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How do legal institutions govern young people’s access to gender-affirming care?
Amid intensifying global efforts to restrict such care, this book analyses 124 Australian court judgments concerning puberty blockers and hormones handed down over 20 years. Examining the ontological, epistemological, teleological, and pathologising arguments courts have used to gatekeep access, the book shows that regulation has not been concerned primarily with safeguarding young people’s welfare but with controlling gender itself.
Offering timely insights for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners, the book exposes the gender-normative assumptions underlying legal interventions into gender-nonconforming lives and advocates a more expansive approach to advancing transgender rights.
"Matthew Mitchell’s post-structuralist study takes an original approach to the issue of hormone treatment for young trans people. Rather than plunge into the heated pro/anti debates, he studies the judicial reasoning of the Australian courts which actually made decisions on such cases, some of them famous. The result is a unique conceptual map of how state officials understand gender issues. Interested in what the map shows? Read the book!" Raewyn Connell, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney, and author of Gender and Power and Trans Lives.
"As anti-gender campaigns intensify around the globe, Matthew Mitchell excavates the logics through which gender-affirming care for youth becomes recognizable and actionable. Focused on Australia, Mitchell’s archival analysis reaches two conclusions: First, the affirmation of transgender identities in youth is not only possible and desirable, it is supportable through a range of legal logics. Yet affirmation is not synonymous with liberation. Mitchell also shows how legal recognition sediments normative claims about what forms of gender are livable, legible and legitimate. By cataloguing the judicial arbitration of gender, this analysis reveals the recursive relationship of courts and culture—and offers a striking cautionary tale for those of us in other places laboring for gender liberation amid political oppression." Tey Meadow, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, and author of Trans Kids.
“As young trans people endure increasing hostile political scrutiny, Mitchell offers a reparative analysis that disrupts cisnormative ideas of gender governance while attending to plural trans and gender diverse lives." Senthorun Raj, Professor of Legal Humanities and Human Rights, Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of Feeling Queer Jurisprudence.
1. Introduction
2. Governing Gender
3. Case and Method
4. Ontology
5. Introspective Epistemology
6. Extrospective Epistemology
7. Teleology
8. Alignment
9. Pathology
10. Conclusion