ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys examples of how ‘runaway legitimation’ has created opportunities for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer rights claims. This dynamic has been both conceptual and, in Dowdle's coinage, ‘infrastructural’. The highest level example of a state authority addressing same-sex sex as a legal issue occurred in 1957, when the High Court of Heilongjiang Province requested instructions from the Supreme People's Court on how to handle a case involving two men who had consensual sex in a labor camp. Policies that affected transgender people also made progress during this time. In 2002, the Ministry of Public Security provided guidance to local public security bureaus on how to change gender markers on national identification cards for citizens who had completed gender-affirming surgery. In the 1990s and 2000s, the government passed and strengthened a flurry of laws on protecting the rights and interests of youth, elderly people, women, workers, and people with disabilities.
