Law Commons^™

Discriminating Gender: Legal, Medical, And Social Presumptions About Transgender And Intersex People, Janet L. Dolgin

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

"Discriminating Gender: Legal, Medical, and Social Presumptions About Intersex and Transgender People” analyzes the significance of the binary-gender presumption in legal responses to intersex people and to transgender people. Both intersex and transgender status challenge familiar understandings of gender, sex, bodies, and personhood. Intersexuality challenges the cultural belief that that everyone can be, and should be, categorized as female or as male. And transgender status challenges the belief that gender and sex are always coincident and that they are established at a person’s birth. More fundamentally, differences in social and legal responses to both transgender people and to intersex people …