The Future of Gender Project has just published its final report. I was one of the 3000 people who responded to their questionnaire and one of the 200 people they interviewed for the project.
The researchers set about exploring whether the current system of assigning people a legal sex and gender status should be dismantled, and to identifythe challenges and potential difficulties that such a proposal raises. They assert that the research identified benefits to decertification. These included: dismantling a legal system which formally places people, from birth, in unequal social categories of female and male; supporting greater self-expression – free from gender constraints; and removing the legal burdens currently placed on people who want state recognition of a change in their sex and gender status.
Concerns about decertification also emerged from their research. These concerns mainly related to gender and sex-specific services, data collection, violence, and positive action. Some research participants worried that measures to abolish
sex as a legal status would make it harder to retain provision and spaces based on distinctions between women and men (or females and males) and that this would disadvantage women.
Their research identified some ways of tackling these concerns. These strategies build on current practices of ‘soft decertification’ as public bodies and other organisations and agencies respond to users, staff, and clients who self-identify outside of a binary framework of gender anchored in the sex registered at birth. However, the hollowing out of legal sex has also faced opposition from groups who assert the importance of attending to women as a class defined by their sex. During this research, public bodies described how they navigated tensions between these competing demands, amid divergent interpretations of the relevant law.
Advancing gender equality as a broad, intersectional agenda does not just depend on state action. It also does not depend on equality law alone; other laws also shape gender relations and whether people can live in gender nonconforming ways. However, equality law has become a site of intense debate. Their research explored how different categories in equality law operate and questioned whether people need to be legally assigned to a category, such as gender or sex, to access legal remedies. Other equality grounds, such as race and sexual orientation, operate without requiring these ‘protected characteristics’ to be part of a person’s legal identity.
Several interviewees suggested that the present political climate was not a suitable or safe one in which to question the architecture of equality law or to radically alter gender and sex categories. Decertification may therefore be better approached through the prism of ‘slow law’. This involves transitional legal reforms (e.g. making gender transitioning easier, and legally recognising other gender identities) while also attending to far-reaching structural concerns of poverty, violence, exclusion, and exploitation. Decertification does not rely on these concerns being resolved. However, what decertification means and how it will work will be shaped by the social policy landscape within which its implementation is situated.
Finally, they set out some possible principles for a law decertifying sex and gender.
If you would like to read the report you can find it here: future-of-legal-gender-abolishing-legal-sex-status-full-report
Thanks for this, Jane. I’d not really thought of this topic much. Yet why should gender be such a legally fixed state where other equally important states are not? Odd when you think about it!