UC EVENTS

31 October 2023
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM (AEDT)
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (CET)
8:00 AM – 9:00 AM (GMT)

Abstract

This paper begins from a longstanding concern about the political under-representation of women relative to men, people from ethnic minorities relative to those from ethnic majorities, people from working class backgrounds relative to those from privileged backgrounds, and so on. There are blurred boundaries around who constitutes any of these groups, but this is most evident in the case of social class (people change their class) and racialised categories (heavily ideological); and part of the relative success of gender quotas is that identifying who is or is not a woman has, by comparison, seemed straightforward. The fact that a small proportion of the population transitions from one gender identity to another has not seemed a major complication.

Recent debates about the nature of gender identity and the conditions under which people can legally change their gender emphasized concerns on gender identity transitions. In the UK, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 allows for those who have transitioned from male to female or female to male to be issued with a gender recognition certificate in their new identity, but this has been subject to a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and at least two years of living in the acquired identity. The delays, medicalisation, and requirement to present oneself as suffering a form of mental illness have been much criticised, and several countries have introduced alternative systems of self-certification.

In the UK, this proposal proved highly controversial. A two-year public consultation on reform produced much heat and no change, and in 2022, the UK Parliament went so far as to block legislation passed in the Scottish Parliament to introduce a form of self-certification. The wider debate has generated highly polarised and distressingly angry counter-positions, with one side conjuring up scenarios of multiple men declaring themselves female to prey on vulnerable girls and women, and the other side responding with accusations of transphobia.

Here, I focus on the alternative proposal set out by Davina Cooper in the Future of Legal Gender, which bypasses discussion about the conditions under which one can legally change one’s gender identity to argue for an end to the legal status of gender. I find the argument philosophically compelling: we would mostly repudiate the suggestion that the state should assign to us at birth a specific racial, cultural or religious identity, so why do we continue to think it so obvious and uncontroversial to be labelled male or female in this way? I explore what problems, if any, abolishing the legal status of gender might bring to the politics of political representation.

This seminar will be chaired by Hans Asenbaum.

About the speaker

Anne Phillips (a.phillips@lse.ac.uk) is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, where she was previously the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science. She also served for several years as Director of LSE Gender Institute. Her first major work was on colonial policy in British West Africa, but most of her writing since then has been in the field of political theory, and more specifically, feminist political theory.