Littleton v.Prange Withholds Survivor Rights from Transsexual Spouses

Male-to-female transsexual Christie Lee Littleton was determined by the courts to be legally male based on her genetic sex and therefore not eligible to file a medical malpractice suit as a surviving spouse.

Date October 27, 1999

Locale San Antonio, Texas

Key Figures

• Phil Hardberger chief justice, Texas Court of Appeals
• Christie Lee Littleton (b. 1952), appellant and petitioner in Littleton v. Prange
• Jonathan Mark Littleton (1961-1996), husband of Christie Lee Littleton
• Mark A. Prange medical doctor, appellee, and respondent in Littleton v. Prange

Summary of Event

On October 27, 1999, a Texas Court of Appeals denied an appeal by male-to-female transsexual Christie Lee Littleton, who had sued the doctor of her deceased husband. Littleton filed the appeal in response to a medical malpractice suit she filed in her capacity as the surviving spouse of Jonathan Mark Littleton. She appealed the summary judgment that was made in favor of Mark Prange, M.D. Christie’s husband had been one of Prange’s patients, but Jonathan died in 1996 after developing blood clots in his lungs. Christie filed suit against Prange. The Court of Appeals, however, found that because Christie had been born “a physically healthy male” in San Antonio, Texas, in 1952, and that “at the time of birth, Christie was a male, both anatomically and genetically,” she, therefore, “cannot be [legally] married to another male.” Because her marriage to Jonathan was deemed by the court to be invalid on that basis, the court upheld the summary judgment that dismissed her cause of action as the surviving spouse in the malpractice suit.

Born Lee Cavazos, Jr., Christie legally changed her name to Christie Lee Cavazos in 1977 and underwent a series of gender reassignment surgeries between November, 1979, and February, 1980. She married Jonathan in Kentucky in 1989 and lived with him until his death in 1996 at the age of thirty-five. After her appeal of the summary judgment was denied by the Fourth Court of Appeals, she was denied discretionary review by the Texas Supreme Court, and she ultimately filed a petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of Texas with the U.S. Supreme Court. On October 2, 2000, her petition was denied.

Significance

In the decision for Littleton v. Prange, Texas Court of Appeals chief justice Phil Hardberger stated that the case involved the following deep philosophical and legal question: “Can a physician change the gender of a person with a scalpel, drugs and counseling, or is a person’s gender immutably fixed by our Creator at birth?” The issue of the legality of sex and gender had been applied in this specific case to the question of transsexual marriage. Hardberger found that Littleton’s assigned (male) sex/gender at birth is her legal sex/gender because “the male chromosomes do not change with either hormonal treatment or sex reassignment surgery”; so, he reasoned, “biologically a post-operative female transsexual is still a male.”

At issue in the appeal and the subsequent petition for writ of certiorari was how the legality of sex/gender is determined, and whether the inconsistency of the determination on a state-by-state basis leads to a violation of a transsexual person’s right and ability to marry. As pointed out in the 2000 petition, there had been three central questions: First, should a legal marriage entered into in one state be recognized by other states? Second, should the legal sex/gender of a transsexual be defined by medical professionals post-operatively or as stated on an original birth certificate? Third, does the constitutionally protected right to marry extend to transsexuals?

By holding that the legal sex/gender of a transsexual born in Texas is genetically determined and may not be changed, the court invalidated Christie Littleton’s marriage and denied her the rights afforded to a legal spouse. The Littleton case, however, has since led to several legal marriages between lesbians, in which one partner was a male-to-female transsexual with XY chromosomes (determined to be male at birth), who was partnered with a woman and therefore in a lesbian relationship. The case also informed a decision in 2002 in Kansas involving J’Noel Gardiner, a transsexual woman whose marriage was similarly challenged in an inheritance case. The Kansas court ruled that a “man,” determined to be male at birth, cannot marry another man.

Bibliography

Coombs, Mary. “Sexual Dis-Orientation: Transgendered People and Same-Sex Marriage.” UCLA Women’s Law Journal 8 (Spring/Summer, 1998): 219.

Flynn, Taylor. “Protecting Transgender Families: Strategies for Advocates.” Human Rights Magazine (American Bar Association), Summer, 2003. http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/summer03/transgender.html.

Greenberg, Julie A. “When Is a Man a Man, and When Is a Woman a Woman?” 52 Florida Law Review 745 (September, 2000).

Littleton v. Prange. No. 04-99-00010-CV. Court of Appeals of Texas, San Antonio. October 27, 1999.

Littleton v. Prange. No. 00-25. On Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the Supreme Court of Texas. Supreme Court of the United States. July 3, 2000.

Minter, Shannon. “Transgender Persons and Marriage: The Importance of Legal Planning.” National Center for Lesbian Rights. January, 2004. http://www.nclrights.org/publications/tgmarriage.htm.

Morgan, Laura. “Boys Will Be Boys: Littleton v. Prange and In re Estate of Gardiner.” Family Law Reader, April, 2002. http://www.famlaw consult.com/archive/reader200204.html.

Tallant, Kevin. “My ’Dude Looks Like a Lady’: The Constitutional Void of Transsexual Marriage.” 36 Georgia Law Review 635 (Winter, 2002).

Texas Gender Advocacy Information Network. “The Christie Lee Littleton Story.” http://christie lee.net.