<i>Gender Recognition and the Law: Troubling Transgender People's Engagement with Legal Regulation</i> By FloraRenz, London: Routledge, 2024, 176 pp., £135.00

Judith Butler's 2024 text Who's Afraid of Gender? seeks to address the question of the current moral panic surrounding the subject of gender and trans identities. Butler notes that ‘the myriad, continuing debates about the word [gender] show that no one approach to defining, or understanding, gender reigns’.1 While this is arguably simply a statement chronicling the landscape of contemporary academic debate, it does so at a time when there are increasingly fierce debates and an attempt to assert a singular model of truth, notably by those sometimes known as ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists' (TERFs) or ‘gender-critical feminists’. Into this debate have entered a variety of activists and scholars such as the Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling2 and the academic Kathleen Stock. Stock resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 following campus student protests and widespread unease at the teaching and writing of an academic who appeared to be transphobic.3 They have been joined by, among others, the campaign organization Sex Matters, co-founded by Maya Forstater, who also serves as Chief Executive and a vocal champion for the gender-critical perspective in the media.4 The debate between feminists who call themselves ‘gender-critical’ and those who insist that feminist alliances must include trans and genderqueer people has become a matter of intense public conflict, bullying, censorship campaigns, and claims of hostile work-place environments. The future of some academic departments has been put into question as administrators are called upon to listen to groups of self-proclaimed feminists argue against ‘gender ideology’ in the curriculum, and others defending their methods, pedagogy, and research against an enemy who should obviously be an ally.5 Such is the ‘debate’ that, as I begin this review, I am conscious that there will be readers approaching this to see which side I have chosen. It is perhaps not enough that I am a long-standing socio-legal researcher in the field of gender, sexuality, and law. I am a queer theorist and, for some, that will disqualify me to appropriately comment on this text. Maybe I should exchange a mortarboard for a tin hat. It is in these rather extraordinary circumstances that Flora Renz's 2024 text Gender Recognition and the Law: Troubling Transgender People's Engagement with Legal Regulation provides a vital and thought-provoking contribution. The book centres on the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) in the United Kingdom (UK), drawing on 30 in-depth qualitative interviews with trans people about the legislation to challenge the assumptions that some arguably have that the legislation is groundbreaking and progressive. In doing so, Renz rightly places at the heart of the text the voices of trans people who are all too often marginalized in the public debate about their own identity. The book draws on the theoretical concepts of legal consciousness, agency, and emotion to explore the normative underpinnings of the GRA. It largely avoids the territory of Butler's text and is anchored firmly in the ground of the GRA. Renz notes that though there has been a range of studies that have sought to explore the GRA, ‘there is currently a lack of research on the connection between theoretical and normative problems within the GRA, and the impact the provisions in the GRA have on a day-to-day basis’ (p. 2). Renz's contribution remedies this gap in knowledge. The book draws on Renz's PhD thesis, which further underlines the challenge of producing this text at this particular time. It has arguably never been more important to have this book and to consider the practical, doctrinal, and theoretical contribution that it makes, while acknowledging that it does so amid a significantly shifting policy and social context. For example, in the introduction, Renz notes the significant contribution of the 2015 Transgender Equality report produced by the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee, which was the first formal parliamentary review of legal and medical issues affecting trans people in the UK. Yet, by 2024, we have had a Conservative Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, who seemed vocally unable to understand the Equalities Act in relation to trans people,6 while following the July General Election one of the first acts of the new Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting was to announce the continuation of the recently imposed ban on puberty blockers for trans children, provoking at the time of writing a High Court challenge7 from a young person and the trans campaign organization TransActual.8 Renz begins her book exploring the performance of normative gender identities in Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) applications as part of the GRA. Renz notes, as others have, the binary gender assumptions of the GRA and the challenges around defining what ‘normal’ is in terms of adhering to those assumptions. What is it to ‘live as a woman convincingly’ in dress, manner, and lifestyle? Renz's original and important contribution here is to present the voices of trans people, such as that of Dan, who notes the way in which the GRA creates a situation where ‘you get the impression that people are looking for a specific thing, it's very stereotypical. You just pick out certain things that match that narrative’ (p. 25). If I was to point to any drawback with this text, it is that more verbatim excerpts from the interviews could have been included, enabling us to hear even more of the participants’ voices and their understanding of the challenges of navigating the law and its bureaucracy. It is this very bureaucracy that Renz seeks to explore, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida to consider the GRC form as an example of paper serving as object. The paper certificate ‘is an inherent part of a chain of act[s] and as such is generally inseparable from the “force of law”, which it symbolises and embodies’ (pp. 33–34). As the book progresses, Renz explores governmentality and then turns to consider the theoretical concepts, first legal consciousness. Here, the text brings to mind Rosie Harding's landmark 2010 text Regulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives.9 Renz – juggling multiple issues in this book – does not offer the same depth of analysis as Harding but nonetheless provides an original contribution by extending those ideas to trans lives. The voices that Renz amplifies provide us with compelling and powerful examples, such as Morgan, who says ‘I mean ultimately the GRC is just trying to control people, like the rest of all those laws do’ (p. 99). Renz chronicles the careful way in which those seeking to obtain a GRC must gather years of evidence and how they consequently build that process into their lives. There is arguably something further that could be explored here linking to the world of cultural studies, archives, and art, notably in the ‘curation’ and design of stories, and my mind turns to the work of Amanda Perry-Kessaris.10 Renz's book already does a considerable amount and it would not have been feasible to include this exploration too, but it would make for interesting further work for someone to provide a synthesis of these two scholars’ research in investigating the legal design and ‘curation’ of legal trans lives. Renz then turns to consider emotional engagement with gender regulation in which we arguably see empathy restricted by the binary nature of the GRA and the limitations that it creates. Here, it is again the trans voices that Renz amplifies that prove most persuasive. From trying to arrange car insurance to changing names on passports, driving licences, and birth certificates, we hear how people navigate not only bureaucracy but also honesty and lies as they seek to negotiate an emotional maze constructed by the law. As readers, we in turn experience an emotional reaction to the stories included here. Take, for example, Ian, who describes how a Gender Recognition Panel (which determines whether a GRC should be granted) ‘didn't understand how the law worked and said that I needed to get a court order for my name change, which actually just isn't possible’. He recounts how in the end he ‘printed out the statute’ for the panel to explain the law (p. 114). The final substantive chapter questions the legitimacy of legal gender recognition and discusses some of the ideas around whether gender should be regulated and what consequences there might be if it were not. The chapter draws on the inspirational work of Dean Spade and his distinction between activist groups focusing on rights and those focusing on resistance. Spade might perhaps have approached the rest of the chapter with the zeal of a resister, but Renz avoids this, in turn addressing some of the more contemporary controversies, such as single-sex spaces, sports, public toilets, and schools. Renz deftly navigates these topics, once again amplifying the research participants’ voices to guide us through this material. At a time when so much of the ‘debate’ on these subjects is toxic, Renz's text points a way to a better-informed and better-designed future for the law in this area. This deftness of touch characterizes the text as a whole. This book is certain to be essential reading on any gender, sexuality, and law module/course. It is likely to be of interest to convenors of any social policy module addressing the subject of trans identities and the law, and a vital point of reference for any scholar engaged in research on the topic. As such, it joins a relatively small number of essential UK texts in this area. There remains the important book Respect and Equality: Transsexual and Transgender Rights by Stephen Whittle.11 Published in 2002, this pre-dates the GRA but remains – for me at any rate – the definitive text outlining that pre-GRA context in the UK, and, given that Whittle was instrumental in the drafting of the GRA, the book provides an important context to that design. In understanding the flaws highlighted by Renz, we can in Whittle's earlier work see why even with those flaws it remained significant legislation that bestowed rights and improved lives. In the same year as Whittle's text, Alex Sharpe's Transgender Jurisprudence: Dysphoric Bodies of Law made an important contribution,12 while her 2018 book Sexual Intimacy and Gender Identity ‘Fraud’: Reframing the Legal and Ethical Debate13 can now be seen as a pioneering text amid a re-set in the debate and research landscape. Renz's book is an important contribution in this moment for bringing us back to the legislation and how it practically impacts the people whom it was designed to help. For me, this is first and foremost why this book is important. Nonetheless, it also makes important theoretical contributions, perhaps most persuasively in relation to legal consciousness but also to agency and emotion. Any scholarship engaging with these ideas will also find in Renz's book an important and stimulating contribution.