Transgender Jurisprudence: Dysphoric Bodies of Law (London: Cavendish, 2002) (original) (raw)
Related papers
This article considers a recent decision of the Family Court of Australia that recognises the sex claims of a transsexual man for the purposes of marriage. The decision is to be welcomed not only for extending reform to the arena of marriage but also, and specifically, because it recognises as male, for the first time, a vaginaed man. However, this moment of reform needs to be treated with some caution. In the first place the 'radicality' of the decision never fully materialises in the judgment. More significantly, recognition of sex claims proves contingent on factors not previously considered relevant in reform jurisprudence, namely (bio)logic and the social and cultural. The introduction of these factors raises questions concerning the autonomy of transgender people and the future of transgender law reform. 1 Re Kevin and Jennifer v Attorney-General for the Commonwealth [2001] FamCA 1074. The decision was appealed to the Full Bench of the Family Court of Australia. At the time of writing their is still awaited. 2 R v Harris and McGuiness [1989] 17 NSWLR 158; Secretary, Department of Social Security v HH [1991] 23 ALD 58; Secretary, Department of Social Security v SRA [1992] 28 ALD 361. 3 It should be noted that the validity of a marriage involving an intersexed person was considered by in Re the Marriage of C v D (falsely called C) [1979] 35 FLR 340. In this much criticised decision Bell J held that Mr C was neither a man nor a woman for the purposes of marriage thereby precluding his ability to marry anyone. For criticism of the decision see Bailey-Harris (
Queer Jurisprudence: Course Manual (Melbourne Law School, 2022)
This course encouraged a slant-wise approach to thinking about the topic of queer jurisprudence: not, as a first parsing of the phrase might suggest, a course about the legal regulation of non-heterosexual relations. Instead, we approached queerness as the open mesh of possibilities that become available to us when we transgress the normal, and jurisprudence as a training in lawful conduct that we might acquire from a diversity of sources which may or may not be conventionally considered “legal. Bringing these terms in relation to each other allowed us to explore a range of expressions of law that are playful and subversive.
This article will provide a critique of two recent English marriage law decisions, the first concerning a female to male transgender person and the second an intersexed person. It will do so through consideration of the dialogue between each and the landmark transgender case of Corbett v Corbett. It will highlight how both decisions, in seeking to minimise the fact of 'departure' from Corbett, serve to reproduce key elements of that decision which serve to undermine the future prospects for transgender law reform in the English context. In particular, both decisions, in different ways, or with different emphases, ensure that 'legal sex' continues to be determined by (bio)logical and temporal factors. Crucially, however, as in Corbett, it is legal anxiety over the boundaries of the 'natural', and the homophobia of law that underscores this anxiety, that account for these particular constructions of 'legal sex'. This article will provide a critique of judicial (re)constructions of sex in the context of two recent English marriage law decisions, S-T (formerly J) v J 1 and W v W. 2 The first case, involved J, a female to male pre-operative transgender person, and the second W, a male to female intersexed person. It should be emphasised from the outset however that distinguishing between transgender and intersex cannot be reduced to a purely descriptive act. While it proved critical in the case of W, the distinction, as we shall see, proves to be an effect of medico-legal constructions of (bio)logical sex and judicial concerns over demarcating the realm of the 'natural'. The distinction is also misleading in that it belies the capacity of the term transgender, and a developing transgender politics, to include 1
Jurisprudence and Gender [1988]
Feminist Legal Theory, 2018
Grey, the participants in the Wisconsin 1987 Feminism and Legal Theory Summer Workshop, and the Georgetown Feminist Legal Theory Workshop for their comments on early drafts of this article. I am also indebted to Marcy Wilder (Stanford Law School '88) for helping me to clarify and develop the critique of the critical legal scholarship discussed in this article.
Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field
Feminist Legal Studies, 2009
The papers in the following section arose from a roundtable discussion organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, titled 'Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field'. Participants in the roundtable were asked to reflect on the challenges confronting law, gender and sexuality (LGS) as an area of research and scholarship, and to ask what benefits, possibilities, risks and dangers accompany the establishment of a research terrain. The papers address such questions as 'what is a field and how is it made?'; 'has LGS attained the status of a field?'; 'what does it mean to locate oneself within the field of LGS?'; and 'what is the relationship between feminism and LGS?'. They also consider possible future directions for the field of LGS. Together, the papers provide a variety of differing, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on the developing body of intellectual and political activity that might be labelled 'law, gender and sexuality'. Keywords Embodiment Á Feminist legal scholarship Á Feminist activism Á Field Á Interdisciplinarity Á Law, gender and sexuality The following papers are the product of a roundtable discussion organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (CentreLGS) held at the University of Westminster in March 2009. CentreLGS was a joint venture between the Universities of Kent, Keele and Westminster, established to stimulate critical, interdisciplinary research in law, gender and sexuality (LGS), and was funded by R. Hunter (&)