"State Regimes of Gender: Legal Aspects of Gender Identity Registration, Trans-Relevant Policies and Quality of LGBTIQ Lives": A Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable took place at the European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) in July 2019. It aims to investigate how gender, as a social process and regime, produces gender identities, often in non-deterministic and unpredictable ways. The right to not be discriminated against regardless of gender identity may, however, clash with practices of sex/gender categorization and gender- relevant policies of nation-states. Indeed, the attribution and registration of sex impacts the human rights of transgender, non-binary, queer and intersex persons. In bringing together expertise from political science, law, political sociology and gender studies, this roundtable: (1) asks how gender operates as a relation of power, particularly the value and possibilities of a more utopian politics of post-gender beyond existing identifications; (2) cultivates a discussion of the consequences of the systematic registration of legal sex and of sex/gender-related policies as they impact quality of life for queer and trans individuals, and (3) discusses theoretical and practical alternatives to such policies and practices. In examining relationships between gender as a relation of power, gender identity attribution and global justice, we also want to ask how non-binary genders are operationalized in policies and practices of nation-states and to think critically about whether undoing formal legal categorization would impact the gendering of social subjects.