Law and Gender Commons^™

What Best To Protect Transsexuals From Discrimination: Using Current Legislation Or Adopting A New Judicial Framework, S. Elizabeth Malloy

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This article specifically examines the issues and controversies that transsexual individuals have encountered as a result of their lack of protection under anti-discrimination laws, particularly the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title VII. Part I is an overview of our society's binary sex/gender system and how this system serves to exclude and disenfranchise transsexuals. Part II examines the relationship between disability law and transsexuals, both explaining why they were excluded from the ADA and how state disability laws have provided more protection. Part III discusses how transsexuals have fared under a Title VII sex discrimination approach. This section also …

Taxing Civil Rights Gains, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

In this article, I take a novel approach to the question of what constitutes a "tax." I argue that the unique burdens placed on same-sex couples by the federal and state "defense of marriage" acts (the DOMAs) constitute a tax on gay and lesbian families.

Classifying the DOMAs as a "tax" has important substantive and rhetorical consequences. As a tax, the DOMAs are subject to the same constitutional restrictions as other taxes. This opens them to challenge under the federal constitution's direct tax clauses and the uniformity clauses present in many state constitutions. Where such constitutional challenges are unavailable or …

Eve Sedgwick, Civil Rights, And Perversion, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

It is hard to imagine where queer theory would be without Eve Sedgwick. Indeed, I can't imagine where my own thinking would be had it not been informed, enriched, challenged, repulsed, and seduced by Sedgwick's writing. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and The Epistemology of the Closet, the early work, gave me the tools to think about the fundamental landscapes of my intellectual world in ways that decoupled and reconfigured the binaries of male/ female, heterosexual/homosexual, friend/lover, and public/private. Sedgwick gave us the idea of homosociality and a critique of identity and identification that exploded the …