ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the criteria employed to determine whether an individual should receive a gender recognition certificate opens a space for trans individuals to challenge the authority of medical evidence to define their lived experiences. The concept of transsexuality, from its beginning, has been linked to medical and psychological discourses that attempt to identify and diagnose "abnormal" or "aberrant" practices of sex and gender. The chapter seeks to understand how law might critique, upset, or challenge the authority of medical evidence while recognizing how this form of evidence provides the conditions in and through which individuals stand before the law in the first place. It closely reads the parliamentary debates surrounding the United Kingdom's 2004 Gender Recognition Act. The chapter argues that the parliamentary debates both invoke and critique medical discourses, suggesting that this practice of legal recognition operates to challenge the very norms on which it depends.
