Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Towards Freedom, Empowerment, and Agency: An Introduction to Queering Criminology in Theory and Praxis: Reimagining Justice in the Criminal Legal System and Beyond
- 1 Gender-and Sexuality-Based Violence among LGBTQ People: An Empirical Test of Norm-Centered Stigma Theory
- 2 Queer Pathways
- 3 Queer Criminology and the Destabilization of Child Sexual Abuse
- 4 Queer(y)ing the Experiences of LGBTQ Workers in Criminal Processing Systems
- 5 ‘PREA Is a Joke’: A Case Study of How Trans PREA Standards Are(n’t) Enforced
- 6 Queerly Navigating the System: Trans* Experiences Under State Surveillance
- 7 Sex-Gender Defining Laws, Birth Certificates, and Identity
- 8 Effects of Intimate Partner Violence in the LGBTQ Community: A Systematic Review
- 9 Health Covariates of Intimate Partner Violence in a National Transgender Sample
- 10 Serving Transgender, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex Youth in Alameda County’s Juvenile Hall
- 11 Liberating Black Youth across the Gender Spectrum Through the Deconstruction of the White Femininity/Black Masculinity Duality
- 12 ‘I Thought They Were Supposed to Be on My Side’: What Jane Doe’s Experience Teaches Us about Institutional Harm against Trans Youth
- 13 The Role of Adolescent Friendship Networks in Queer Youth’s Delinquency
- 14 ‘At the Very Least’: Politics and Praxis of Bail Fund Organizers and the Potential for Queer Liberation
- 15 A Conspiracy
- 16 LGBTQ+ Homelessness: Resource Obtainment and Issues with Shelters
- 17 The Color of Queer Theory in Social Work and Criminology Practice: A World without Empathy
- 18 Camouflaged: Tackling the Invisibility of LGBTQ+ Veterans When Accessing Care
- 19 Barriers to Reporting, Barriers to Services: Challenges for Transgender Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Victimization
- Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Do Justice? Current and Future Directions in Queer Criminological Research and Practice
- Index
7 - Sex-Gender Defining Laws, Birth Certificates, and Identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Towards Freedom, Empowerment, and Agency: An Introduction to Queering Criminology in Theory and Praxis: Reimagining Justice in the Criminal Legal System and Beyond
- 1 Gender-and Sexuality-Based Violence among LGBTQ People: An Empirical Test of Norm-Centered Stigma Theory
- 2 Queer Pathways
- 3 Queer Criminology and the Destabilization of Child Sexual Abuse
- 4 Queer(y)ing the Experiences of LGBTQ Workers in Criminal Processing Systems
- 5 ‘PREA Is a Joke’: A Case Study of How Trans PREA Standards Are(n’t) Enforced
- 6 Queerly Navigating the System: Trans* Experiences Under State Surveillance
- 7 Sex-Gender Defining Laws, Birth Certificates, and Identity
- 8 Effects of Intimate Partner Violence in the LGBTQ Community: A Systematic Review
- 9 Health Covariates of Intimate Partner Violence in a National Transgender Sample
- 10 Serving Transgender, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex Youth in Alameda County’s Juvenile Hall
- 11 Liberating Black Youth across the Gender Spectrum Through the Deconstruction of the White Femininity/Black Masculinity Duality
- 12 ‘I Thought They Were Supposed to Be on My Side’: What Jane Doe’s Experience Teaches Us about Institutional Harm against Trans Youth
- 13 The Role of Adolescent Friendship Networks in Queer Youth’s Delinquency
- 14 ‘At the Very Least’: Politics and Praxis of Bail Fund Organizers and the Potential for Queer Liberation
- 15 A Conspiracy
- 16 LGBTQ+ Homelessness: Resource Obtainment and Issues with Shelters
- 17 The Color of Queer Theory in Social Work and Criminology Practice: A World without Empathy
- 18 Camouflaged: Tackling the Invisibility of LGBTQ+ Veterans When Accessing Care
- 19 Barriers to Reporting, Barriers to Services: Challenges for Transgender Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Victimization
- Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Do Justice? Current and Future Directions in Queer Criminological Research and Practice
- Index
Summary
As the subject of multiple laws, court rulings, and vested public interest, sex and gender nonbinary people are increasingly subjected to scrutiny and enforced politicization, medicalization, and criminalization. By legally defining sex and gender as permanently interconnected and bodies as either male or female from birth based on the perceived ability of sexual reproduction, proponents of sex-gender-confirming proposed legislation seek to establish that one's sex-gender is determined through scientific, thus inarguable, fact. In January 2019, the Utah Vital Statistics Act Amendments bill (H.B. 153, 2019), was proposed, which would legally define sex and gender – assumed congruent – as inherently and permanently either male or female. However, the strict language used in the proposed bill provides definitions for what is considered legally male and female that are so explicit that nonbinary bodies, even those bodies that doctors would typically assign as male or female, would ‘literally fall outside of the only categories the court recognizes as human’ (Lloyd, 2005, p. 170). A failure of the proposed legislation to account for the myriad of natural bodily formations beyond the binary male/female indicates a failure to include personhood or humanity for people whose bodies do not match the required function in the text of the law. This potentially marks transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people as existing outside the category of legally human by denying their identity in relation to the available legal male/female markers, such as accurate birth certificates and legal identification documents, which, in turn, impact access to employment, housing, healthcare, finances, education, and interactions within the criminal justice system.
By examining the purposefully specific language used in H.B. 153 and comparing it with previous incarnations of similar legislation, I show how exclusionary legislation fails to represent the vast differences in sexgender present within the human body, potentially defining multitudes of people out of societal and legal existence. Through an examination of the structure and language of the proposed bill and an examination of how the sciences noted in proposed legislation fail to account for the variances in bodily formations, I position sex and gender nonbinary people as not only not included in, but intentionally prevented from, being considered legally human.
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- Information
- Queering Criminology in Theory and PraxisReimagining Justice in the Criminal Legal System and Beyond, pp. 98 - 110Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022