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The Reform of the Gender Recognition Act: Government Consultation (2018) catalyzed a heated debate on transgender rights and trans inclusion in the United Kingdom. I start by explaining what the reforms to the U.K. system of gender recognition propose, why gender-critical feminists oppose them, and how other feminist academics have responded to their arguments. I then offer a more detailed philosophical critique of gender-critical trans-exclusionary feminist arguments. I argue that the gender-critical feminist case against trans women’s access to women-only (or sex-segregated, or single-sex) spaces suffers from a number of fallacies, and introduces modes of argument that are at odds with well-established and sound uses of practical reason. I try to make sense of these problems with gender-critical feminist thought by appealing to the idea of presupposed paranoid structuralism. I also argue that gender-critical feminists’ enthusiastic use of social media and allied online platforms may be implicated in generating some of these problems.

Conceptual analysis remains the methodology of much contemporary mainstream jurisprudence. The last fifteen years have seen significant contributions addressing the nature of conceptual analysis in legal theory, but many questions have not been answered in a satisfactory way. These questions can be more clearly addressed if we appreciate: a) that there is a central case of conceptual analysis; and b) the ways in which non-paradigmatic cases of conceptual analysis differ from the central one. Among other things, the article argues that conceptual analysis is necessary but not sufficient to a full understanding of the nature of law. Some knowledge about law is impervious to conceptual analysis but not to empirical social science. The reverse is also true. In explaining the meaning of ‘conceptual analysis’ the article also enacts conceptual analysis: the method the article uses to clarify the nature of conceptual analysis is precisely the method known as ‘conceptual analysis’.

This paper argues that Queer has distinctive and worthwhile contributions to make to both conceptual and normative inquiries in jurisprudence, but that the potential Queer has for enriching jurisprudential inquiries has not always been tapped adequately. In particular, I argue that the way in which Queer often speaks and conceives of itself, and the way in which queer theory is done has unnecessarily limited the extent and quality of its contributions to normative jurisprudential inquiries. Queer analyses, including those of queer legal theory, have sometimes tended to slip from an enthusiasm for counter-normativity - intended as a repudiation of dominant norms - to the embracing of antinormativity - intended as a renunciation of prescriptive projects. Yet, since normative commitments clearly animate the Queer project (and neither could, nor should, it be otherwise), it is a failure on Queer’s part not to acknowledge, articulate, reflect upon and interrogate its own normative commitments. The hitherto limited extent of queer contributions to normative jurisprudence is a direct result of this failure. Queer analyses of ‘abjection’ are discussed to illustrate how queer theory can be mobilised to enrich normative inquiries in jurisprudence.

In Australia throughout the 1980s and 1990s, anxieties about new reproductive technology crystallised especially conspicuously around surrogacy, resulting in legislative disfavour for the practice. Since then there has been a partial de-problematisation of surrogacy. This article examines the extent to which the increased legal acceptability of surrogacy in Australia has extended to its use by gay men. It also examines judicial approaches to federal provisions relating to the ascription of parental status with respect to children born into surrogacy arrangements, and reflects upon their impact on gay families. Finally, because gay surrogacy foregrounds parenting intention as the decisive ground for allocation of parental status, the article reflects upon the nature of surrogacy in the West by engaging in a comparative analysis of Tahitian parenting, which traditionally has accommodated intentional parenthood on a large scale, through the institutionalisation of adoption practices. The fact that in Tahiti sexuality- and gender-variant people may figure as adoptive parents makes the comparison all the more interesting. The article elaborates on the policy implications of the insight that this comparative analysis yields into the nature of surrogacy.

This article examines advocacy of Catholic restorative justice for clerical child sexual abuse from the standpoint of feminist criminological critiques of the use of restorative mediation in sexual offence cases. In particular, it questions the Catholic invocation of grace and forgiveness of survivors of abuse in light of critical feminist concerns about the exploitation of emotions in restorative practices, especially in regard to sexual and other gender-based offences. In the context of sexual abuse, the Catholic appeal to grace has the potential for turning into an extraordinary demand made of victims not only to rehabilitate offenders and the Church in the eyes of the community, but also to work towards the spiritual absolution of the abuser. This unique feature of Catholic-oriented restorative justice raises important concerns in terms of feminist critiques of the risk of abuses of power within mediation, and is also incompatible with orthodox restorative justice theory, which, although it advocates a 'spiritual' response to crime, is concerned foremost with the rights, needs and experiences of victims.

In eleven countries, same-sex sexual intimacy is punishable by death. Applying a legal pluralistic framework, we argue that “state-enabled killing” of same-sex-attracted people occurs in at least twenty-three countries. State-enabled killings range from extrajudicial and quasi-judicial killings, where state actors carry out the killing, through instances where the state retrospectively authorizes, through bias or lawful excuses to homicide, the killing of same-sex-attracted people by private actors, to cases where the state permits or endorses forms of so-called “conversion therapy” that can lead to death. We contend that a narrow focus on the death penalty as the only genuine form of state-enabled killing of same-sex-attracted people is analytically unwarranted and strategically dubious in terms of law reform advocacy. Critical legal pluralism allows us to pursue the practical and normative implications of hypothesizing a functional equivalence between the death penalty and these other forms of state-enabled killing.

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) has potential for promoting full recognition of lesbians' and gay men's procreative and parental rights - potential to allow them to obtain any additional level of protection which a state may accord to heterosexuals - implications of decisions that appear to have paved the way for realising that potential.

Laws that restrict access to reproductive technology and fail to adequately recognise parent–child relationships in lesbian/gay families detrimentally affect not only individual lesbians and gay men interested in parenting, but the broader lesbian and gay community. On the one hand these laws, as they currently stand in much of Australia, are complicit in maintaining the closet, inarticulation and silence as defining features of lesbian and gay lives. On the other hand, they contribute to the construction of all lesbians and gay men as non-familial and anti-family. Representations of lesbians and gay men along these lines have traditionally been central to the construction of lesbian and gay identity in Australia, as revealed by a survey of queer-themed Australian works of literature and popular fiction. If improving the status of lesbians and gay men in heteronormative societies depends on destabilising identity categories, practices that contribute to maintaining the integrity of lesbian and gay identity should be targeted for change. Reforming laws on reproduction and parenting should then be a priority for lesbians and gay men, even those who do not wish to have children.

This article analyses the laws that govern the allocation of parental responsibility for children conceived through non-coital reproduction by lesbians and gay men in England/Wales and Australia. In 2008 both jurisdictions introduced important reforms affecting this area of law, providing new options for the legal recognition of parent–child relationships in lesbian and gay households. However, the practical usefulness or effectiveness of the reforms may be limited by the excessive complexity or obscurity of the system of parental responsibility thus introduced. Furthermore, the reform Acts encourage the formation of some family structures—especially homonuclear families—while discouraging the emergence of more imaginative and cooperative parenting configurations at odds with heteronormative parenting scripts. Only through a clearer commitment to intentionality as a ground for the allocation of parental responsibility will future reform be likely to adequately protect the interests of lesbian and gay parents and their children.

French Polynesia is an overseas collectivity of France whose kinship practices accommodate transgender parenting through the involvement of gender-variant (mahu) people in childrearing, including as adoptive parents in customary (faamu) adoption. While the existence and visibility of gender-variant people in French Polynesia is well documented, there is no literature on their involvement in parenting, reflecting a more general dearth of research on LGBT parenting in non-Western contexts. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in French Polynesia, this article fills this gap. The article also discusses the negative implications of France's ambivalence towards LGBT parenting for French Polynesian gender-variant parents and the children they raise.