How we define someone's gender by law is the critical question we must ask when addressing transgender rights. Is it up to the individual to know and define their own gender, or is it the state's role to determine it? It's the long-standing debate which has been revived in national/international consciousness in light of two radical and opposing solutions to transgender politics and rights revealed in recent months in two contexts where transgender rights and politics are arguably the most visible. In the UK, a proposed reform would allow people to change their legal sex without seeking permission from the state first while the Trump administration plans to strip transgender people of their legals rights in federal law to define their gender as anything other than their biological sex altogether.
Both answers to transgender rights and politics have been met with enormous backlash. The UK's proposals, by taking the view that only people have the right to affirm their own gender, has resurfaced a whole multitude of security arguments, most commonly used to deny transgender people their chosen gender expression in spaces of incarceration. In contrast, the Trump administration's plan has received enormous backlash as it effectively denies the existence of gender dysphoria, by reproducing a gender binary through the legal system. As such, transgender people would be given no protection against discrimination and would be denied the opportunity to leave behind their sex assigned at birth in the eyes of the law.
Theories of gender identity have spread remarkably quickly in recent years, particularly among young people, due to the increasing visibility of different types of gender expression and gender identities on social media, which dispel the assumption of a mutually exclusive male/female gender identity binary. These theories are intimately bound up in identity politics and states have responded accordingly, albeit some more rapidly than others.
The most obvious barrier to achieving a far more inclusive society for trans people surrounds debates of the rights of women and children in spaces and how transgender people would threaten their 'safe' spaces. To the global community, the state is clearly viewed to have a pivotal role in determining whether gender self-identification is a matter of civil rights or not.
We can't possibly predict whether a world under self-identification could keep everyone safe or what kind of harm it could cause; politicians and trans-activists alike can't possibly pretend to know the answer to this. But what is abundantly clear to me is that the Trump administration, once again, seeks to divide by writing transgender people out of society altogether while the UK considers making trans-people's legal status a matter of personal debate and dismissing the potential for harm to come to those in spaces accessible to anyone.
Antonia x
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