Transgender Trouble: Legislation Beyond Binaries? (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Transgender Debate: the crisis surrounding gender identity
The Transgender Debate: the crisis surrounding gender identity, 1999
This work addresses the historical, social, legal and medical issues surrounding the transgender community and throws a light onto the complex issues. This short book is intended to be a resource primarily for non-trans people who wish to get a simple grasp on current transgender issues. Perfect for older high school students, university undergraduates from many fields who need a simple explanation to the back ground of their project work, and for family and friends of trans people who simply want to understand. It addresses the historical, social, legal and medical issues surrounding the new community. The book throws light onto what are complex issues, clarifying them in a way that all those who think they know what gender roles mean, will be called to question the certainties they are no longer about. Transgender has become a cultural obsession. From the high camp of Ru Paul to the working class transsexual icon, Hayley of the UK's longest running soap "Coronation Street", it pervades our lives. Yet for many it remains a freakish interest on the sidelines. For transsexual and transgender people, though, it is a reality bound up in complexities, legal contradictions, family discord, and a desperate need to explain what it means to be a man or a woman, or neither, or both.
Transsexualism and transgenderism: Unravelling sex and gender, and abstractions of the sexed body
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019
Albeit a relatively old phenomenon, transgenderism currently remains difficult to define and understand due to the fact that it is so polymorphous and changing. Indeed, while it may be considered that in continuity with the mediatization of the transsexual phenomenon and of the first cases of Sex Reassignment Therapy (SRT), the transgender phenomenon appeared in the 1970s with certain cases of secondary transsexualism described by Stoller, and with the "first" transgender person, Virginia Prince (Castel, 2003, p. 486 and 491), it is only recently that the American Psychiatric Association (2013, pp. 451-459) and the WPATH 4 (2011, p. 97) have given it a certain recognition in their respective studies. According to the definitions given by these associations of health professionals, transgenderism corresponds first and foremost to a group encompassing all the different forms of gender incongruence (whether or not this incongruence entails distress experienced by the individual, and whether or not there is gender dysphoria). It is "simply" the opposite of cisgenderism 5 , that is, the opposite of the congruence between sex and gender. Thus, according to this broader conception, very diverse issues of identity or of non-conformity of gender may be considered as transgender, such as: • transsexualism with total hormonal and surgical transformation, but also partial (without an operation of sexual reassignment), • intersex conditions with ambiguities of genital organs, • identity-related transvestism, and even in a certain manner: • effeminate men who consider themselves as men, • or virile women who consider themselves as women.
Transgender: A Useful Category
Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2021
This article seeks to start a discussion that may help us understand why the category "transgender," created to include all trans* experiences, has excluded some. If "transgender" cannot fully include all trans* people, can it still be a useful category to adequately capture and analyze the lived experience of historical actors? It is in tracing back the genealogy of transgender, in the search for a name that could encompass the multiple and sometimes contradictory relationships between one's body and its social recognition, that we may attempt to discover why transgender has eclipsed terms such as transsexual and transvestite. The article first examines the parallels between recent debates in the historiographies of gender and transgender as terms that can express the complex social representation of bodies negotiated by language. Second, it studies how much a genealogy of transgender in the past reveals in fact a multiplicity of terms to express a realignment between body and a self that can be read by society. Ultimately, the author proposes the study of first-person narratives as the best way to comprehend the multiple terms used to express the diverse and sometimes contradictory identities an individual can embody.
Trajectories of the Transgender: Need to Move from Sex to Sexuality
Economic and Political Weekly, 2012
The Supreme Court has issued notices to the centre and state governments asking for responses on why such a category as "third sex" should not be created for transgender people. The question starts from an inappropriate positioning of establishing hierarchies in gender and implied gender roles. Mainstreaming the so-called "sexual minorities" by creating a separate category will lead to stigma and discrimination, rather than encourage pluralistic expressions in gender.
Transgender Trouble. A Transdisciplinary Approach to Transgender Rights
Verifiche, 2013
This paper is the result of a collaboration between a philosopher and a sociologist of health and human rights, both interested in transdisciplinary approaches to social sciences. While working together in Porto Alegre and in Paris, we realized that sex, more than gender, is one of the most interesting transdisciplinary notions in contemporary social sciences and that the failure of treating it in transdisciplinary terms still has weighty consequences in political and legal decisions regarding the recognition of transsexual identity. In our analysis, we focus on the normative consequences of ambiguous conceptions of sex by comparing legal sentences on sex change in Brazil and Europe and commenting on the recent Argentinian adoption of a jurisdiction that recognizes transgender rights by clearly distinguishing gender identity from the anatomical/biological sexual identity determined at birth. We conclude that a fully developed consideration of transsexuality as a human and health right should normatively account for the distinction between sex and gender. This will improve the rights not only of transsexuals but also of all the transgender attitudes towards sexuality (that is attitudes aimed at weakening the sharp opposition between male and female) that struggle to be recognized because of the conceptual confusions between different interpretations of sexual identity.
Columbia journal of gender and law, 2017
Sex is documented, administered, and adjudicated via a network of statutes, regulations, and administrative rules that is astonishing for both its inconsistencies and its complexity. (1) Courts and agencies tasked with issuing identity documents, or determining who qualifies as a spouse for the purposes of marriage licenses or same-sex marriage bans, routinely adjudicate the question of sex--employing "common sense" approaches to determine whether a person is "male" or "female." (2) For transgender persons seeking new drivers' licenses or other forms of official recognition, (3) the folkways of sex can be particularly dire because courts have naturalized both the idea of binary sex and the impossibility of sex reassignment. In refusing to recognize a transgender woman as a legal woman, a Texas appeals court exclaimed, "There are some things we cannot will into being. They just are." (4) The Kansas Supreme Court followed suit, stating: &quo...
Review on the Transgender Literature: Where Are We Now and a Step beyond the Current Practice?
Endocrines
The transgender concept is described as a clinically significant distress due to the incongruity between the experienced gender and assigned gender. A transgender person carries a gender identity that is different from their assigned sex at birth. Transgender people may be binary: male to female (transgender women) or female to male (transgender men) or genderqueer (non-binary, fluid or variable gender expression). The binary concept has been described in transgender population, where the term transwomen is used to describe people assigned male at birth (AMAB) who are recognized as females during gender transition; with the term transmen where they are assigned female at birth (AFAB) and are then recognized as males in gender transition. According to the DSM-5 classification, gender dysphoria is described when a transgender person develops clinically relevant bio-psychosocial suffering. Currently, the transgender population has gained massive public awareness through social media an...