by Rex Wockner
A married couple in Australia has become a married lesbian couple after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal allowed a transgender woman to change the sex designation on her passport, SX magazine reported Oct. 4.
The couple, Fiona Power and Grace Abrams, had married in 2005 while Abrams was in the process of changing her gender.
When Abrams later applied for a new passport, she was turned down because her birth certificate says she is male, but the tribunal concluded "it is not so much the identity of the person as she or he was in the past, but the identity of the person as at the time of the application, that is of prime importance."
The tribunal directed the Foreign Affairs Ministry to issue the new passport, which carried the side effect of government acknowledgment of the marriage of two women.