As jurisdictions reform gender identity laws to accommodate transgender and intersex people, this article speculatively explores a more fundamental shift: eliminating state law's role in determining and assigning gender status altogether. Adopting a feminist perspective, we explore what the meaning and effects of comprehensively reforming legal gender might be in terms of gender's constitution as a socio-legal property, differentially recognised and protected by diverse but unequal bodies. Our discussion proceeds along two intersecting paths. The first concerns the different classificatory methods which could enable state law, without assigning gender, to continue to regulate gender identity decisions, thereby allowing state law to remain involved in tackling gender discrimination. The second concerns the changing form gender might take in conditions where state law withdraws its allocative function. These paths converge in a final discussion which considers what legal and political effects might follow from gender becoming a property that is individually and collectively cultivated.

Contrary to widespread belief, sex trafficking also targets LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) communities. Contemporary social and political constructions of victimhood lie at the heart of regulatory policies on sex trafficking. Led by the US Department of State, knowledge on LGBT victims of trafficking constitutes the newest frontier in the expansion of criminalization measures. These measures represent a crucial shift. From a burgeoning range of pre-emptive measures enacted to protect an amorphous class of 'all potential victims', now policies are heavily premised on the risk posed by traffickers to 'victims of special interest'. These constructed identities, however, are at odds with established structures. Drawing on a range of literatures, the core task of this article is to confront some of the complexities and tensions surrounding constructions of LGBT trafficking victims. Specifically, the article argues that discourses of 'exceptional vulnerability' and the polarized notions of 'innocence' and 'guilt' inform hierarchies of victimhood. Based on these insights, the article argues for the need to move beyond monolithic understandings of victims, by reframing the politics of harm accordingly.

British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine equality law protections. This article explores how gender-based equality law could operate in conditions of decertification, drawing on legal thoughtways developed for two other protected characteristics in equality law—religion and belief, and disability—to explore the legal responses and imaginaries that these two grounds make available. Religious equality law focuses on beliefs, communities, and practices, deemed to be stable, multivarious, and subject to deep personal commitment. Disability equality law focuses on embodied disadvantage, approached as social, relational, and fluctuating. While these two equality frameworks have considerable limitations, they offer legal thoughtways for gender oriented to both its hierarchies and its expression, including as disavowal.

In July 2017 the UK government committed to "streamlining" the process for a legal change of gender in England and Wales. At present, the legal recognition of a change of gender is conditional upon applicants submitting two detailed medical reports certifying their diagnosis with "gender dysphoria", as well as a number of documents that attest to the "permanence" of their so-called "new" gender. In addition, legal recognition is limited to those applicants who identify -at least for the purpose of the application process -with a binary system of sex/gender. Drawing on comparable legal frameworks, this chapter will consider the limitations of the current legal framework regarding non-binary people, as well as the potential changes proposed more recently.

Our analysis includes laws that relate specifically to England and Wales as well as laws which also extend to Scotland and Northern Ireland, e.g., see Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances Act 2021, s7(1). 2 Political contestation over the terms of sex and gender-in what they mean, what they include, and how they operate as material enactments-makes their usage complicated. Our use of gender does not refer principally to identity or expression but to socially institutionalised processes that draw and maintain hierarchical distinctions. These also work with and give meaning to material forms of embodiment, conventionally understood as sex. Thus, we refer to gender in contexts where some sex-based feminists would prefer to talk about sex. Where the law refers explicitly to 'sex', we follow this terminology. However, English law is often inconsistent in its usage of these terms.