Abstract
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 informalization. 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 recognizing 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 informalization 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.
Highlights
The Future of Legal Gender (FLaG) is a critical, feminist research project concerned with gender’s relationship to law, inequality, subjectivity, society, and imagined futures
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
We explore some feminist criticisms of decertification
Summary
The Future of Legal Gender (FLaG) is a critical, feminist research project concerned with gender’s relationship to law, inequality, subjectivity, society, and imagined futures. England & Wales remains a jurisdiction in which gender endures as a source of inequality, and as an abiding structuring feature of societal organisation This has important implications for how we think about law reform. It is worth stressing at the start that, while our article focuses on a specific legal measure, we do not assume that legal reform, and legal reform to “informalise” sex/ gender status, will radically undo gender-based inequalities or the reproduction of gendered categories more generally (see, especially, Smart 1989; see e.g., Bottomley and Conaghan 1993; Munro 2001; Sandland 1995; Fletcher, Manji, this issue). We take these up to ask: does decertification contribute to accounts of how gender-based injustices might be undone (in ways that could include gender’s undoing as well) or does it merely signify state withdrawal in conditions of continuing gender inequality, exploitation, and violence?
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