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This special issue explores the politics and controversy surrounding the proposal to decertify (or abolish) legal sex status in Britain, focusing on the jurisdiction of England and Wales.Footnote1 Decertification emerged as a law reform idea, from the confluence of several developments: feminist and transgender politics, intellectual movements in critical and prefigurative research, and the institutionalisation of liberal equality paradigms. However, the immediate story starts with legal measures introduced transnationally to accommodate gender transitioning and in some cases to legally recognise gender identities other than as women and men (e.g., see Sharpe 2007; Clarke 2018; Holzer 2018; Renz 2020a). These state legislative projects of incorporation, intent on maintaining broader... |
This article explores the challenge of developing a feminist law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender based on research conducted for the ‘Future of Legal Gender' project. Locating the proposal to decertify within a do-it-yourself, prefigurative approach to law reform, the article asks: Can a law reform proposal be both instrumental and radical? Can a proposal take shape as a viable legislative text and as a more subversive intervention to unsettle and reimagine gender’s relationship to law? This article explores this at two levels. First, it considers the ontological challenges of developing a controversial law reform proposal in terms of its realness (or fictiveness), contours, and temporality, turning to ‘slow law' as a credible way of approaching radical reform. |
