Gender Self-determination Troubles

This dissertation explores the growing legal recognition of what has become known as ‘gender self-determination.’ Examining sex reclassification policies on a global scale, I show a shift within sex reclassification policies from the body to the self, from external to internal truth. A right to self-attested gender identity amends the grave breach of autonomy presented by other legal schemes for sex reclassification. To secure autonomy, laws and policies understand gender identity as an inherent and internal feature of the self. Yet, the sovereignty of a right to gender identity is circumscribed by the system of sex classification and its individuating logics, in which one must be stamped with a sex classification to be an autonomous legal subject. To understand this failure, I turn to the legal roots of the concept self-determination by looking to international law, and to the origin moment of legal differentiation, sex assignment at birth. Looking at the limitations of the collective right for state sovereignty allows me to provide a critical account of the inability of a right to gender identity to address systemic harms. Self-attested gender identity inevitably redraws the public/private divide along the contours of the trans body, suggesting a need to examine the apparatus of assigning sex at birth and its pivotal role in both the systemic exclusions of trans people, and in the broader regulation of gender. Looking forward rather than back, I turn to what I perceive to be the ‘future challenge’ of a right to self-attested gender identity, trans parental designations. I show that when people ask that their gender identity be recognized as parents, and especially when using their own bodies to conceive, they become inconceivable, exposing the gaps between what the law imagines as natural and the realities of lived experience. Theorizing the self-determination of gender through sex reclassification histories and practices of international law, and through its articulation within family law, suggests that all its elements, the individual self and its assumed ability for autonomous determination, and the formulation of gender identity as a self-evident right, require new imaginaries.S.J.D