One interesting issue I encountered in my various research projects on marriage is how transgender individuals interact with the law of same-sex marriage. For example, if a couple is originally married as a man and a woman, and one of the parties later changes their legal sex, does that invalidate the marriage (if the state does not allow same-sex marriage)? I’ve found surprisingly few written appellate decisions on this topic.
Yesterday, the Indiana Court of Appeals concluded that the answer was “no.” If the marriage was valid when the parties entered into it in Indiana, then nothing in Indiana’s anti-same-sex marriage law changes that. The case was litigated by Professor Steve Sanders, at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. I’ve previously posted about Sanders’s scholarship on the importance of reliance interests in marriage law.