TRANSSEXUALS A NEW TEST OF MARRIAGE: From the San Jose Mercury News

Depending on how you see things, Fran Bennett and Erika Taylor are a heterosexual or lesbian couple.

Either way, under California law, they're married.

That's because the couple tied the knot before Bennett, once a popular Bay Area disc jockey known as ''Weird Old Uncle Frank,'' had what is commonly called a sex change.

Their marriage -- and possibly thousands like it involving transsexual women and men across the Bay Area and country -- is already testing the boundaries of marriage as the nation wrangles over the rights of same-sex couples to wed. ...

''I am concerned that if there's a federal change defining marriage only between a man and woman, and I no longer qualify as a man, then could they try to dissolve my marriage?'' said Fairfax resident Dani-Marie Kleist, 54, a transsexual woman who married as a man 12 years ago.

Transsexuals -- people who have an innate sense they were born the wrong sex -- have a legal right in California to change their gender on various forms of identification. Those who elect to have sex-reassignment surgery can also apply for a new birth certificate that reflects their corrected sex. There are an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 transsexuals living in California.

Transsexuals have long been able to marry in California and many other states under a variety of circumstances, including marriages entered into before a person makes the transition to the opposite gender, and those that would be considered heterosexual after a person changes gender.

''It's a precious right that we already have,'' said Shannon Minter, a transsexual man and legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, one of three organizations that filed a lawsuit in March for six same-sex couples arguing that denying them the right to marry violates California's constitution.

While Minter believes marriages like Bennett and Taylor's can't be undone, she said they underscore the arbitrariness of using gender as a basis to restrict marriage. ...

She cited recent family court decisions regarding transgender marriages, including one involving attorney Mathew Staver, whose Liberty Counsel is representing the conservative Campaign for California Families in suits filed to outlaw gay unions. ...

''I think the whole gay marriage debate, although it may not always be phrased this way, is a debate about gender,'' [Staver] said.

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