Saturday, September 4, 2010

Nikki Araguz - Possible Methods for Avoiding a Legal Battle Like Hers

While it may not be entirely possible for transsexual and intersex people to prevent or avoid the sort of legal calamity that currently consumes Nikki Araguz's life, there are steps that people can take that may help. What follows are descriptions of some of the various ways in which transsexual and intersex people may be able to protect themselves from the sort of real life legal and media onslaught that Nikki Araguz currently faces. The topics covered include: identity documents, estate planning, jurisdictional choices, and other defensive legal protections.

Transsexual and intersex people live in a world of legal uncertainty with regard to: legal sex status recognition, ability to marry, access to healthcare, rights to privacy, and so on. However, legal counseling during the medical treatment process for transsexual and intersex people appears to be one of the glaring omissions within such treatment protocols. Such omissions may account for the many instances of transsexual and intersex people finding themselves in situations without having made appropriate legal preparations. It seems like every transsexual and intersex person receiving medical treatment and counseling for their conditions should have some legal counseling included as part of the process. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be a priority for such professionals, all too often with embarrassing or even catastrophic results.

There are multiple areas of legal protections that are important, such as:
  • Transsexual and intersex people need to get all their identity documentation in order. The gold standard among these documents is a birth certificate with the correct name and sex designation on it. With an appropriate birth certificate, it is usually possible to persuade relevant governmental agencies to change a person's other identity records.
  • Every transsexual or intersex person needs to have estate documents, even if they own little or nothing. Estate documents such as a will, or a will and trust combination, are essential, no matter how young someone is.
  • Legal documents for medical care are also essential, including wishes regarding treatment when not consciously able to make one's own decisions, wishes regarding resuscitation, organ donation, blood transfusion, specifically naming hospital visitors, and so on.
  • Making strategic choices about where to live is also essential for transsexual and intersex people. Residential location within the U.S. determines legal jurisdiction, which can determine the difference between avoiding legal problems and experiencing the sort of legal nightmare that faces Nikki Araguz.

Choice of Residence

It seems worthwhile to address choice of residence first, since doing so can help avoid many of the legal problems that unfavorable jurisdictions create for transsexual and intersex people. For example, if the circumstances of Nikki and Thomas Araguz 's lives and marriage had enabled them to move to a more favorable U.S. state, Nikki could probably have avoided the lawsuit currently filed against her. People in the U.S. generally have few if any restrictions when it comes to choosing where they live. However, making strategic choices about where to live appears to be a huge psychological hurdle for many people, including transsexual and intersex people. Self help discussion web sites for transsexual and intersex people frequently contain discussions in which one person recommends that another person change their geographic residence, but they are often met with resistance.  Moving may be stressful to do at the outset, but the results for transsexual and intersex people could make all the difference when it comes to avoiding the problems created for transsexual and intersex people merely by living in certain jurisdictions.

For example, if Nikki and Thomas Araguz had moved to a state like Massachusetts after their marriage, they could probably have avoided the entire ordeal that Nikki Araguz currently faces. However, Nikki and Thomas Araguz had at least one very legitimate obstacle that would have made relocation a difficult choice. The problem is that the divorce decree between Thomas Araguz and Heather Delgado, his ex-wife, probably required Thomas Araguz to remain in Texas in order to maintain custody of his children. For Nikki and Thomas Araguz, separation from their children was probably a deal breaker with regard to relocation. Instead, they chose the many legal risks associated with remaining in Texas, legal risks that now haunt Nikki Araguz, the memory of Thomas Araguz, and their marriage.

For transsexual and intersex people who want to plan and structure their lives to avoid the sort of lawsuit Nikki Araguz faces, Texas is among a long list of U.S. states where transsexual and intersex people simply cannot reside, at least not until such states change their laws. States whose appeals courts have invalidated the post-genital-reconstruction-surgery legal sex status of transsexual and intersex people, and usually their marriages too, include: Ohio, Texas, Kansas, Florida, and others (2). At present, Connecticut and Massachusetts are the only states which have universal marriage equality and which issue such marriage licenses (3). Three other states, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa recognize all marriages, but some ambiguity exists about whether those states will issue marriage licenses to all couples. Consequently, only the five foregoing states (3) are states where married couples that include one or more transsexual or intersex people, are likely to be able to avoid potential battles over the legality of their marriages, based on state law. Recognition by the federal government, with regard to income taxes, social security benefits, and other federal benefits that require marriage, is another matter. Given the dozens of possible configurations of people among married couples with one or more transsexual and/or intersex partners, there isn't much settled law about what the federal government and its agencies recognize. However, many such married couples seem to function unnoticed by the federal government, but are at serious risk of threat to their benefits if their marriage relationships were closely scrutinized by it.


Estate Planning Documents - A Will or Will and Trust

Even if living in one of the five legally safer U.S. states for married transsexual and intersex couples, all such couples should have appropriate estate documents drafted and executed. While a will is one component of essential estate planning documentation, the modern strategy is to create a will and a living trust. Among the major advantages of a trust is that in most states it enables the decedent's heirs to avoid probate court and to avoid delays in property and asset distribution. It is possible to research many of the details of wills and trusts online, to save money and time before getting the assistance of an estate planning attorney to create and execute finalized documents. Only a knowledgeable estate planning consumer can determine whether or not such final documents, created and reviewed by an attorney, actually communicate their wishes accurately. Online estate planning web sites are filled with discussions about the details of poorly drafted wills and trusts, and about how to improve them for greater clarity, to more explicitly and better document a person's wishes.

Another important consideration is that some aspects of estate planning require a trust, while others require a will. For example, for someone with pets who wants to set aside money for their care, that can only be done through a trust, not with a will, because a pet cannot be the recipient of a bequest in a will. A trust and its successor trustee can also do things like maintain web sites setup by its grantor/settlor during his or her lifetime, so that they can be maintained after death, although not in perpetuity. Additional arrangements are needed to create an ongoing entity to carry on such efforts after death in perpetuity, but that is something an experienced estate attorney can setup as well, which usually involves creating a legal entity called a foundation that is managed by the trust and successors of the trust. Conversely, a will is necessary to make designations for arrangements like treatment of a decedent's remains, whether cremation or burial, including details such as location of burial or disposition of ashes after cremation; whether or not a person agrees to organ donation, including restrictions on which organs; and other similar personal preferences.

It can be worthwhile to first read about these topics online (6), and to create an outline of one's wishes before approaching an attorney to draft final documents. Before creating a trust it can also be useful to read and become familiar with the Uniform Trust Code (4), which is now standard in twenty-two states, and to read some model trust documents to become familiar with their structure and contents. The parties to a trust are: the settlor/grantor (the person who creates the trust); the trustee(s), and successor trustee(s); and the beneficiaries. With a living trust (5), the creator of the trust (the settlor) is also its first trustee, until her or she dies, and may be a beneficiary as well. After the settlor/grantor's death, the person or people in control of the trust are the successor trustee(s), and the people who receive property from the trust are its beneficiaries. Sometimes a successor trustee is also a beneficiary.

Most of the text in a trust document is standard language that addresses a vast array of circumstances that can arise after death and includes provisions that give the trustee those powers over the trust, and by extention the decedent's estate. It is important that a trust document be complete and extensive because under trust law in most states, rights and powers not explicitly provided the trustee are not available to the trustee. Once past all the standard language, the core components of a trust may appear similar to a will, with some exceptions. For example, a trust can include provisions that distribute assets or property in installments, and under the supervision of the trustee. For example, a trust might provide that a trustee distribute educational and living expenses to a child beneficiary during childhood, and require the child beneficiary to wait until some specified age before receiving the remainder of the trust property, something a Will usually cannot specify.

There are numerous details involved in a trust that a qualified and experienced attorney can make certain are addressed. However, it is very important to learn everything possible about wills and trusts, since many a beneficiary has discovered only too late that language describing property left to them is unclear, ambiguous, and open to multiple interpretations. Consequently, it may be worth the effort to study the law and language of wills and trusts and make certain that such estate documents express one's wishes. The more straightforward, yet appropriately detailed, the core of the property and asset distribution language is, the less likely it is to create disputes when it becomes active after the settlor's death. For example, trusts and wills need to consider what happens if a beneficiary dies before the settlor, and must consider what happens when their are multiple beneficiaries, but one or more dies, or even if all beneficiaries have died before, or simultaneously with the settlor. For example, if an entire family dies in a car accident or plane crash, the wills and trusts of the family members need to consider who should receive the assets if all the family members are already deceased. To account for such conditions, the property distribution terms of wills and trusts are usually structured in sequences, with a primary beneficiary, one or more secondary/contingency beneficiaries, and a tertiary beneficiary if none of the named people can benefit. A tertiary beneficiary is usually a charity, institution, non-profit organization, or university.

It is also important to avoid a huge mistake people often make who have trusts created. They make the mistake of not funding their trust. It is essential to make provisions that transfer a person's assets into the trust, which is called funding. For example, once most people retire, they often have the title to their home changed to be owned by their living trust. It is sometimes possible to do the same thing with vehicles, which are also titled property. Personal property can be transferred into the trust using a simple document called an assignment, which can be written to automatically invoke upon a person's death. In addition bank accounts can be written with a joint tenancy where one of the parties is the trust. These techniques for property transfer to a trust vary from state to state, and should be executed with the help of an experienced estate attorney.

For transsexual or intersex people, the language in estate documents should also explicitly and carefully state that its distribution wishes should be deemed valid regardless of whether or not any married couple involved is considered legally married by the jurisdiction whose law governs the estate documents. However, only an attorney who specializes in wills, trusts, and estate law, can provide definitive legal advice about the specifics of such will and trust language details. It is also important that all estate planning documents be carefully executed, witnessed and notarized, and that the signatures of all parties and witnesses should be notarized separately and individually on the documents. In addition, all the estate planning documents should be numbered with 1. of x page numbering and each page should contain a blank for the grantor/settlor's initials, and such initials should appear on every page of every document to help prevent fraudulent changes afterward.

Every transsexual or intersex person should get a will or will and trust combination drafted and executed as soon as possible, to help avoid disputes after death like some of those faced by Nikki Araguz. However, it should be noted that even if Thomas Araguz had created a will and living trust, those instruments would not have prevented the lawsuit filed against Nikki Araguz by Heather Delgado. This is because wills and trusts are called testamentary documents, in which the decedent "testifies" as to their wishes. The large sums of money at issue in the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz are granted to the legal spouse of the deceased firefighter without any opportunity for the firefighter to explicitly designate a beneficiary or declare them as a testamentary bequest. In other words, such firefighter death benefits are not covered by wills or trusts, nor are they instruments like life insurance or pension policy documents in which someone is designated a beneficiary in writing by the policy holder. In fact, on the life insurance/ pension policy Thomas Araguz had as a firefighter, he designated Nikki Araguz its beneficiary. After some initial wrangling, Nikki Araguz has already received those funds, about $60,000.00, minus attorneys fees. However, if Thomas Araguz had drafted and executed a will, he could have avoided disputes about how the couple's personal property and other shared effects were to be distributed. Currently, there is some chance that Nikki Araguz may be stripped of much of the personal property she shared with her late husband, because the court named Simona Longoria, Thomas Araguz's biological mother, the administrator of his estate, and she has an adversarial attitude toward Nikki. That is a mishap Nikki and Thomas Araguz could have avoided with a carefully prepared Will or Will and Trust.


Health Care Directives and Power of Attorney

Another category of legal documents that is important for all transsexual and intersex people to have are healthcare management documents. All too often a transsexual or intersex person becomes incapacitated, only to discovery during and/or after their recovery, that hostile biological family members have taken over their lives and made decisions about their care and their lives they don't agree with. Such actions often include forbidding people the incapacitated person cares about them from visiting them. The laws about healthcare power of attorney and healthcare living will documents vary among U.S. states. Consequently, an attorney should be consulted before finalizing and executing such documents, and such documents should be reviewed by a local attorney when changing residence from one state to another. Time and money can be saved by researching these types of legal documents online and creating one's own draft to be reviewed by an attorney, rather than paying an attorney for the time required for detailed consultation and drafting them from scratch.

A healthcare power of attorney, designates someone the creator trusts, to make decisions about the creator's healthcare under certain circumstances when the creator is unable. The healthcare power of attorney can also dictate the protocol that must be employed to invoke it. The circumstances that usually cause such a power of attorney to be invoked include its creator: becoming unconscious, being unable to communicate, being in a persistent vegetative state, having been declared legally incompetent (as a consequent of brain damage due to illness or accident, such a Alzheimer's disease, severe stroke, or a severe head injury), or becoming otherwise totally incapacitated. While such circumstances may be uncomfortable to contemplate, by designating a trusted person beforehand, and by a creating power of attorney document that describes one's wishes both in detail and with flexibility, it is usually possible to avoid having a default person, which could even be an adversarial biological family member, or a person who may have differing beliefs, make such decisions.

A healthcare power of attorney can describe how the person with the power of attorney should handle any number of medication decisions, and well as the circumstances during which the designated person has such powers. Such decisions can include when and how to handle:
  • nutrition methods, including feeding tubes;
  • pain management, types of pain medication;
  • kidney dialysis;
  • whether or not to accept a transplanted organ;
  • management of medical life support systems;
  • whether or not to receive blood transfusions; and
  • numerous others.
The reference links below include cursory example healthcare power of attorney documents that may be worth perusing. It is possible to make a such document far more detailed and inclusive than the ones in the examples. Such documents, like estate documents, need to be drafted in contemplation of how to handle numerous potentially unexpected and unanticipated medical circumstances.

A Living Will, or Advance Healthcare Directive, is a second document which has some overlap with a Healthcare Power of Attorney. The primary function the power of attorney is to designate a person to make decisions on one's behalf. The intent and purpose of a healthcare living will is to describe in detail what actions shall be taken, and what actions may not be taken, under any of numerous circumstances that can occur when the creator of the Living Will is unable to make decisions. A Living Will is different and separate from a Will and from a Revocable Living Trust because a Will and Revocable Living Trust deal with finances and property, while a Living Will handles healthcare decisions when its creator is unable to make them otherwise.

Like all estate planning and similar legal documents, it is essential that each signature for each person who is a party to the document and who signs the document, either as a party or as a witness, is notarized individually. Some states have statutory requirements for Living Wills and Healthcare Powers of Attorney, which in some circumstances may even include filing the document with a court of law. Only a review by a competent attorney can help prevent problems from occurring at the very moment when such problems become nightmarish.


Identification - Driver's License, Birth Certificate, Passport, Social Security Card

Last in this list, but probably first in order of chronological concern for transsexual and intersex people, is procurement of appropriate identity documents. Transsexual and intersex people need to be proactive about making sure that as much of their identity documentation as possible is in order. This includes obtaining:  a driver's license, a birth certificate, a social security card and underlying documentation at the social security administration, a passport, high school and college transcripts, changing records maintained by credit reporting agencies, and so on, all to the appropriate name and sex designation.

A birth certificate with the proper name and sex designation can function like a master key that makes all the other identity document changes relatively easy procure. However, only two U.S. states, Illinois and Michigan, have actual statutes which provide for such changes. Most states have instituted administrative procedures for changing birth certificates, but often such administrative procedures have little if any actual force of law. In fact, justice Phil Hardberger, who wrote the Littleton v. Prange ruling in Texas, explicitly stated in his ruling that the modified birth certificate Christie Lee Littleton received from the state of Texas was purely "ministerial", and that it did not represent any legality with regard to her legal sex status or her ability to marry in Texas.

Throughout states other than Illinois and Michigan, the process required to change a birth certificates, and the results of the process varying remarkably. Since none of them are supported by statute, any of them could be declared void by a state court of law, as has occurred already in Ohio, Texas, Kansas, and Florida (2). In addition, many states, such as Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Mississippi, and West Virginia,  do not provide a "clean" new birth certificate, but instead provide a document that outs the transsexual person by placing information on the birth certificate indicating that the sex designation has been changed, leaving the transsexual or intersex person with a document that serves as the modern equivalent of a legal scarlet letter. On the documents provided by some states, such as Mississippi, the name change and sex designation change are mere footnotes in small print at the bottom of the document, while the holder's previous name and previous sex designation remain above in larger text. In addition, some states that will change birth certificates do not seal the previous birth certificate to prevent future access to it. Worse yet, there are states which refuse to provide changed birth certificates at all, such as Ohio, Idaho, and Tennessee.

It can take months if not years to complete the entire process of obtaining a complete set of modified identity documents with the appropriate name and sex designation information on them. Most often, the procurement of the essential ones, such as a birth certificate, require a notarized affidavit from the surgeon who performed the surgery. For example, the birth certificate change statute in Illinois is so draconian it requires that the surgery be performed by a U.S. surgeon and that the affidavit be executed and notarized in a U.S. state. The Canadian vaginoplasty surgeon Pierre Brassard, MD has gone to the trouble of becoming licensed to practice medicine in Michigan, so that he can create Michigan based affidavits for patients born in Illinois who have surgery performed by him in Montreal, Canada. Although transsexual and intersex people can usually choose where to live, none have chosen where they were born, and many people have been saddled with the terrible misfortune of having been born in a state that will not issue them a new birth certificate. Two good resources for information about changing birth certifcates and obtaining a legal name change, is the web site created by Andrea James, called tsroadmap.com, and the web site of Becky Allison, MD.

Even once most other documentation changes have been made, many transsexual people report nightmarish difficulties getting the credit reporting agencies, and companies that have issued credit cards, to make the appropriate changes in their records and reports. Even after making the changes, transsexual and intersex people have discovered that it is a good idea to double check that the agencies have actually performed the tasks as promised. This can be done by having a trusted friend pretext the agencies as a potential employer, to obtain identity information confirmations, to determine if the information has actually been changed. All too often, unchanged information is reported by the agencies to third parties even after they have assured the subject that the information has been changed. In other words, do not trust, and always verify. It only takes one discrepancy when a prospective employer performs a background check or pre-employment credit check, to raise questions that involve complex answers.


Non-Disclosure Agreements

Given all the foregoing, transsexual people also need to make careful decisions about when to disclose one's transsexual and/or intersex status, to whom, and under what conditions. There are numerous situations in which transsexual and intersex people may want to consider requiring people they interact with to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with them regarding their medical history, including information about their transsexual and/or intersex condition. A non-disclosure agreement requires the second party to the agreement to keep information designated in the agreement confidential. Such an agreement enables the holder to sue the person violating the agreement for: breach of contract, invasion of privacy, to obtain a restraining order and later permanent injunction against further or additional disclosure, and potentially other forms of legal recourse.


Political and Legislative Activism

Last, it seems like one of the things transsexual and intersex people who are interested in political activism may want to focus on, is lobbying state legislatures for the creation of statutes in U.S. states that:
  • provide explicit legal sex status for transsexual and intersex people after genital reconstruction surgery; 
  • explicitly describe the legal marriage rights of transsexual and intersex people before and after genital reconstruction surgery; 
  • provide for sealing of court name change petitions,  birth certificate proceedings and related government records that are changed because of a person's transsexual or intersex condition. 
If Texas had a statute that provided sealed name change petitions for transsexual and intersex people, Nikki Araguz may have been spared the public humiliation of having the contents of her 1996 name change petition distributed to the entire world via the internet, notwithstanding the invasions of privacy committed against her by Frank Mann III. Currently, not a single U.S. state has explicit or detailed statutes which describe the legal sex identity status of transsexual and intersex people, that define related marriage rights, or which have legal definitions of male and female in its statutes. Even in Michigan, its birth certificate change statute is really just a single phrase in a single line, of its statute regarding procurement of birth certificates and making modifications to them (8). Not until, transsexual and intersex people are given explicit legal recognition by state and federal governments, will there by any hope that legal assaults like the one being rapaciously inflicted on Nikki Araguz, or upon Christie Littleton, Michael Kantaras, and others before her, will come to an end.


Conclusions

Although many people who have written articles in web-logs, or comments on social networking sites, have wondered if Nikki Araguz could have avoided her current legal battle, the steps she would have needed to take, may have been untenable in her situation. Even if Thomas Araguz III had a Will, a Revocable Living Trust, a Healthcare Power of Attorney, and a Living Will, none of those legal documents would have prevented the core of Nikki's current probate court battle from being initiated by Healther Delgado and Simona Longoria, because the money in question is a rare form of financial benefit sometimes given to the families of firefighters and police, that is created by various guilds and union organizations. Unlike life insurance policies, retirement accounts, and so on, which include specific written beneficiary designations, the firefighter benefits that are central to Nikki Araguz's probate battle do not include any provision for such designations. In some U.S. states, such funds are enacted and endowed by state statute, and designate the beneficiaries in the statute, without any opportunity for the firefighter or police-person to name a beneficiary. Such benefits are a form of non-testamentary proceeds, which designate the legal spouse of the firefighter as their beneficiary, or the children of the firefighter when there is no spouse.

In this case, Heather Delgado, who represents Thomas Araguz's children in the lawsuit, and Simona Longoria, who now represents the estate of Thomas Araguz, want to claim that Nikki Araguz is not his legal spouse, and therefore any money that would go to Nikki Araguz from the fallen firefighter fund, should instead be given to the secondary/contingent beneficiary, his children. However, Thomas Araguz could have avoided another aspect of the battle that isn't much discussed, the disposition of Nikki and Thomas's personal property if he had executed a Will or a Will and Revocable Living Trust. In that regard, it appears that Nikki Araguz may have lost the battle over her shared personal property, because Simona Longoria has been appointed executor of Thomas Araguz's estate by Judge Randy Clapp, who presides over the Wharton County District Court, and Thomas Araguz III did not leave a Will. Thomas Araguz did designate Nikki Araguz the beneficiary of his life insurance / pension plan benefit, which is $60,000.00, and Nikki Araguz has already received those funds, minus attorney's fees. However, if Nikki Araguz loses the lawsuit, she loses: the $300,000 in firefighter spousal benefits; she won't get Texas statutory free college tuition; her marriage to Thomas Araguz will be ruled legally void by the court, as though it never existed; and the court would likely declare her legal male; all in accordance with the 1999 Littleton v. Prange decision.

The only way Nikki and Thomas Araguz had much chance of avoiding the legal battle she is now waging, would have been relocation to a U.S. state that recognizes heterosexual marriages where one of the partners to the marriage is transsexual or intersex and has undergone genital reconstruction surgery. To do that, they would likely have needed to leave behind the two young boys they both loved dearly, and devoted themselves to raising. Apparently, their personal priorities did not enable them to place their love for each other before their love for their children. They may have knowingly taken the legal risks associated with their residence in Texas because of their devotion to their boys, although it will forever be impossible to know what they thought or may have discussed, never expecting that Thomas Araguz would die fighting a fire, after his fifteen years experience fighting fires without a mishap.

At present, Nikki Araguz is faced with an extreme test of motivations, morals, principles, and priorities. For example, her attorneys could negotiate down to a final offer to Heather Delgado and Simona Longoria, offering to sign away Nikki's interest in the $300,000 in exchange for an out of court settlement that enables Nikki's marriage to remain intact. Such a settlement proposal would also test the motivations, morals, principles, and priorities of Heather Delgado and Simona Longoria. If Heather Delgado and Simona Longoria were to accept such a settlement, the court of public opinion might make the judgment that they were only in it for the money, rather than making a judgment that they were setting aside their spite toward Nikki Araguz by allowing the legal status of Nikki's marriage to Thomas to remain intact through the settlement. A settlement would allow Nikki Araguz to win the existence of her marriage, plus an opportunity for free tuition at any Texas public university, at a cost of $300,000 in literal blood money, and the settlement would also save the larger battle over legal rights for transsexual and intersex people for another day.

Such an approach upsets the sensibilities of many people in the transsexual and intersex populations, and the associated online communities, who believe the battle for transsexual and intersex legal rights should be waged with full legal force at every opportunity. However, such beliefs deny the realities of Texas courts and the history in U.S. courts in response to similar legal battles. When it comes to social crusades in the courts, place, time, jurisdiction, venue, and the composition of courts, has always been part of such legal battles. By comparison, surely the court battle in federal courts that started in California over universal marriage rights was carefully chosen by it litigants and legal supporters as to time and jurisdiction. The composition of the federal district and federal appeals courts in California is clearly favorable, while the U.S. Supreme Court has shifted toward being favorable as well, since the core issues are primarily constitutional, regarding equal protection and due process. While the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz is currently in its evidence gathering phase, and not likely to create new headlines for weeks or even months, its future will not only be a test of judge Randy Clapp's character and temperament, it will be a test of morals and motivations, principles and priorities, for Heather Delgado, Simona Longoria, and Nikki Araguz, alike.



references

(1) WPATH Standards of Care
http://www.wpath.org/Documents2/socv6.pdf

(2) U.S. States whose appellate courts have voided legal sex status and marriages of transsexual people:

Ohio - In re Ladrach, 32 Ohio Misc.2d 6, 513 N.E.2d 828 (Ohio Probate Ct. 1987)
Texas - Littleton v Prange, 9 SW3d 223 (1999)
Kansas - In re Estate of Gardiner, 42 P.3d 120 (Kan. 2002)
Florida - Kantaras v. Kantaras, 884 So. 2d 155 - 2004

(3) U.S. State that recognition marriage regardless of legal sex status of that parties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States

(4) The Uniform Trust Code
http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/archives/ulc/uta/2005final.htm

(5) Living Trust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_trust

(6) Some basic information about Wills and Trusts
http://www.livingtrustvswill.com/

(7) tsroadmap - information about changing birth certificates
http://www.tsroadmap.com/reality/birth-certificate.html


(8)  Michigan Compile laws 333.2891 (9) (a) - Changing Sex on Birth Certificate
http://legislature.mi.gov/doc.aspx?mcl-333-2891


(9) Some Health Care Legal Document Resources (neither verified nor endorsed)

cursory outline, example healthcare power of attorney
http://estate.findlaw.com/estate-planning/living-wills/hc_poa.html

cursory, outline, example living will
http://estate.findlaw.com/estate-planning/living-wills/le23_9_1.html

another cursory, outline, example healthcare power of attorney
http://www.idph.state.il.us/public/books/PwrOf.PDF

http://estate.findlaw.com/estate-planning/living-wills/

http://www.legalhelpmate.com/living-will-form-faq.aspx

http://www.legalhelpmate.com/

Monday, August 30, 2010

The Lawsuit Against Nikki Araguz Could Impact Many People in Texas

Among the many topics left out of nearly every mainstream newspaper and television report about the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz, are the number of people in Texas and across the U.S. who have had genital reconstruction surgery, and who could potentially be affected by an unfavorable appeals court ruling, if the Delgado v. Araguz lawsuit gets that far. While the number of such people may represent a small fraction of the U.S. population, the numeric totals may surprise many people who are not otherwise informed about the prevalence of people born with intersex and/or transsexual conditions. There are likely hundreds of such married couples living in Texas, some who have married in Texas and some who have married elsewhere, whose marriages exist in a state of legal uncertainly while they remain resident in Texas, because of the confused status of Texas marriage law.

Conversely, if a Texas appeals court were to overturn Littleton v. Prange and validate Nikki Araguz's heterosexual marriage to Thomas Araguz, there are numerous Texas couples who have married precisely because of the Littleton v. Prange decision who could also be adversely affected by such a change in Texas law. They are people who, because of the Littleton v. Prange ruling, have married in Texas, where one of the women is a post-genital-reconstruction-surgery-female with a presumed XY sex chromosome pair and the other is a female with a presumed XX sex chromosome pair, or with the converse ostensible genetic situation where one of the partners is a post-genital-reconstruction-surgery-male with a presumed XX sex chromosome pair and the other is a male with a presumed XY sex chromosome pair. There are potentially hundreds of such couples in Texas. Any time a county in Texas refuses to provide such a couple a marriage license in Texas, they give that couple grounds to bring a lawsuit against the state on the basis of Littleton v. Prange, notwithstanding the recent but unclear 2009 legislative change to the Texas marriage statute regarding recognition of change of sex for the purpose of heterosexual marriage. While the television and newspaper reports about the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz give the impression that her marriage is an isolated and unique one, such presumptions are far from the truth. The truth is that there are hundreds of such married couples in Texas. At any time some circumstance in any of those marriages could lead to yet more lawsuits similar to Littleton v. Prange or In Re the Estate of Thomas Araguz III, the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz. What follows is a survey of the populations of people who could be affected by these lawsuits and their legal rulings, and circumstances precedent to them, including the relevant medical conditions, and the various forms of marriage engaged in by the affected people.

Although there aren't any centrally available statistics on the number of people who have had such surgery, various people have attempted to build estimates of the statistical totals using secondary statistics to accumulate aggregate sums. They have been able to create aggregate statistics because the surgeons who perform such surgeries are generally quite well known because of the work they do. Over the years, and on various occasions, most such surgeons have published information about the numbers of surgeries they have performed. Such surgeries have been performed in abundance in the U.S. since the 1960s. The most prolific vaginoplasty surgeon thus far was the late Stanley Biber, MD, who reportedly performed over 5,000 such surgeries during his career. At any given time since the 1960s there have been at least two or three surgeons in the U.S. performing as many as three or four such genital reconstruction surgeries every week on average. There are also a number of surgeons performing such surgeries on U.S. citizens in European countries and in Thailand. Thailand is a country with a highly developed healthcare system, and a culture that readily accepts the medical nature of transsexual and intersex conditions, and surgery to treat them. By assembling estimates from individual surgeons about the number of surgeries each has performed, reasonably reliable estimates, albeit with a large margin of error, are possible to aggregate into various total estimates. The more conservative estimates of vaginoplasty surgery performed on U.S. transsexual women between 1960 and 2010 is about 25,000 with the highest estimates being about 45,000. Lynn Conway, professor emeritus at University of Michigan has compiled one such estimate that is well supported by demographic data. Lynn Conway's estimate is 30,000-40,000 (1) U.S. transsexual women who have received vaginoplasty surgery between approximately 1960 and 2010.

In addition, that total currently increases at a rate of about 1,000 annually. An increase of 1,000 surgeries performed on U.S. transsexual women is easily derived from the sum of the average number of vaginoplasty surgeries performed annually by the most well known and prolific surgeons who are currently practicing. In the U.S. and Canada, this includes four surgeons who frequently perform vaginoplasty procedures: Toby Meltzer, MD, Marci Bowers, MD, Pierre Brassard, MD, and Christine McGinn, DO. There are also about a dozen well known and reputable vaginoplasty surgeons in Thailand including: Suporn Watanyusakul, MD, Chettawut Tulayaphanich M.D., and others. Using an average annual rate of 150 to 200 surgeries performed by the most prolific of the surgeons, a 1,000 annual average is an easily supported, reliable and possibly even a conservative estimate. While some researchers' estimates are lower (4), an estimate of 1,000 seems far better supported by the obvious publicly available information.

The number of people who have received such surgery who likely live in Texas can be derived from some simple ratios calculated using the surgery statistics above and geographical population estimates. Using a ratio derived from the total surgeries performed versus U.S. population statistics from the U.S. Census, Lynn Conway estimates that the prevalence of transsexual people in the U.S. who have undergone such surgery is about 1 in 2,500 people (1). Based on a estimated greater Houston, TX population of 5,539,949 (2) and the 1/2500 prevalence, there likely may be about 1,100 transsexual women who have had vaginoplasty surgery living in greater Houston, TX area. Given the U.S. Census bureau estimate of the Texas population, 24,782,302 (3), and the same prevalence estimate, there may be as many as 5,000 such transsexual women who have had vaginoplasty surgery, who live in the very populace Texas. Given the cultural nature of Texas, and other reasons for transsexual people to live elsewhere, the number may be smaller. However, such estimates do provide information about the order of magnitude of the number of people directly impacted the 1999 Littleton v. Prange ruling and by any future negative appeals court ruling in Texas, if the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz were to progress that far.

Statistics for transsexual men who have received either a phalloplasty procedure or a metoidioplasty procedure to create male genitalia have been more difficult to obtain. However, given related statistics, there may currently be as many as 500 such procedures performed on U.S. transsexual men annually. The historical rates for phalloplasty surgery and metoidioplasty surgery performed on transsexual men are smaller than those for vaginoplasty surgery performed in transsexual women. However, for the purpose of developing a working estimate, if a 2/1 ratio were used to develop aggregate statistics, that would yield about 500 transsexual men in the Houston, TX area who have received such surgery and as many as 2,500 such transsexual men throughout Texas.

With the statistical information above as a basis, there could be as many as 7,500 transsexual men and women in Texas who have been affected by the 1999 Littleton v. Prange ruling and who could be affected in the future by the outcome of the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz. It would be very difficult to calculate the number of married couples in Texas where one partner is a post-surgical-transsexual person, but there could certainly be hundreds of such marriages, if not thousands, in various potential configurations. If the Delgado v. Araguz lawsuit were to be litigated through various appeals courts, the outcome could impact transsexual and intersex people throughout Texas. If on the slim chance that the U.S. Supreme Court considered and ruled about the case, such a ruling could impact transsexual people throughout the U.S. for the foreseeable future. If both post-surgical transsexual men and transsexual women are included along with intersex people throughout the U.S., such a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court could forever change the legal status of  60,000 to 80,000 such people.

Among the many people such an appeals court ruling could impact, there are numerous types of marriages to consider with regard to transsexual people and various types of marriages to consider with regard to intersex people as well. In the various pairings below, the term ostensible is used because very few people have procured DNA analysis of their sex chromosomes, and all but a few people base their genotype (genetic makeup) on presumption:

  • transsexual woman without vaginoplasty
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XX sex chromosome female
  • transsexual woman with vaginoplasty
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XX sex chromosome female
  • transsexual woman without vaginoplasty
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XY sex chromosome male
  • transsexual woman with vaginoplasty
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XY sex chromosome male
  • transsexual woman without vaginoplasty
    - married to -
    a person with some form of intersex condition
  • transsexual woman with vaginoplasty
    - married to -
    a person with some form of intersex condition

  • transsexual man without phalloplasty or metoidioplasy
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XX sex chromosome female
  • transsexual man with phalloplasty or metoidioplasy
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XX sex chromosome female
  • transsexual man without phalloplasty or metoidioplasy
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XY sex chromosome male
  • transsexual man with phalloplasty or metoidioplasy
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XY sex chromosome male
  • transsexual man without phalloplasty or metoidioplasy
    - married to -
    a person with some form of intersex condition
  • transsexual man with phalloplasty or metoidioplasy
    - married to -
    a person with some form of intersex condition

  • person with an intersex condition
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XY sex chromosome male
  • person with an intersex condition
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XX sex chromosome female
  • woman born with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XY sex chromosome male
  • woman born with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome
    - married to -
    ostensible 46XX sex chromosome female


In addition to the configurations above, a court would need to consider what happens to the validity of a marriage when one of the partners to an existing marriage undergoes surgery that changes the state of their genitals. There are many such married couples throughout the U.S. in which one partner in a spousal pair with ostensibly differing sex chromosomes undergoes genital reconstruction surgery after the marriage, sometimes years or decades after the marriage. As each of the various types of potential married couples listed above travel from state to the state the legal status of their marriage changes from valid to invalid to undetermined, based on conflicting and varying local state law. There are similar couples that involve a transsexual man married to an ostensible 46XY male spouse. Theoretically, based on Littleton v. Prange, such marriages remain valid in Texas regardless of the changes the married partners make to their genitals. However, in a state like Michigan, which has a statute that specifically provides for legal change of sex, including issuance of a new birth certificate and sealing of the original, would such a marriage be deemed legal by a court of law there? Since Michigan recognizes legal change of sex by statute, but also has a state constitutional amendment that outlaws same-sex marriage, it would seem logical to conclude that such couples would not be considered legally married by the state of Michigan. However, in most states, such conclusions of law have not been settled by their state appellate courts. When the Fox News television station in Houston, TX ran a poll asking if transsexual people should be allowed to legally marry, the station asked the question without specifying surgical status or the nature of the second partner involved in the marriage, rendering their poll somewhat ridiculous. News of the poll spread throughout the blogosphere, inspiring thousands of people to vote on the poll so many times that the final result was 95% in favor of legal marriage for transsexual people.

There is likely a segment of the transsexual population that is indifferent to the outcome of the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz, since a negative ruling would enable them to marry what for them are same-sex partners, as Littleton v. Prange has already done for them. The greater problem is that Littleton v. Prange mis-characterizes the Araguz marriage, and marriages like it, because they are marriages that by any practical and reasonable standard are heterosexual ones. There is already dissent and militance within the transsexual population, as expressed in analysis of these complex perspectives among the many web sites available where people discuss such topics. If the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz is litigated to a final judgment, it doesn't seem like there is any outcome that could please the entire transsexual and intersex population. The only real hope for a way to recognize the right for all these various groups of people to marry would be federal universal marriage equality. However, it appears that the only path to those sorts of rights is through the federal court system and the U.S. Supreme Court. Such recognition seems like it would be many years away, if at all possible given the positions of the judges and justices on the bench in the various courts involved. Regardless of the outcome, the lives of thousands of people could be affected.

One outcome that doesn't seem likely to be able to please anyone except Nikki Araguz, even if it might be acceptable to her, would be an out of court settlement of the Delgado v. Araguz lawsuit, that takes control over the legal issues away from the court. However, given the current posture of Heather Delgado, Simona Longoria, and their attorneys, including Chad Ellis, Edward Burwell, and Frank Mann III, they believe they can prevail on all their claims and have no reason to settle.

What is even more surprising, is that given the very high stakes, external financial support for the attorneys representing Nikki Araguz has apparently been a mere trickle, with little support from national transsexual activist groups, and apparently little or no support from national same-sex marriage support organizations operated by gay and lesbian groups. Apparently, gay and lesbian groups have not internalized the connection between the threat to heterosexual marriages for transsexual and intersex people and the denial of marriage rights to gay and lesbian people. The connection is that both are violations of constitutional equal protection and due process. Without financial support from various tertiary advocacy groups, the legal team representing Nikki Araguz will be litigating an expensive case on a shoe-string budget. While thousands of couples with a transsexual partner marry regularly throughout the U.S., the legality of their marriages is often unsettled law in most U.S. jurisdictions, and they exist in a statue of tenuous legality at best, vulnerable to lawsuits like the one against Nikki Araguz, from any number of threat sources. Unless an out of court settlement is reached in the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz, which would only effect her, a future appeals court decision could impact thousands of people in Texas, if not tens of thousands of U.S. citizens nationwide.


references

(1) How Frequently Does Transsexualism Occur?, Lynn Conway
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html

(2) City of Houston, Texas, Houston Facts
http://www.houstontx.gov/abouthouston/houstonfacts.html

(3) U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates
http://www.census.gov/popest/estimates.html

(4) The Incidence and Prevalence of SRS among US Residents - Mary Ann Horton, Ph.D.
http://www.tgender.net/taw/thb/THBPrevalence-OE2008.pdf

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Frank Mann - An Ethically Challenged Bigot

Editorial Commentary

Unscrupulous attorneys have long been the tantalizing subject of fictional stories about lawyers who would do anything they think they can get away with, to get ahead and generate fees for themselves at any cost, including a proverbial pound of flesh. When real life exposes one of these sorts of cretins, the insidiousness of their evil takes on both personal and socially repugnant dimensions. Such miscreants also expose incompetent if not corrupt governmental institutions around them. One such example is Frank E. Mann III, whose unethical background has already been the subject of an article on this site. That the Texas State Bar Association allows him to continue practicing law, implies that the Bar Association in Texas is either as incompetent or as corrupt an institution, and one that has failed to fulfill its duty to the people of Texas it is supposed to serve, as Frank Mann appears to be.

Cristan Williams
The inspiration for this missive about Mr. Frank Mann, is a telephone call he made to Cristan Williams, the beautiful, articulate, and highly representative, executive director of the Houston Transgender Center. Cristan Williams has been the force behind the facebook.com support page setup for Nikki Araguz. She has also been creating online videos containing her commentary about the ongoing proceedings, and she has appeared on television to discuss the issue of marriage legality for transsexual and intersex people. Since Texas law allows any party to a telephone conversation to record it, Cristan Williams recorded their conversation when Frank Mann telephoned her. She has also published the recording, with commentary, in a video on youtube.com. Frank Mann's ostensible purpose for telephoning Ms. Williams was to extend an Olive Branch (his own words). Such a telephone call surely implies that he has become aware that newspapers, television media, and the blogosphere, have all been exposing the negative truth about who he is, about his ongoing unethical activities, and the rest of his apparently incorrigible behavior. Based on the contents of his telephone call with Cristan Williams, Mr. Mann has the naive notion that smooth and friendly sounding talk might overcome the reprehensible nature of his actions and his associations. Frank Mann's actions have made it clear that he is a bigot, that he has neither ethics nor conscience, that he is part of the lawsuit against Nikki Araguz primarily in the interest of his own personal greed, and that he has the grandiose notion that his cruel and malicious lawsuit against Nikki Araguz will be the case of his career.

Frank E. Mann III
A brief review of Frank Mann's history might help provide some context for making judgments about his character. Frank Mann has twice been investigated by and sanctioned by the Texas State Bar Association. In both cases his license to practice law was suspended, once for a period of years, and further extended by periods of probation once the Bar Association allowed him to practice again. Nikki Araguz made the unfortunate and fateful mistake in 2002 of hiring Mr. Mann to represent her in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. During his representation of Nikki Araguz, she disclosed confidential information to him about her medical past and apparently even gave him a copy of her first birth certificate, all under attorney/client privilege. Heather Delgado, the ex-wife of Nikki's second husband Thomas, happened upon Frank Mann when she needed an attorney to represent her in a child custody dispute against Nikki and Thomas Araguz. It was both illegal and unethical for Frank Mann to represent Heather Delgado, or anyone else as an adversary to Nikki Araguz in a legal matter, but Frank Mann did so anyway. This is called a direct conflict of interest. In most states, Frank Mann would have been disbarred for doing so, but apparently not in Texas. Frank Mann used his knowledge of confidential information about Nikki Araguz to take advantage of and humiliate Nikki and Thomas Araguz during that dispute and depositions they gave during it. While Frank Mann was representing Heather Delgado against Nikki and Thomas Araguz in the child custody dispute, Nikki Araguz decided to run for mayor of Wharton, Texas. Frank Mann then sent a broadcast email to a large group of his friends and colleagues that contains information which violates the attorney/client privilege he owes Nikki Araguz. Mr. Mann's bigoted email poked fun at Nikki Araguz, exposed her medical past, and disclosed the possibility that she may not have been eligible to run for office because of a previous criminal conviction. Once again, in just about any state other than Texas, Frank Mann would have been disbarred for a stunt like that.

Long after Nikki Araguz should have known that Frank Mann had no business being involved in a lawsuit against her, the attorneys representing her filed a complaint with the Texas State Bar Association about Mr. Mann's behavior. At first the Texas State Bar Association dismissed the complaint. Only after Frank Mann, Nikki Araguz, Heeather Delgado, Simona Longoria, et al, became national news, did the Texas State Bar Assocation decide to take a closer look at the complaint against him. Frank Mann is currently under investigation by the Texas State Bar Association with regard to the numerous ethical violations listed above. However, Frank Mann continues to represent a party adverse to Nikki Araguz, in clear violation of ethical rules. In fact, the telephone call Frank Mann made to Cristan Wiliams is right at the edge of another ethical violation. An attorney is not allowed to engage in ex-parte (without the adverse attorney present) communication with an adverse party to a case. Although Cristan Williams isn't the actual adverse party, there are clear implications that Frank Mann intended to communicate his propaganda indirectly to Nikki Araguz through Cristan Williams. If not a direct ethical violation, Frank Mann's telephone call to Cristan Williams certainly seems to violate the spirit of the ethical rules he swore to uphold upon becoming an attorney.

With the foregoing review of Frank Mann's behavior as context, the contents of Frank Mann's conversation with Cristan Williams demonstrates just how much of an unprincipled hypocrite he is. There isn't any way to separate Mr. Mann's representation of someone in a case that disrespects the memory of the father of the boys he represents, from the implications such representation has about Frank Mann's own lack of character. Every time Frank Mann files a motion that mischaracterizes the marriage between Thomas Araguz and Nikki Araguz as same-sex, he isn't just taking an easy pot shot at Nikki Araguz, his actions dishonor Thomas Araguz and his sons as well. There isn't any way for Frank Mann to separate his greed from his involvement in the case either, since he and the other attorneys had an ethical duty to point out to Heather Delgado and Simona Longoria, that Thomas Araguz's boys would end up with about the same amount of money with or without the lawsuit, and by refraining to litigate such a matter, they would protect the memory of the boy's father and socially shield the boys from the bigoted Texas culture that surrounds them.

There isn't any way Mr. Mann can claim he is not a bigot when the core of his case requires him to argue before a court of law that somehow intersex and transsexual people should not be afforded constitutional equal protection and due process in their right to marry someone of the opposite genital sex, even if they may have some theoretical genetic similarity of sex chromosomes with their marrying partner. Such an imposition of law defies practicality and pragmatic common sense. It is a notion so preposterous that Texas has only now begun to understand that in so doing, it has actually legalized the very thing it purported to outlaw with the Littleton v. Prange ruling. What Littleton has legalized in Texas, is hundreds of transsexual and intersex people who have married partners of the same genital sex because the law there is based on the theoretical and presumed sex chromosomes of the marrying couple, without ever even testing them for verification. The resulting bureaucratic confusion at county offices which provide marriage licenses in Texas that has followed from such blind bigotry, threatens to deny the rights of intersex and transsexual people not just in Texas, but potentially throughout the United States. By serving as a plaintiff's attorney in a rapacious lawsuit whose purpose is to confirm such bigotry, Frank Mann demonstrates to the world by his actions, no matter what words he may use to provide an excuse for them, that he is a bigot. Mr. Mann's ego may be bolstered now by his involvement with such a case, but in a more enlightened future reading of the history he may be creating, he will be properly labeled as one of the bigots who made such institutionalized bigotry possible.

If Frank Mann were actually an honest, conscientious, or ethical person, he and the other attorneys representing Heather Delgado and Simona Longoria in the supposed interest of Trevor and Tyler Araguz, would never have filed such a lawsuit to begin with. It seems equally important to remember that without Frank Mann's violation of attorney/client privilege, Heather Delgado et al, may never have discovered the information about Nikki Araguz's medical history that fanned the flames of the child custody case and instigated the present probate case.  Frank Mann is one of three attorneys who knew full well that when it comes to most probate lawsuits, the only people who generally win are the attorneys. While their unscrupulous gains are purely financial, they will leave scorched earth behind them, and a broken family in their wakes. While Frank Mann got fake friendly on the telephone with Cristan Williams, explaining that Thomas Araguz's sons Trevor and Tyler would be attending private school in the hope that may help protect them from playground bullying, such efforts are naive recompense, a vain effort to bandage the gaping emotional wounds those two boys will likely battle for many years to come. In the same conversation, Frank Mann also noted that his potential involvement with Cristan Williams might last for years, without any acknowledgement of the benefits to the children that a settlement now might provide: for them, for Nikki Araguz, and potentially for thousands of intersex and transsexual people who could be directly impacted by a negative appeals court ruling in such a case. Shame on all three attorneys: Frank Mann, Edward Burwell, and Chad Ellis; for such blatant hypocrisy and greed. The pound of flesh they hope to excise from Nikki Araguz does not come without a drop of blood, but with copious quantities of it; from Thomas Araguz, from his sons Trevor and Tyler, from Nikki Araguz his chosen wife, and potentially from thousands of intersex and transsexual people everywhere, no matter how their chromosomes may be configured.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Nikki Araguz - A Biographical Assessment

While most of the mainstream media seems almost blindly focused, with near tunnel vision, on their excoriation of Nikki Araguz, on occasion, brief glimpses of the woman behind the news stories has slipped through the din of their diatribe. When assembling a portrait of any person, the traditional attributes people gather about another person usually include: professional interests, hobbies and avocations, socioeconomic background, education, beliefs and values, all deduced from a person's relationships, work, recreation, and residence, as a person structures their life. Without an opportunity to interview Nikki Araguz directly, it has been possible to ensemble the following cursory assay of Nikki Araguz and her life, based on sifting through the media disinformation, in search of aspects of her life that appear credible and which provide a better reasonably balanced purview of the woman she is. Hopefully, some future opportunity will lend itself to a more in depth and personal portrait, based on information directly from the subject.

Nikki left, with her father, mother, sister and brother.
Nikki was born in June of 1975 to her mother Sheri, when Sheri and her husband were in Carmel, California, while he was stationed there during military service. Sheri and her husband were originally from Texas, so Sheri returned to Texas after her husband was ordered to a post in Germany, shortly after Nikki was born. A year later, Sheri's husband returned home to Bryan, TX, but was hit and killed by a semi-truck a month later, long before Nikki had any opportunity to get to know her biological father. A few years later, Sheri married Chuck Bockelman, Nikki's stepfather, to whom Sheri remains married today. Since the recent probate lawsuit was filed against Nikki, her entire family has made positive and supportive public statements about her, including her mother Sheri, her stepfather Chuck, her older brother Gary, and her younger sister Vanessa. Sheri's mother is active on the facebook.com page setup to support Nikki, where she has stated she would attend the hearings about Nikki's case if she were healthy enough to be able. The photo above, apparently taken some years ago, provides clear evidence of her family's support of her, with her stepfather Chuck hugging her, while all five of them were gathered for a family snapshot.

Nikki at 19 in video documentary
Meanwhile, as Nikki grew up, her teenage years were apparently a time of experimentation and exuberance for her. She doesn't appear to have had the benefits of affluence that often expose people to resources that provide information on topics that might not otherwise be readily available. As a result, Nikki apparently had a hard time getting detailed information about the congenital intersex condition she was born with, or doing much about it during her early life, despite her mother's attempts to get the attention of physicians about it. She seems to have struggled while trying to find her social place because of it, and more than once succumbed to manipulation by people whose primary purpose was to take advantage of her natural need for attention and positive social feedback. At one point when she was in her late teens, she attended a college or junior college near her in Texas, but none of the news reports have included much information about majors, graduation, or degrees she may have earned. Only one news report states that she has some form of degree in marketing. In a video documentary made of her when she was in college, she appears happy as well as reflective, but a little flighty, as one would expect of any young woman her age. She was in fact quite beautiful at nineteen or twenty, and an obviously sexually attractive young woman, apparently without medical or hormonal intervention. The college video documentary provides demonstrable evidence of her intersex condition, although it also demonstrates her lack of medical understanding about it at the time. What many uninitiated people clearly don't understand, is that by the time Nikki had reached the age of eighteen, her body had developed to become a normal looking female one from all outward appearances, along with her contradictory but unseen underdeveloped genitalia. The genetic condition she has prevents her body from responding to any testosterone her body may produce, which caused her body to respond only to the estrogen that is naturally in everyone's system.

From all appearances, much of Nikki's twenties after college were occupied with low level jobs such as working in retail. In her early twenties, Nikki worked at a shoe store in a local Texas shopping mall. That is where she met her first husband Emilio Mata, who she married when she was about twenty-four or twenty-five. Without socioeconomic privilege to provide financial and intellectual stability, news reports imply that neither Nikki nor Emilio had very good judgment during that period of her life. Both she and Emilio Mata racked up minor convictions for petty criminal acts such as driving while drunk, minor drug possession, and petty theft, all the sorts of youthful indiscretions that people with financial privilege often manage to avoid getting on their permanent records, even if they have committed them. By 2002, she and Emilio Mata were also in financial trouble and decided to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If only they could have known the terrible fate that would befall them for unknowingly choosing an unscrupulous attorney named Frank E. Mann III, whose violation of her attorney/client privilege eight years later would be one of the falling dominoes that have knocked Nikki Araguz into the middle of an arduous legal ordeal. The financial and social instability surrounding Nikki and Emilio seems to have eventually become too much for their relationship to survive, and they divorced in 2007, about the same time Nikki met Thomas Araguz. Emilio Mata eventually worked his way up in the technology business and now works for a digital chip foundry in Houston.

Nikki and Thomas Araguz wedding
At about the same time Nikki divorced Emilio Mata, she began attending Grace Community Fellowship church in Needville, TX, another deep Houston suburb. One Sunday she was approached by Thomas Araguz, who she had seen at church and said hello to previously, but during their first significant encounter, he asked her to have brunch with him after the service. Their Mexican restaurant brunch turned into a classic, love at first sight, three hour, marathon event. Within weeks they had decided to move in together. Nikki seems to have gained significant emotional support from Thomas Araguz after the two of them met at their church, and immediately struck up a soulful and collaborative relationship. Early during their relationship, Nikki apparently disclosed her medical condition to Thomas Araguz as well. In addition, there are indications that Nikki had been saving money during that time to get corrective genital surgery. Thomas seems to have also attended medical meetings with Nikki to get information about the corrective surgery she needed. One day in June, 2008, Thomas took Nikki on a private, afternoon, Gulf of Mexico boat cruise, where he proposed marriage to her. A year after they had met, the two of them somehow managed to put together a wedding, with excellent photos that document the ceremony, to which she wore a beautiful white strapless gown. Two months later, Nikki had also finished making payments for the $20,000 genital reconstruction surgery she needed, with a well known and respected surgeon in Trinidad, Colorado, Marci Bowers, MD. It's a surgery that must be scheduled and paid for in cash, many months in advance. Since Thomas had to stay home on call for firefighting duty, the two of them exchanged affectionate email messages and phone calls while she spent a week recuperating in the hospital, from the surgery she needed to have a vagina constructed. Thomas was a man patient enough to wait months before he could consummate his marriage.

During the past two years, since her wedding and her surgery, Nikki Araguz appears to have been focused primarily on building a home life with her husband Thomas Araguz. They were finally able to rent a little house, on a couple of acres, in the outskirts of Wharton, which is a small town that looks like it was cleaved from a section of the fictional town Mayberry, where the district courthouse marks the center of town, and the mostly single story business buildings that surround it for a few blocks in each direction don't appear to have changed much since the 1950s. While some of the houses around are tear-down/rebuild two story homes of a more recent vintage, most of the houses are tiny single story ramblers, many of them no bigger than apartments. They are set back on large lots among huge deciduous trees that shade the lawns and houses from the oppressive summer heat, along residential streets without sidewalks. Nikki spent the time when she wasn't working, taking care of her husband Tom's two young boys four days a week, helping the boys with their homework, helping the boys with their toy trucks, and making a home of the house they rented together.

Nikki's relationship with Thomas Araguz and his sons in such a quaint looking place as Wharton, appears to have stabilized and grounded her. Meanwhile, she had leveraged her knowledge of the magazine business, which she had developed while working for various local Texas magazines, including a GLBT magazine called Outsmart where she sold advertising, into a magazine business of her own. She was the creator and publisher of a local magazine called Wharton County Living, the sort of free circulation piece that is often found in shops around most communities these days, that generate their revenue entirely from selling advertising space rather than from subscription fees. When Thomas was out of work, it was Nikki who pitched in the money for the child support payments to Heather Delgado, Thomas's bitter ex-wife. Nikki has also described her marriage as one with a normal amount of emotional intensity and disagreement, the natural product of constant, daily, deep, emotional involvement with, and commitment to, another person. During her recreational time she apparently had a horse that she enjoyed riding and caring for, something also quite typical for small town exurban life in Texas. In an interview with the Houston PBS television station, she described herself in the following manner:
"I was a housewife and you know ran a magazine, and loved my husband and my children, and rode my horse. This was my life prior to my husband’s death, and um, with the lawsuit that was brought on, I was thrust into the media."
Her weekends appear to have been consumed primarily with going to church with her husband and their two boys. When she wasn't busy with the boys, she seemed to have spent her time helping her husband study for exams while he was trying to get through Wharton County Junior College, to earn an associate's degree in firefighting and emergency medical technology, all on a very modest income. In the meantime, Nikki ran for Mayor of Wharton, a town so small that her loss to the incumbent mayor was by a vote of 382 to 118.

Then sometime in the spring of 2010, Heather Delgado, Thomas's disgruntled ex-wife, became discontent with her level of access to the sons she shared with Thomas Araguz, so she filed a child custody lawsuit against them. Delgado somehow happened upon the unscrupulous attorney Frank Mann III, who seized at the opportunity to gain the advantage by outing Nikki's medical past to Delgado. Once he did that, Nikki and Thomas's lives suddenly became emotionally stressful beyond their limits, and apparently their judgment in some instances.

Thomas Araguz funeral procession
The day her husband died, Nikki had left Wharton, and was reportedly driving west toward California. Some speculate she was driving to California to see if she could get expedited service on obtaining a female California birth certificate. Meanwhile, Thomas was called out to fight a huge fire at an egg farm and processing plant. While Nikki drove west, Thomas and the other firefighters fought their way into a blaze so huge that as many as one hundred and fifty firefighters, from hundreds of miles around, were brought in to fight it. Thomas went missing somewhere inside the structure, with only minutes of air left in his oxygen tank. His charred body wasn't found until the next day, July 4, 2010. Nobody in Thomas's family even thought of calling Nikki to give her the terrible news. It was the wife of another firefighter who called Nikki on her cell phone, as she was driving west through New Mexico, who gave Nikki the news that would spark the flames of a different sort of blaze, one that continues to consume Nikki'e life. At first Nikki and her step sons were nearly sainted by the news reports, along with Thomas, the fallen hero. But the classic heaping of sympathy for the family of a fallen public servant, turned almost instantly into a public pummeling of Nikki, while Thomas and his memory faded instantly, once the attorneys for Heather Delgado and Simona Longoria filed their lawsuit and held a press conference, having already obtained the attention of the press because of the fire and Thomas's death. Newspapers and television stations all over Texas, and then all over the U.S., began to run stories that changed from near beatification to vilification of Nikki, mischaracterizing her as a liar, a fraud, a criminal, and a gold digger.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the midst of the heated child custody dispute that preceded her husband's death, their occupancy of the house they were renting together appears to have been lost, as a whirlwind of events culminated with Nikki being left without a husband, with the children she had taken care of for nearly three years stripped from her life and possibly forever, without a home, without a business and its income, and with a contentious lawsuit filed against her, based not on what she had done, but because some people would rather not allow her to have female legitimacy. While Nikki has been receiving intensive support from transsexual activists around Texas, the Houston Press wrote the following:
Nikki also told Fox News that, because she was actually born female, she never identified as transgender. And despite the fact that many in the Houston transgender community are offering Nikki financial and emotional support, and despite the fact that prominent transgender attorney Phyllis Randolph Frye believes the suit against Nikki threatens every transgender person's civil rights and has taken on Nikki's case pro bono, Nikki told Fox that she should not be "lumped in" with the transgender community.

http://www.houstonpress.com/content/printVersion/1935902/
Similarly, Nikki told Ernie Manouse of the Houston PBS station in an interview with him:
Nikki Araguz - I simply am a heterosexual woman. That’s how I define myself. I’m not a medical professional, but I know that I have been diagnosed with partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, and that falls under a classification medically as a transgender syndrome.

Ernie Manouse - And folks have a problem getting past the idea, and they assume that when we talk in these that it is someone who was a male, born a male, grew up as a male, somehow felt they weren’t a male, so they had sexual reassignment surgery. That is a different condition than what you went through, correct?

Nikki Araguz - Completely, completely, I, in my growing up, even in my early years, my parents started to notice that I was not developing into a boy, umm, that I was developing into a girl, and sought medical professionals, umm, late 70s early 80s, nobody knew what was going on. And so umm, they just allowed me to continue to develop into the woman I am today.

[...]

Ernie Manouse - And again I want to clarify for our audience, when you say it was the birth defect we are not talking about a fully developed all male individual going and having a sexual reassignment surgery.

Nikki Araguz - That would not be at all an accurate description of what happened for me, umm, because I was an underdeveloped, umm, and not past the age of two or three years old did I develop anatomically, genitalia.
Nikki's public posture in this regard may turn out to be an all important component of her legal argument that her marriage to Thomas Araguz should be considered valid under Texas law. Her statements in the PBS interview were better organized than her statements in earlier television interviews, including the following one, in which she appeared quite flustered when a television news reporter tried to pressure into describing herself as male, to which she responded with the following statement:
"I do not and have not ever considered myself in that way (male), but I understand that some people are explaining it like that. And what I'd like to say is that essentially I had a disorder much like anyone else who was born with a birth defect of any kind - no arm, six toes, no vision, OK? There was an anatomical birth defect that was underdeveloped beyond the age of 2 years old." (assertion (male) added)
The same television news reporter attempted to address the false accusation that she had somehow deceived her husband, that her husband didn't become aware of her medical history until April 2010. Heather Delgado and Simona Longoria have included a fraud claim in their lawsuit against Nikki Araguz based on this accusation. Nikki made her case to the news reporter by disclosing that she didn't have genital reconstruction surgery until October 7, 2008, two months after her August 2008 marriage to Thomas, with the following response to the reporter:
"I had the operation two months after our marriage, and my husband was fully aware, and the birth defect that I had essentially was not a problem to my husband," she said. "He was proud to be my husband as much as I was proud to be his wife."
However, Nikki Araguz is going to need help from skilled attorneys and persuasive medical expert witnesses in order to make her case before the court. While she has been unlucky to have chosen to marry in Texas, she is luckily surrounded by a legal team ready and willing to do everything in their power to help her.

Nikki Araguz - two days after her husband's death.
Currently, Nikki Araguz presents the demeanor of the mature and maturing thirty-five year old woman she is, a woman whose thin youthful beauty has settled into a more filled out thirty-something attractive charm, and subdued calm. She expresses herself in video interviews with emotional presence at the same time she is capable of intellectually lucid clarity. Her attire demonstrates social awareness appropriate for her thirty something status, providing indications of social as well as intellectual sensitivity. She also has a beautiful voice; one that delivers her usually articulate ideas with a pleasant warmth. Just two days after her husband died, during a video interview she gave to a small local newspaper, she said of personal relationships:
"If there is anything that I can say to anybody, don't waste a minute of your life arguing. Don't walk out the door and not say I love you, because you never know when you'll never get to speak to them again.",

http://www.victoriaadvocate.com/videos/2010/jul/06/2030/
It was a statement she made with heartfelt emotion in her voice, as steady tears of genuine grief streamed down her face. The majority of her statements since this tragedy began, have been focused on similar forms of reflection, and requests for respect and dignity from the media and the public.

Although Nikki's small immediate family hasn't been physically present when she has appeared at the district courthouse in Wharton, TX, her family has expressed a desire to be there if they were physically able. Unfortunately, both Nikki's parents have severe chronic illnesses. In fact, Nikki has apparently made frequent excursions to help her mother, who has suffered from and been hospitalized with strokes and seizures, and apparently has diabetes, heart disease, and partial paralysis. Nikki's mother Sheri has been active and present on the facebook.com support page setup for Nikki though, providing what support she can through that medium. As far as trying a case in the media is concerned, the presence of family seems to give the public an impression that someone has social legitimacy. With that in mind, the people from Nikki's immediate family whose presence might lend moral support to her during court appearances are her biological siblings Vanessa and Gary, whose public statements about Nikki have been entirely supportive and corroborative.

With help from the Houston transgender support center, Nikki Araguz has apparently been staying with friends and supporters, and spending nights in hotels, as far from Wharton, TX as is practical, since her husband's death and the onslaught of media frenzy that surrounds her. Other than a couple visits to the courthouse there, and visits to her husband's grave site, Nikki has stayed away from Wharton, TX. One possible conclusion that it seems reasonable to reach from such a portrait, is that Nikki Araguz is a woman whose life over the past few years has matured her in ways she probably never dreamed of before the day she met Thomas Araguz. One can only wonder how someone like herself, or like Christie Littleton and others before her, forge new life plans after such events, or how they structure their future personal relationships.