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31 Feminist L. Stud. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/femlst31 and id is 1 raw text is: Feminist Legal Studies (2023) 31:1-16 https:Ildoi.org/10.1007/si0691-022-09514-5 EDITORIAL Introduction to Special Issue: Decertifying Legal Sex-Prefigurative Law Reform and the Future of Legal Gender Davina Cooper' Flora Renz2 Accepted: 6 December 2022 / Published online: 23 March 2023 ŠThe Author(s) 2023 Introduction This special issue explores the politics and controversy surrounding the proposal to decertify (or abolish) legal sex status in Britain, focusing on the jurisdiction of England and Wales.' Decertification emerged as a law reform idea, from the con- fluence of several developments: feminist and transgender politics, intellectual movements in critical and prefigurative research, and the institutionalisation of liberal equality paradigms. However, the immediate story starts with legal meas- ures introduced transnationally to accommodate gender transitioning and in some cases to legally recognise gender identities other than as women and men (e.g., see Sharpe 2007; Clarke 2018; Holzer 2018; Renz 2020a). These state legislative pro- jects of incorporation, intent on maintaining broader legal sex and gender struc- tures,2 provide for some movement away from binary statuses assigned at birth (e.g., Dunne and Mulder 2018; Renz 2020b). Yet, the assumption that minorities should be incorporated within existing classificatory structures, with all the political and Our analysis includes laws that relate specifically to England and Wales as well as laws which also extend to Scotland and Northern Ireland, e.g., see Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances Act 2021, s7(1). 2 Political contestation over the terms of sex and gender in what they mean, what they include, and how they operate as material enactments makes their usage complicated. Our use of gender does not refer principally to identity or expression but to socially institutionalised processes that draw and main- tain hierarchical distinctions. These also work with and give meaning to material forms of embodiment, conventionally understood as sex. Thus, we refer to gender in contexts where some sex-based feminists would prefer to talk about sex. Where the law refers explicitly to 'sex', we follow this terminology. How- ever, English law is often inconsistent in its usage of these terms. E Davina Cooper Davina.cooper@kcl.ac.uk Flora Renz flora.renz@kent.ac.uk Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK 2 Kent Law School, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NS, Kent, UK 1 Springer