why conclude that Gloria regarded her anatomical transition to her correct female gender as “self-punishment,” a reason to feel “guilty,” an “inability to live up” to potential, or being “degraded”? Isn’t it far more likely that Gloria had positive associations with the gender that she went to such great lengths to make her anatomy consistent with?

–NYCGuy

Your commentary, especially since it was so thoughtful, is very welcome. Contrary opinions are always tonic to read and consider, so by all means make your views known. Conflict is good. As Heraclitus said, all things come into being and are destroyed through strife.

That being said, there was certainly no disrespect intended toward G/G or G/G’s gender. You seem to accept that G/G was, at the time of death, female — and by choice. However, Supervert’s opinion was that G/G’s gender status was not quite so clear. Reuters used the male pronoun, and the Florida courts seemed to think of G/G as a male. Because same-sex marriages were not yet legal in Florida, G/G must have accepted upon himself the legal status of male in order to marry his wife. Granted, this could have been a mere legal expedient — but the questions remain. Which gender is your “true” gender: the one you’re born with? The one you die with? The one you’re given? The one you choose? Do the presence of a surgically constructed vagina and a female worldview make up for the other sorts of gender identity a person is born with? Do these things compensate for the typical XY chromosome of a born male?

Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. The point is that G/G’s status raised those questions without, in Supervert’s opinion, resolving them. Aside from what looked like the greediness of G/G’s heirs, this is why the case was going to court. The law was going to decide what G/G was — man or woman. To be clear, a court decision wouldn’t resolve the issue either — can it ever be definitively decided, you think? — but it would have been fascinating to see what the legal precedent might have been.