“Man of law.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legal%20man. Retrieved 14 January 2022. 44. Of course, there is an international convention on the elimination of discrimination against women, as well as national provisions against discrimination. But the purpose of such legislation is not to give women a specific legal character as female human persons, but to disqualify sex as a legitimate category of discrimination. 101. Stumbling upon a grenade for a buddy (and agreeing to distract the strange friend of the hot baby he`s trying to hit) is your legal duty. But if you get carried away by your good deed and you find yourself on the beast, it is forbidden for your boyfriend to talk about it. 78. Therefore, the legal denial of a certain gender to an intersex person seems almost cruel. See In the Marriage of C and D (erroneously named C) (1979) 5 Fam LR 636. Now the husband has a legal mess with his wife and a legal mess with his girlfriend, and the wife knows it. She tells her husband through his lawyer that she will end the criminal conversation and the lawsuit for alienation of affection against the man`s girlfriend if he accepts additional monthly payments and an unequal division of property in his favor.
59. Michael S. Moore “A Natural Law Theory of Interpretation” (1985) 58 S Cal LR 277, p. 294. Moore does not deny that scientific knowledge about death can change, and with it its meaning. Thus, “it is determined whether a person is really dead or not by applying the best scientific theory we have about what death really is” (in 294). And indeed, the legal meaning of death has changed under the influence of science. We now have “beating heart” carcasses that are legally dead (i.e. entirely brain dead), but whose organs are artificially preserved to perform organ transplants to the living. 6. That is, whenever the law requires me to indicate my gender, I am obliged to indicate it.
I cannot abstain. Of course, my legal gender does not play an explicit role in all my legal relationships. It`s at the heart of my wedding, but it doesn`t have much to do with owning my car. 11. For a more recent philosophical account of this legal necessity to impose unity on society, see Philip Pettit “Collective Intentions” in Ngaire Naffine, Rosemary Owens and John Williams (eds.) Intention in Law and Philosophy (Dartmouth, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 241. 20. For the legal and moral distinction between persons and property, see Margaret Davies and Ngaire Naffine Are Persons Property? Legal Debates about Property and Personality (Dartmouth, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 49. Twentieth-century human rights instruments openly condemn the practice of discrimination between and against persons of former legal status. 93. Alexander Nekam said something similar in The Personality Conception of the Legal Entity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1938): that the legal characterization of the person depends on what a particular community considers natural.
50 million Although Australian deviations from the English essentialist biological treatment of sex acknowledge the effects of culture and individual preference, they maintain a strong biological basis in the definition of gender. You start with genitals and hormones. Then surgery and society are allowed to influence the definition. The Australian approach does not challenge the underlying assumption of transgender jurisprudence that gender differences (however defined) exist and must be legally recognised. 14. Anti-discrimination legislation prohibits discrimination against mentally and physically disabled persons, children and women (which, of course, implies implicit confirmation that the legal standard of humanity is the mentally and physically capable adult man). 30. For an interesting discussion of the real fiction of the legal person, see Teubner and Hutter, point 29 above, p. 569. 48.
For an analysis of the emergence of modern legal personality and the possessive individual, see Naffine and Davies, point 20 of this Opinion, p. 63. 73. The exclusion of women from public life has proved remarkably permanent. It was not until 1945 that women were admitted to the Royal Society, described as “the citadel of Britain`s scientific elite for nearly three centuries.” Brenda Maddox Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (London: Harper Collins, 2002) p. 82. And as Maddox notes, “Forty-three years had passed since the Society rejected the appointment of the first nominee, Hertha Ayrton, an engineer and physicist, on the grounds that, as a married woman, she was not a legal entity and therefore could not be a member of a statutory body” (pp. 82-83). Women are still excluded from some of the major social and professional clubs, whose members include the most powerful men in the country.