A Firefighter’s Widow and Her Gender Battle

by Em. Begly

Imagine for a minute that your child was born with no internal reproductive organs. The child has a small penis with no testicles and an underformed scrotum. The child is pronounced male by the doctor. You give him a name and take him home, unaware that he may not be a he after all. At age two, the penis stops growing and during puberty, breasts grow. A few years later, without any surgery, another doctor declares the child female. Birth certificates are changed and eventually, she falls in love and gets married. Later, surgery occurs to make all genitalia match and they live happily ever after, right?

Errrr….not quite.

This is the the story of Nikki Araguz. Nikki, born Justin Graham Purdue, married Thomas Araguz in 2008, 14 years after she had the gender on her birth certificate changed and a few months before having her underformed male anatomy removed. On July 4 of this year, Thomas, a fire fighter, was battling a blaze on an egg farm. Thomas was killed. This story, by itself, would be tragic but it doesn’t end here.

A mere 8 days after his death, the parents and exwife of the deceased filed a lawsuit alleging the marriage to be illegal. An emergency injunction currently bars Nikki from taking any property from the home (even her own clothes and personal belongings) or spending any money from their joint accounts. They are in court today to determine whether she has already profited from his death. The family’s attorney made a statement basing the lawsuit on a 1999 law which outlawed same-sex marriage and stated that gender could not be changed after birth. He has also stated that Thomas did not know about her condition until after this past April. He went on to say the fact that Nikki did not have a uterus barred her from being a woman.

OK, stop right there. Is THAT the definition of male vs female? I have no penis, scrotum or testicles. I also have no uterus, ovaries or natural vagina (due to life saving surgery). What does that make me? Others have suggested that it is blood testing to determine DNA that needs to happen to prove her sex. I suspect, although no one knows for sure, that a DNA swab would show either a mix of male and female chromosomes or some variation on the norm such as xxx or xxy or even xxxy. Genetics is not a sure thing. In fact, the 1999 case to which the attorney refers even states that the state will have great difficulty when such a time occurs that the internal and external genitalia and DNA present at birth do not match.

Further, Nikki’s family and friends have stated that this was common knowledge and that they were sure Thomas knew.

Nikki is not a transgender MTF. Nikki is intersex. This is something most of the world wants to forget, including the trans community. While this case may still have an impact on the trans community, Nikki was not born a man in body OR mind and no doctor should have called her male. She was defined as male because no other option existed. I hope the state of Texas wakes up and realizes that they issue corrected birth certificates, they need to honor them.

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