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Legal enactments are de facto definitions of gender/sex and affect the day-to-day lives of trans-identified individuals. We assessed requirements for changing gender/sex designations on US driver's licenses and birth certificates alongside their potential foundations to explore these legal definitions. Analyses showed that surgico-medical authority and sex reassignment surgery were privileged over lived experiences, psychology, and physiology (e.g. genetics; hormones). Though ‘biologism’ is typically theorized to explain legal conceptualizations and treatments of gender/sex and transgender, we argue for a diverse set of ‘bio/logics’ (implicit biological decision rules) that have profoundly different implications for trans lives. Over two other possibilities (trace bio/logics: a conceptual or physiological persistence of sexed origins; and interior bio/logics: a privileging of more embedded and immutable sex features), we conclude that US state enactments of gender/sex rely on ‘newborn bio/logics’: those binaristic features of genital sex immediately observable in newborns and naturalized via surgico-medical authority.
Anders et al. (Wed,) studied this question.