A 49-year-old transsexual did not set out to mislead authorities when she said she was a woman intent on marrying a man, a Leavenworth County judge ruled Tuesday.

“This is a great day for all transgender people in this state and, hopefully, all across the country,” said Pedro Irigonegaray, a Topeka attorney representing Sandy Gast on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Earlier this year, Leavenworth County authorities charged Gast with filing a “false swearing” on her marriage license after learning she and her partner, Georgi Somers, are transsexuals.

Kansas law prohibits same sex-marriage, and a Kansas Supreme Court ruling in 2001 established that a person’s gender is established at birth and not subject to change.

Gast’s original birth certificate indicated she was born a male. Testimony indicated she had been married three times — each time to a woman — and that one of those marriages had produced a child.

Irigonegaray had hoped to used Gast’s case to challenge the supreme court’s ruling, but Judge Frederick Stewart limited his ruling to whether Gast meant to mislead authorities. Prosecutors, he said, failed to prove Gast had acted with “criminal intent.”

Leavenworth County Atty. Frank Kohl characterized the ruling as neither a victory nor a defeat. “We present the case to the court, the court makes its decision, and whatever the court does — that’s what is viewed as justice,” he said. “It’s not a win or lose situation at all.”

Kohl and Irigonegaray agreed Stewart’s ruling was structured in a way that prevented either side from filing an appeal.

Irigonegaray said he wouldn’t appeal because his client was found not guilty. Kohl said he would not appeal because the court rescinded Gast and Somers’ marriage license during an earlier proceeding.

“The license has never been used,” Kohl said, noting that Gast and Somers, 63, are not legally married.

Several witnesses for the defense testified against the notion that a person’s sex can be determined at birth, saying that legal definition of gender is scientifically flawed.

Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray, left, Georgi Somers, center, and Sandy Gast meet with reporters Tuesday after Gast was found not guilty of misleading authorities when she applied for a marriage license as a woman. Gast and Somers are transsexual.

About one in every 10,000 births, they said, is transsexual — males who have the chromosomes, hormones, organs and brain functions of a female and vice versa. And though a transsexual — Gast, for example — may appear to be a male, he truly considers himself a female.

“It is time for the ignorance to end,” Irigonegaray said during closing arguments.

In dramatic testimony often interrupted by sobs and tears, Gast shared how, as a child, she had hidden girl’s clothes in the woods where she and her older brother Bob played.

“We’d play Tarzan,” she said. “He was Tarzan, I was Jane.”

Because she believed she was a girl, Gast said she was often beaten and sexually abused by her father. “No matter what I did,” she said. “I knew I could never satisfy him.”

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Upon being charged with filing a false marriage license, Gast said she was handcuffed and taken to the Leavenworth County Jail, where she was forced to strip in front of male deputy.

“I was on hormonal therapy then — I had breasts,” Gast said, weeping. “I put my hands over my breasts and (the deputy) said ‘Put your hands down!’

“It was horrible,” she said. “I was so embarrassed. I cried the whole time I was there.”

On cross examination, Kohl did not challenge Gast’s account of what happened in jail.

“It wasn’t an issue in the trial,” he said. “It was irrelevant. It had nothing to do with the facts of the trial.”

Asked whether she planned to file a civil lawsuit against the county, Gast replied: “It’s a possibility, I guess. But at this point, I’m not sure I ever want to deal with these people anymore.”