Published Paper Details:

The transgender person represents a challenge to the notion of sex and sexuality as the problems to gendered and heterosexual subjectivities continue to persist. A number of judicial pronouncements particularly in U.S, Australia and New Zealand abandoned chromosomes and birth as the governing factor in determining sex. Instead, preferred to articulate the test of psychological and anatomical harmony which gave prominence to sex reassignment surgery. Judicial anxiety over the homosexual body proves to be a consistent and central feature of transgender jurisprudence. Although, there has been a gradual shift in the outlook of gender identity, Foucault has rightly argued that the function of law as a judicial entity has greatly diminished and focused more on regulations governing norms. This has been exemplified by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick and by the House of Lords in the infamous case of R v. Brown2 how, the structural mindset of normative gender construct lead the way for stigmatization, discrimination, marginalization and violation of their rights exposes the transgender people to extreme vulnerabilities. Prior to 19th C the idea of recognizing deviant sexual actions were not prominent and social mindset was confined to cultural assumptions. In 1849, Claude Francois Michea, a French physician, for the first time formulated a theory that sexual desire between men is an inborn phenomenon.4 Despite having existed throughout the history of human civilization, a large number of literature related to biological aetiology, failure to consolidate consensus as well as psychological accounts have tended to receive prominence in accessing and categorizing transgender persons.