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Drawing on 38 in-depth, qualitative interviews, this article explores how people working in the equality sector in England and Wales view and use the current law around sex and gender, and how they imagine law’s future, particularly potential decertification, where the state would withdraw from certifying and regulating a person’s sex/gender. Whilst situated in the bureaucratic strand of the literature, the paper also contributes to wider legal consciousness studies. This literature has generally focused on people’s relationships to law in terms of domination, alienation and game-playing. Drawing on idioms and the language of touch, the paper unpacks the way in which equality actors talked about law not as remote or alienating, but as close and familiar; not as oppressive, but as “precious” and hard-won. Some also regarded law as a place of safety in unsafe times. These proposed ‘attached to law’ and ‘protective of law’ strands of consciousness enrich and extend Ewick and Silbey’s classic ‘before the law’ narrative. The findings are also useful for critical legal and feminist scholarship. Combined with the equality sector’s pragmatic and tactical use of law to problem-solve, this close and protective orientation towards law reproduces its hegemony. The paper concludes by exploring a recurrent refrain that, in relation to decertification, “we’re not there yet” and that gender equality would need to be achieved before decertification would “fly”.

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for readily responding to their requests for information; the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women for sharing its experiences of interviewing trafficked persons; and Garlum Lau for her research assistance. The research was conducted with the assistance of a Small Project Grant from the University Grants Council, University of Hong Kong. 1 In this article, references to "mainland China" are to the People's Republic of China [PRC], excluding the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong and the Special Administrative Region of Macau. References to "mainland Chinese people" are to people resident in mainland China. This article draws upon in-depth interviews with women from mainland China who were incarcerated in Hong Kong for offences related to sex work. The interview pool included women who had worked under thirdparty management in Hong Kong, a group not previously studied. 3 As well as providing important information on the experiences of migrant sex workers generally, the interviews presented an invaluable opportunity to examine whether any of the interviewees had been trafficked into Hong Kong, expanding on earlier studies that could not access trafficked women. 4 Based on their accounts, 12 of the 58 women interviewed for this study would qualify as trafficking victims under our interpretation of the modem international definition of the term, contained in the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women 2 See discussion at pp. 60-63 below. The terms "victims of trafficking" or "trafficking victims" are adopted in this paper for consistency with the Trafficking Protocol, although the authors recognize that the term "trafficked persons" is preferred by advocates of the "pro-sex work" position (see discussion on p. 46 below). 3 Whilst there is a growing body of research on the experiences of independent migrant sex workers in Hong Kong, interviewing an incarcerated population enabled us also to access women who had worked under third-party management, a group that is normally not accessible to researchers. On the experiences of independent migrant sex workers, see Veronica Pearson, "Business & Pleasure: Aspects of the

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