feminists@law

Introduction to the Special Issue on the Future of Legal Gender: Exploring the Feminist Politics of Decertification

Davina Cooper — 2020-11-08

Introduction to the special issue on the Future of Legal Gender. The editors of the special issue are Flora Renz, Davina Cooper and Emily Grabham.

Pulling the Thread of Decertification: What Challenges are Raised by the Proposal to Reform Legal Gender Status?

Davina Cooper — 2020-11-08

In decertification, the state withdraws from registering, assigning, or guaranteeing a person’s sex and gender, giving one shape to the growing momentum towards their informalisation. This article explores decertification as a speculative reform, now emerging onto the political and legal agenda, in two primary ways. First, it asks what contribution, if any, might decertification make to a feminist politics intent on undoing gender-based hierarchies. Second, as a methodological thread, what concerns, issues, and hopes does decertification bring with it? In addressing these questions, the article considers different versions of decertification alongside an alternative reform strategy of legally recognising multiple gender identities. It explores the feminist benefits of decertification; the concerns and criticisms expressed; and strategies for responding to feminist worries. Here, the article turns to possible and already in-place governmental strategies to manage the informalisation of sex/ gender, alongside criticisms that can and have been made of these strategies. It then considers decertification’s relationship to other strategies that foreground purpose, specificity, connection, and context, within a politics intent on questioning and unsettling existing orderings. Finally, the article considers the risks of androcentrism and gender-neutral law; and argues for the need to embed decertification within a wider multiplex progressive agenda.

Working Decertification, Sensing Reproduction

Ruth Fletcher — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Cooper and Emerton.

Taking on the State: An African Perspective

Ambreena Manji — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Cooper and Emerton

The Challenge of Same Sex Provision: How Many Girls Does a Girls' School Need?

Flora Renz — 2020-11-08

Can a girls’ school include a boy and remain a single-sex school? Is there something intrinsic to being a girls’ school that exists separately to pure demographic issues? Does single-sex education, and specifically female single-sex education, have an inherent value that is different to that of mixed sex education? To address these questions, this paper draws on some initial findings from a wider research project on the Future of Legal Gender. Specifically, this paper will consider the implications for single-sex services if legal gender status were to be reformed. Especially, what would the consequences be for reform options which (re)allocate authority to organisations or individuals to determine gender criteria and individual status in terms of eligibility to receive or access services? The article uses the example of single sex schools to consider two key questions regarding potential reforms in this area. Firstly, what aims is gender differentiation currently trying to achieve? And secondly, how do service providers, including secondary education providers, currently engage with challenges to their differentiation criteria?

Negotiating Binary Conceptions of Sex/Gender in a Multi-Gender World: Response to ‘The Challenge of Same-Sex Provision: How Many Girls Does a Girls’ School Need?’

C.L. Quinan — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Renz.

The Struggle to Imagine Higher Education Otherwise: The Transformative Potential of Diverse Gender Knowledges

Jennifer Fraser — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Renz.

Gender’s Wider Stakes: Lay Attitudes to Legal Gender Reform

Elizabeth Peel — 2020-11-08

The Future of Legal Gender (FLaG) project is interested in examining the implications, for a wide range of stakeholders, of changing how legal sex/gender is regulated in England and Wales. In this article, we explore the views of ‘the wider public’ as manifest in responses to our ‘Attitudes to Gender’ survey (n=3,101), which ran in October to December 2018. Generally, respondents were invested in the status quo regarding a binary two-sex registration of gender close to birth. We discuss this finding with reference to cisgenderism and endosexism, focusing particularly on being critical of ‘gender’ and foregrounding biological sex, and views for and against self-identifying gender. In tandem, we also provide a critical commentary on the methodological positives and pitfalls associated with online survey research on a ‘topical’ issue. We suggest that cisgenderism could provide a less individualised framework for understanding different people’s hopes and worries with regard to both the current legal gender framework, and the possibility of reform.

Doing Feminist Research in Contested Moments: Commentary on ‘Gender’s Wider Stakes: Lay Attitudes to Legal Gender Reform’

Kath Browne — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Peel and Newman.

Cisgenderism’s Move Beyond Anxious Defence: Commentary on ‘Gender’s Wider Stakes: Lay Attitudes to Legal Gender Reform’

Shona Hunter — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Peel and Newman

Taking Public Responsibility for Gender: When Personal Identity and Institutional Feminist Politics Meet

Davina Cooper — 2020-12-11

This essay explores the challenge that soft decertification poses for feminist politics. In soft decertification, people continue to have a formal legal sex/ gender status; however, public and other bodies act as if such status was no longer determinative (at least in certain contexts). As glimpses of soft decertification emerge, what are its implications for gender equality initiatives hitherto focused on addressing the asymmetrically patterned lives of women and men? What new ways of understanding gender are coming to the fore, and what challenges arise for bodies engaged in equality governance in trying to address them? This essay explores these questions through the prism of responsibility - the ethical, political, and legal obligation to pay attention or respond that different bodies have because of their capacity to undo or ameliorate social inequalities and other injustices. Specifically, it asks: What does responsibility for gender entail when gender is treated as both institutionalised and self-determined; public and private? The essay addresses two contexts where equality governance approaches gender as a site of institutional re-making and redress. The first concerns the front-stage initiatives and policies of public sector provision; the second concerns the back-stage scenes of organisational action, where informal decision-making arises. In both cases, taking responsibility for gender, as an institution, is far from straight-forward. This essay explores the importance of doing so - not just despite, but because of, the complex conditions responsibility confronts when institutional forms also exist as individual attachments.

A Responsibility to Representational Justice: A Few Notes on Reading Davina Cooper’s ‘Taking Responsibility for Gender’

Sumi Madhok — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Cooper.

Doing Due Diligence on Gender? A Reflection on Davina Cooper’s ‘Taking Responsibility for Gender’

Vanessa E. Munro — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Cooper.

Exploring the Textual Alchemy of Legal Gender: Experimental Statutes and the Message in the Medium

Emily Grabham — 2020-11-08

This article draws on original empirical research to explore the politics of experimental feminist statutes. It has two main aims. First, it traces how conventional legislative drafting techniques have participated in the wider social creation and continuance of sex/gender norms. It shows how dominant statutory expressions of sex and gender that might otherwise appear timeless have shifted with social change and legal innovation. The article contributes to debates in feminist legal studies, legal anthropology, and legislative drafting by making visible, and analysing the particular power of legislative text, its ‘alchemy’, in expressing and re-creating sex/gender as a social, cultural and political artefact. Second, drawing on this research, the article explores what the Future of Legal Gender project might consider and do when drafting an experimental statute to decertify legal gender. Addressing questions of positionality, believability, legal form and the use of potentially innovative or contested drafting techniques (the singular “they”, the second person), the article explores tensions between legislative drafting and feminist legal method, as well as the benefits for bringing feminist analysis and perspectives to this important aspect of legal practice. Given that legislative drafting does not merely inscribe pre-agreed policy ideas into legal text but helps to shape emerging ontologies of gender, then drafting an experimental statute invites feminists to pay attention to interlinked questions of substance and form in the exploration of prefigurative legal futures.

Response to ‘Exploring the Textual Alchemy of Legal Gender’

Alain Pottage — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Grabham.

Gender Inclusive Legislative Drafting in English: A Drafter’s Response to Emily Grabham

Helen Xanthaki — 2020-11-08

Commentary on Grabham.

The Introduction of “Anti-Racist Legislation” in the Greek Legal Order: Political Strategies, Legalised Violence and the Formal Protection of Gender Identity.

Roussa Kasapidou — 2021-02-14

The present article follows the introduction of the much-contested “anti-racist legislation” during a particularly dark era of governance in Greece. Within a context of deepening crisis, absolute legitimation of state racism and institutional violence against the nation’s racial, gender, religious and sexual Others, the politico-legal choice of a right-wing government to go through with this reform appears paradoxical at first glance. Even more so, the introduction of gender identity among the protected characteristics seems at odds not only with governmental actions that have directly targeted trans individuals but also with the overall gender-normative imperative of the law and the hostile institutional atmosphere that mirrors and reproduces it. In view of this seemingly paradoxical legislative choice, queried here is the concrete work performed by the “anti-racist law” reform in the context in which it unfolded. Utilising a broader problematisation of any legal regime’s authority to justify its own violence, it is suggested that a closer reading of the conditions under which the reform took place brings into light its instrumentalisation, during that era, to legitimise systemic racism and institutional gender/sexual violence materialised through operations against marginalised populations.

End of Trump's Rule Will Not End the Assault on Reproductive Rights in Africa

Saoyo Tabitha Griffith — 2020-11-30

This comment highlights the damaging and long-lasting effects of the Trump administration's policies on reproductive rights in Africa.