Andrew N. Sharpe

Violence, identity and policing The Case of violence against transgender people

The call by transgender people for the police to take violence against them more seriously has some familiar attributes. In general it is a violence characterized as hate crime. Transgender activism has highlighted many problems, for example, under-reporting, lack of trust and confidence in policing, lack of police recognition, low detection rates, clear up rates and infrequent judicial determinations of guilt. This activism might be characterized as another instance of identity politics emerging within the field of policing and criminal justice. While we welcome its emergence some scholars have been critical of the impact of identity politics upon policing and criminal justice bodies, suggesting it promotes further social and community divisions. Although we share some of these concerns, in this article we argue that these problems are the effect of particular assumptions about the nature of identity. We offer an analysis of identity politics that seeks to challenge this position, as well as an analysis of empirical data of transgender experiences of violence and insecurity arising out of research undertaken in Sydney, Australia. Our analysis exposes the multiple and simultaneous operation of many different social and cultural divisions at work in the context of transgender identity. We explore the significance of this approach to identity for policing.

Foucault's monsters and the challenge of law

1. Introduction Part 1: History/Theory/Monsters 2. Foucaults Theoretical Framework 3. Foucaults Monsters as Genealogy: The Abnormal Individual 4. An English Legal History of Monsters Part 2: Contemporary Monsters 5. Changing Sex: The Problem of Transsexuality 6. Sharing Bodies: The Problem of Conjoined Twins 7. Admixing Embryos: The Problem of Human/Animal Hybrids 8. Conclusions

Gender Recognition in the UK: a Great Leap Forward:

ON 1 July 2004 the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 1 was enacted in the UK. While this legislation is certainly not beyond criticism, as each of the three comments to this Debate will, in different ways, highlight, it is nevertheless a remarkable piece of legislation. By virtue of the Act, and as the result of decades of struggle by the transsexual community, transsexuals who have attained the age of 18 (s. 1(1)), and who have been diagnosed as suffering from, or as having suffered from, gender dysphoria (s. 2(1)(a)),2 are able to apply for and obtain a full Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) entitling them to be treated on the basis of their reassigned gender for all practical legal purposes. Thus, and by way of example, a male-to-female transsexual woman who possesses a full GRC is to be considered a woman under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. She is also to be considered female for the purposes of section 11(c) of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 and therefore able to enter into a valid marriage with a man. The Act is especially remarkable in the UK context. Prior to the GRA, the single event that most captured legal and political attitudes towards the plight of transsexual people in the UK was the now infamous decision of Corbett v Corbett [1970]. In this case, Ormrod J decided that ‘sex is determined at birth’ and by reference to the congruence of three biological factors: chromosomes, gonads, and genitalia. Moreover, prior to the enactment of the GRA, the UK had the dubious distinction of being one of only two EU nations (with Ireland) refusing to grant transsexuals full legal status as men or women consequent upon gender reassignment surgery. Despite a series of appeals to the European Court of Human Rights through the 1980s and 1990s, claiming breaches of Articles 8 (the right to privacy) and 12 (the right to marry and found a family) of the European Convention on Human Rights (most notably, Rees v UK [1986]; Cossey v UK [1991]; X, Y and Z v UK [1997]; Sheffield

A Return To The `Truth' Of The Past:

THE GRA is clearly a positive development in a number of respects as detailed in the opening article. Moreover, while Sandland is correct to highlight how the Act reproduces, and thereby bolsters, a binary gender order, and is in this sense problematic, his acknowledgement of the claim by Whittle and Turner (2007) that the legislation nevertheless ‘undermine[s] the binary of two morphologically distinct sexes’ is worth emphasizing. Yet, even here, we should perhaps be more circumspect. In this concluding comment I want to draw attention to a specific and discrete difficulty contained within the legislation. This difficulty serves to call into question how we choose to characterize and situate the Act within the wider context of transsexual law reform. I wish to suggest that despite the obvious benefits of the GRA including, and in particular, its renunciation of a requirement to cut the flesh, law has not divorced itself from a concern with the body. Indeed, I will put it more strongly than that, and claim that a biological, rather than a merely anatomical, understanding of sex is, in an important sense, a subtext within the Act. It is in this sense that the GRA represents a return to the past. In this regard, the GRA might be read as less progressive than some earlier reform decisions and statutes. I have argued elsewhere that reform jurisprudence rarely entails a clean break from the past (Sharpe, 2002). The argument here is that the GRA proves to be no exception. This contention might strike the reader as counter-intuitive. After all, the GRA has enabled transsexuals to have their gender identity legally recognized irrespective of any surgical or even hormonal interventions. In the face of this legal development, how, it might be wondered, can it be argued that the anatomical body remains paramount, let alone its biology? To appreciate a connection between the GRA and a biological understanding of sex we must look to section 11 of the Act. Section 11 gives effect to schedule 4 to the Act. Crucially, paragraphs 4 and 5 of schedule 4 amend section 12 of the Matrimonial Causes Act (MCA) 1973 to add a new ground for rendering a marriage voidable, namely ‘that the respondent is a person

Police performance crime as structurally coerced action

This article will argue that police performance crime can be described as structurally coerced action because it represents the most reasonable response to a sanction‐containing organizational demand set beyond a legitimately attainable threshold. This account of police performance crime recognizes the importance of structural strain, rational choice and social learning experiences as key contours on its contextual landscape. However, the concept of coercion as a moral concept requires a further and vital ingredient ‐ enroachment upon some moral right. The claim of right asserted here is one to have organizational rewards allocated upon the basis of merit‐based criteria. It is strain theory which provides a space for the assertion of encroachment upon this moral right, while the theories of rational choice and social learning help explain the reasonableness of action. The designation of police performance crime as coerced action contains serious implications for criminal responsibility, punishment and cri...

Transgender Performance and the Discriminating Gaze: A Critique of Anti-Discrimination Regulatory Regimes

This article will examine the ways in which Australian anti-discrimination laws serve to regulate transgendered persons. It will emerge that the forms of regulation deployed vary significantly across jurisdictions. In order to appreciate the complex relation of transgendered persons to practices of discrimination and to forms of regulation, it is necessary not only to consider the category ‘transgender’ but to consider also the categories of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’. This is not a matter of law’s blindness to ‘intersectionality’, of the abstraction of legal subjects from embodied particularity, but rather a question of the interplay between these categories within specific regulatory regimes. Moreover, the regulation of transgendered persons, and indeed other categories of person protected by anti-discrimination laws, will be seen to occur in ways which call for a re-examination of rights critiques which attempt an interrogative interpretation of rights. The article contends that Australian anti-discrimination laws are marked by a shift from an interrogative to a performative mode of regulation. That is to say, anti-discrimination laws are to be comprehended not by reference to the ‘immutability’ of some attribute or characteristic but rather in the interplay of performance and gaze. This regulatory shift is one which serves to problematize, rather than ossify, extant legal categories. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male’ or ‘female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. (Freud, 1964) But it seems we are as we appear. What a nonsense we make of our hatreds when we can only recognise them in the most obvious circumstances. (Winterson, 1996)

Corporate Performance Crime as Structurally Coerced Action

This article will argue that corporate performance crime can be described as structurally coerced action because it represents the most reasonable response to a sanction-containing organisational demand set beyond a legitimately attainable threshold. This account of corporate performance crime recognises the importance of structural strain, rational choice and social learning experiences as key contours on its contextual landscape. However, the concept of coercion as a moral concept requires a further and vital ingredient — encroachment upon some moral right. The claim of right to be asserted is one to have organisational rewards allocated upon the basis of merit-based criteria. It is strain theory which provides a space for the assertion of encroachment upon this moral right, while the theories of rational choice and social learning help explain the reasonableness of action. The designation of corporate performance crime as coerced action contains implications for criminal responsibility, punishment and crime-prevention strategies which the article explores.

England's Legal Monsters

This article offers a history of the English legal category monster, a legal category that entered English law in the mid-thirteenth and survived until the mid-nineteenth century. The aim of the article is to provide a close textual analysis of an otherwise absent legal history and to locate laws monsters, and the anxieties that they suggest, within their appropriate contexts: social, political, religious and legal. However, while the principal aim of the article is to address a lacuna in legal historical scholarship, and perhaps precisely because of this fact, the history to be detailed offers a series of valuable insights for future study, particularly in the areas of legal history, philosophy and feminist theory. While full elaboration of these themes is beyond its ambit, the article will draw attention to four different and specific contexts in relation to which future scholarship might benefit from an historical study of Englands legal monsters.

A Review of “Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men”

of methodology and dissemination of knowledge were selected with care to empower their participants (and by extension, other sao braphet song in Thailand) through respect, collaboration, and cogeneration of knowledge. In a feminist framework, they conceptualized their inquiry by repositioning themselves as mediators between the participants’ actual voices and the readers. The authors represent sao braphet song’s personal narratives through the participants’ translated written personal essays and intentionally leave the final chapter without authoritative claims of conclusive truths about sao braphet song. In place of authorial conclusions, they cogently argue that any insights or observations they and the readers might gain from the presented data must be seen as contextualized and situated in a specific time and place within a cultural history. Rather than generalize, typify, or crossculturally taxonomize their findings to capture the knowledge for instructive convenience, they insist on the plurality of experiences among sao braphet song. Their approach problematizes the traditional dominant-passive relationship between the researchers and the subjects. More important, it subverts our paradigmatic positivist orientation to scientific inquiry. Costa and Matzner did an exceptional job at critically reviewing extant literature about kathoey and sao braphet song. Their chapter “Gender and Sexuality in Thailand” offers a thorough and informative review and thoughtprovoking analysis that are at least as good as any heretofore scholarly work. For example, they examine the Thai construct of kathoey by juxtaposing it with the Western or global concepts of homosexuality and transgenderism without submitting to those paradigms and in the process highlight the complicated relationship between gender identity and sexual orientation for which there are no easy formulas. In reviewing academic and popular accounts of the Thai social attitudes toward sao braphet song, they question the common perception that alternative sexualities and genders are generally accepted in the Thai culture (this is often cited by other authors to be a result of Thai people’s nonjudgmental attitude, Buddhist benevolence, or hedonistic indulgence). As the participants’ personal narratives would illustrate, acceptance is a much more complex, heterogeneous phenomenon, depending on many factors such as the relationship one has with a sao braphet song and the degree of her adherence to gender, moral, and personalintegrity codes in the Thai culture. Researchers present data. Here, the authors do just so with the personal narratives of sao braphet song they collected in Chiang Mai, Thailand, but they aim higher than the common business of disseminating findings. Costa and Matzner conceptualize their data as a means to advocate for sao braphet song by way of creating connection between the readers and the storytellers. Sixteen personal narratives in this book connect the readers intellectually with the storytellers by being informative and educational but do not stop there; these data go into the realm of the “poetic” by evoking the readers’ emotional responses. In contrast to the austere microscopic gaze upon human subjects through the quantitative and “objective” lens, these data dare to be funny, joyous, defiant, provocative, intriguing, frustrating, heartwarming, poignant, inspiring, and troubling. One of the tenets of feminist research is praxis orientation, and the authors attempt it by having their participants, on their own terms, connect with readers. Assuming that we all have the capacity for empathy, sao braphet song in Costa and Matzner’s book raise our consciousness by touching our hearts.