ABSTRACT
In recent years, transgender people around the world have made tremendous strides toward achieving legal recognition – that is, the ability to obtain government documents that reflect their gender identity and not the sex they were assigned at birth. Legal gender recognition is hardly a panacea for the myriad human rights violations – from discrimination to outright violence – trans people face globally. Rather, achieving it sets individuals and communities up to achieve a number of other rights and dramatically increases their social mobility. But the push for legal recognition is not without its challenges. Historical entanglements between gender identity and expression and medicine have proven difficult to untangle. For example the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases only in 2018 removed transgenderism from a list of diagnosable mental illnesses. In some contexts, this promises to be liberating; in others, tumultuous – for example, in Japan, the activists who secured a legal gender recognition procedure in 2004 remain convinced that trans people do indeed have “Gender Identity Disorder” and need more medical procedures in order to transition and obtain legal recognition, not fewer. Non-medical political backlash has also proven to be a complex barrier. Identity-based recognition procedures have drawn the ire of some feminists who fear trans women will “invade” hard-fought female-only spaces; some politicians have pushed back against self-identification models in the name of preventing terrorists from traveling incognito. And the progress has taken different paths in different contexts – some governments have conceded to recognize a third gender category before allowing legal transitions between male and female categories; for others, non-binary categories are positioned as antithetical to the social order.
