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This article investigates how legal sex shapes gendered parenting, suggesting decertification may challenge societal norms.
‘Legal sex’, the formal registration and categorisation of sex, initiates a sex/gender binary discourse in the UK that limits substantive sex equality and gender diversity. This article, employing a Foucauldian legal feminist method, takes an alternative theoretical approach, and investigates the systems of power that produce and sustain the sex/gender reality which society accepts as truth. It explores the extent to which ‘legal sex’ contributes to the social construction of the sex/gender binary discourse. It examines the intersection between ‘legal sex’ and ‘gendered parenting’ to determine the effect of this system of power. It discusses decertification to evaluate a method of dismantling the system of power. This article posits that ‘legal sex’ initiates a ‘truth regime’ by creating a discourse that is accepted by society as the truth. This discourse informs and constrains the interactional practices of parents, resulting in ‘gendered parenting’, which entrenches and perpetuates the discourse. Decertification of ‘legal sex’, despite limitations, provides a potential means of dismantling the system of power by undermining the discourse and weakening the ‘mechanisms of control’. Ultimately, it replaces the discourse for one that promotes the intra-variation of sex and gender, and in doing so advances sex equality and gender diversity.
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Freya Norton (2025) studied this question.
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