Transsexual Seeks Divorce From Wife; Wants to Remarry (original) (raw)
Transsexual Seeks Divorce From Wife; Wants to Remarry
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Oct. 7, 1970
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October 7, 1970
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A 37‐year‐old Navy veteran Is going to State Supreme Court this morning in hopes of win ning a ruling that will broaden the rights of the transsexual.
The veteran, whose sex was changed from male to female by surgery in Casablanca last spring, is trying to divorce the woman she married in the days when she was known as Buddy Hartin.
Miss Hartin, who now uses the first name Deborah, is bas ing her case on the claim that her wife, Patricia, abandoned her in 1957 after three years of marriage.
Under New York's divorce law, abandonment is a legiti mate ground for divorce unless the abandonment is justified. Miss Hartin concedes that her wife might have had good cause to leave—"I was cross‐dressing even then,” she said yesterday —but hopes that the judge, Thomas A. Aurelio, will inter pret the statute in her favor.
Miss Hartin said she wanted to remarry. She is not yet en gaged, she said, but is “going out with a few fellows right now.” And in cases of trans sexuals such as she, said her lawyer, Ira Van Leer, “it would be a horrible injustice” to in terpret the law literally.
The transsexual, who is cur rently unemployed, living on welfare said she had felt more like a woman than a man for as long as she can remember. “It starts when you're 6 or 9,” she explained, adding that even as a small boy she used to try on her mother's clothes.
But it was not until 1952, the year that a young Army clerk named George Jorgensen was changed, by surgery in Denmark to Christine Jorgen sen, that she thought there might be an answer to her problem.
“I decided to join the Navy,” she said. “I thought I could jump ship in Europe and go to Denmark for the operation.” She was, however, sent to a naval base in Maryland; she found life among the other un married sailors there so “un comfortable” that she decided in 1953 to get married so she could live off the base.
A year later her wife gave birth to a daughter. “My wife thought it would change my feelings, make me feel more like a man,” she explained. “All it did was make me more eager to be a woman.”
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