Our legal lives as men, women and persons

Abstract

To be recognised as a legal person is to be individualised: it is to be rendered a separate and distinct being, the unitary bearer of rights and duties. By contrast, to be assigned a legal sex is to be grouped with others, to be placed within one of only two sexes, as either a man or a woman, a necessarily crude dichotomy. It is to be legally defined by the characteristics we are said to share with half the human population rather than regarded as an individual in our own right. This paper entails a critical comparative analysis of the legal concept of person and the legal concept of sex: of maleness or femaleness. It questions the logic and defensibility of this double characterisation of our legal lives. How can law reconcile its deep commitment to individualism with its persisting commitment to a two-sex system?