Getting Sex "Right": Heteronormativity and Biologism in Trans and Intersex Marriage Litigation and Scholarship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Essay criticizes two negative tendencies in legal scholarship, lawyers' arguments, and judicial opinions addressing the legal sex of and the validity of marriages involving transsexual and intersex persons.First, some pro-transrecognition arguments display a tendency to treat questions of a person's legal sex as simply a matter of biomedical fact or "truth."These arguments typically treat views rejecting transgender persons' self-identified sex as objectionable primarily for their failure to get sex "right," that is, their failure to enshrine in law the current views of medical practitioners.Second, and relatedly, some pro-recognition arguments manifest an undefended heteronormativity, naturalizing not only sex, but also cross-sex desires.Canvassing U.S. judicial decisions in marriage-related cases that reject claims that a litigant's sex had been legally changed, this Essay argues both that these arguments' heterosexism is objectionable and unnecessary for making effective sex recognition arguments, and that the "getting sex right" approach fails to appreciate how legal sex is a normative, regulatory tool, not a natural fact."Getting sex right" risks unaccountable legal decision-making and transfers of power to an alternative regime, that of medicine, that may seem more congenial than the legal arena at the current moment, but which is not guaranteed to promote the liberty and equality of transgender, or indeed any, persons.Litigants, judges, and scholars around the world have grappled with issues of sex determination.A frequent site of contestation has been civil marriage, which in modern times has, until recently, been formally restricted in most western jurisdictions to a union of one man and one woman. 1When the validity
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".