The Future of Legal Gender Project was a collaborative research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, that ran from May 2018-April 2022. The project explored competing visions of gender’s future and how to get there, focusing on the question: are there good reasons for people to continue to have a legal sex and gender, and what are the implications of abolishing this in countries like Britain?
The Project’s Final Report is briefly summarized in this post. Click on this link to read the full Report, which explains the Project’s research and its important contribution to imagining a world without gender.
Britain requires everyone to have a legal sex: the sex of citizens and residents are recorded on official documents including, for those born in Britain, their sex registered at birth.[1] This certified sex is then used as a legal status in diverse areas of law and policy.
But it has wider implications. As explained in the Overview of the Report: “Legal sex and gender contribute to who we are as legal subjects. They affect how we are treated, and the opportunities that we have…. More generally, legal sex status contributes to the social development of women and men as two separate groups of people. It suggests that both sex and gender matter – not simply for remedying inequality but as core settled aspects of who we are.” (p. 4)
With this in mind, the Project’s researchers explored these questions using qualitative and quantitative research methods:
· Should the law determine one’s formal gender status and then use that to classify people in policy?
· What would be the social, political and cultural implications of abolishing such status, or reforming it in other ways?
It is important to note that the Report does not advocate for the dismantling of legal sex and gender status (a.k.a. decertification), but explores it as a potentially progressive program for change in a British context. It is a future-oriented project that adopts and develops prefigurative law reform as a research method, where radical or controversial ideas are carefully considered as if they were already on the law reform agenda.
In order to do this, the Project researchers took an in-depth look at what concerns, problems and challenges decertification would invoke, particularly for thinking about equality and social justice. They also explored the benefits of decertification for individuals, institutions, and society. The Report also sets forth some principles and questions for policymakers and stakeholders to consider in order to move forward with decertification as a legal reform. For example, ways to continue the government’s role in ameliorating gender inequality without relying on legal membership of gender groupings.
There were several phases to the Project, as well as excellent resources, in addition to this Final Report, which you can read about on their website, linked here. The most recent publication from this project is the 2023 Special Issue of Feminist Legal Studies, “Decertifying Legal Sex—Prefigurative Law Reform and the Future of Legal Gender”.
[1] unless one formally changes their gender and legal sex by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate.
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