TRANSGENDER JURISPRUDENCE Dysphoric Bodies of Law
CP
Cavendish Publishing Limited
London • Sydney
TRANSGENDER JURISPRUDENCE Dysphoric Bodies of Law Andrew N Sharpe Senior Lecturer in Law, Department of Law Macquarie University
CP
Cavendish Publishing Limited
London • Sydney
First published in Great Britain 2002 by Cavendish Publishing Limited, The Glass House, Wharton Street, London WC1X 9PX, United Kingdom Telephone: +44 (0)20 7278 8000
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© Sharpe, Andrew N 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE, UK, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Transgender Jurisprudence: dysphoric bodies of law 1 Sociological jurisprudence 2 Transsexuals – Legal status, laws, etc I Title 346'013 ISBN 1 85941 666 7
Printed and bound in Great Britain [MC Escher’s ‘Metamorphosis III’ © 2001 Cordon BV – Baarn – Holland. All rights reserved.]
I would like to dedicate this book to my mother, Susan Winifred O’Hagan and my father, Neville Tomlinson Sharpe. With love and gratitude.
FOREWORD It is de rigueur for law to draw clear lines between people so that some are ‘in’ while others are ‘not in’. In/out, norm/other: dualistic thought has been naturalised through language and myriad discourses. Male and female is one such dualism, superficially simple, but in fact highly complex. Law both reflects and reifies the ostensible simplicity through countless legislative and adjudicative sites. Heterosexuality is the normative sexual transparency which overlays the sexed pairing, while homosexuality complicates it. Andrew Sharpe’s trailblazing study of transgender jurisprudence goes further, putting paid, once and for all, to a two dimensional, anatomical characterisation of sex. The word ‘trailblazing’ is not hyperbolic in this case because Transgender Jurisprudence is the first full length, scholarly study on the topic. Transgenderism itself is not