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This article focuses on the transgender civil rights, including transsexual marriage litigation and sex discrimination. The modem regulatory project of sex classification is currently in a crisis, caused by the increasing divergence between individual gender definition and legal sex designation: individuals are more likely than ever before to affirm a gender identity different than the one traditionally associated with the sex assigned to them at birth. Moreover, increasing numbers of people are refashioning their identity as transgender by transitioning with the assistance of medical technologies or choosing not to undergo any body modification but opting to present themselves in gender non-conforming ways. There are some other conditions which make the unambiguous sexing of some individuals very difficult. Some of these conditions include chromosomal ambiguity, gonadal ambiguity and ambiguity in external genitalia. Gender identity is usually classified in legal discourse as the psychological component of sex. In a just regime, one that celebrates individuals as authors of their own lives, one's gender identity should be the deciding factor in determining one's legal sex. And in such a regime, the state's ability to classify its population and distribute resources on the basis of a binary gender system would cease to exist. While each individual transgender rights case might advance a particular narrative about what biological sex is and how it is related to gender, collectively the advocacy efforts already reflect a multiplicity of transgender experiences, and portray transgender people in a wide diversity.

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Vol. 4 Issue 2, p705-721 17p