Introduction to Special Issue: Decertifying Legal Sex—Prefigurative Law Reform and the Future of Legal Gender

of Legal Gender project, which formally started in 2018 (in design from 2015), decided to research this question, to ask: Are there good reasons to continue to accord sex and gender legal status in Britain, including in light of developments elsewhere?In response to this question, we investigated contemporary socio-political uses of sex and gender categories, in Britain, as well as movements in other directions.With its manifold distinctions and hierarchies, including between women and men, trans and non-trans, endosex and intersex, and conventional and unconventional (or post-gender) self-expression, organising principles of gender continue to shape relations of work, wealth, esteem, self-expression, violence, power, and authority .Law also continues to use sex and gender categories.In addition to the complexly gendered character of legal rules, principles and doctrine, some British laws deploy distinctions of gender and sex more explicitly.These include laws on reproduction, pregnancy, and parenthood, laws on inheritance and overcrowding, and equality law provisions which variously permit, prohibit, and regulate sex/ gender-specific activities, spaces, and decisions. 3 At the same time, like many other countries, Britain is undergoing an ostensible shift towards gender neutral law.Pronouns and terms to designate law's subjects are becoming gender neutral -avoiding 'he' or 'she', as well as previous approaches where 'he' included 'she' (see Grabham 2020). 4More substantively, many laws, including laws relating to sexual 3 See, e.