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The inaugural lecture will consider the role of gender recognition and regulation in the law of England and Wales. It will explore how law has tried to define sex and gender and has often done so in a way that excludes some people from important legal protections. Overall, in England and Wales until about a decade ago relatively little attention was paid to the regulation of transgender identities by the state. Even when there has been a focus on trans and non-binary people, and the social/legal issues affecting this group disproportionately, such as the legal regulation of sex/gender, they were and arguably are still being treated as marginal or outliers in terms of their specific concerns regarding legal recognition and protection. At the same time, while there is increasing public awareness of people who do not identify with a binary understanding of gender, this is only slowly being translated into legal and policy debates. While there is now much more awareness of the status of trans people in law, this sits in tension with a concurrent pushback against rights and recognitions for this group.
Dr Flora Renz is a socio-legal scholar whose research interests lie broadly in the area of gender, disability, and social and legal inequalities. Her approach to law is influenced by feminist theory and critical disability studies; it uses a mix of empirical methods and theoretical analysis. Her publications include the monograph Gender Recognition and the Law: Troubling Transgender Peoples' Engagement with Legal Regulation (Taylor & Francis, 2024).
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