Legislating intersex equality: building the resilience of intersex people through law

Abstract

This paper presents the findings from the first qualitative study to consider the relationship between intersex experience and law, representing a significant contribution to a currently under-researched area of law. Since 2013 there has been a global move towards the legal recognition of intersex, with Australia, Germany and Malta all using different techniques to construct and regulate intersex embodiment. This paper is the first to compare and problematise these differing legal approaches in the legal literature. In doing so it demonstrates that many of these approaches are grounded in ideas of formal equality that lead to the entrenchment of vulnerability and fail to build resilience for the intersex community. Through engagement with the intersex community a more contextual account of substantive equality is enabled, encouraging new approaches to law and social justice. Our qualitative study revealed that prevention of non-therapeutic medical interventions on the bodies of children was understood to be the key method to achieving equality for intersex embodied people. Whilst this is the cornerstone of intersex-led legislative reform, such an approach necessitates support through a mixture of formal and substantive equality methods such as anti-discrimination law, education and enforcement procedures. This paper concludes by offering a series of recommendations to legislators capable of enabling substantive intersex equality.

Interrogating Vulnerability: Reframing the Vulnerable Suspect in Police Custody

“…As such, any mechanisms that seek to build resilience must also be accompanied by increased funding of – and commitment to the adequate functioning of – criminal justice institutions. Further, as Garland and Travis (2018: 591) have highlighted, state responsibility to provide resilience requires that the state ‘actively monitor institutions in terms of their success at promoting resilience and to intervene where they are not operating in an egalitarian manner’. Thus, the process and its adequate functioning must also be monitored.…”

Intersex: cultural and social perspectives

“…Recent writing of this kind includes papers by Ghattas (2013), Carpenter (2016), Bauer, Crocetti and Truffer (2020, Monro et al 2017 andCrocetti et al (2020). Critical legal approaches to sex variance, which also address the human rights issues, include work by Fox and Thomson (2017), Horowicz (2017), Garland and Slokenberga (2019), Garland and Travis (2018) and Travis (2015). Recent psychosocial healthcare research is reviewed in Roen (2019).…”

Gaps in the protection of athletes gender rights in sport—a regulatory riddle

“…For instance, Article 14 of the UK Human 2 Council of Europe (2015) Human Rights and Intersex People, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, https ://rm.coe. int/human -right s-and-inter sex-peopl e-issue -paper -publi shed-by-thecounc il-/16806 da5d4 (Accessed 10 September 2020); FRA (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights) (2015) The Fundamental Rights Situation of Intersex People, FRA, https ://fra.europ a.eu/ sites /defau lt/files /fra-2015-focus -04-inter sex.pdf (Accessed 10 September 2020); Scherpe et al (2018) and Garland and Travis (2018 West (2019, p. 9). Rights Act 1998 (HRA) prohibits discrimination in the enjoyment of human rights.…”