Abstract

This paper examines the parliamentary debates surrounding the United Kingdom's 2004 Gender Recognition Act. An Act meant to provide transgender people legal status according to their "acquired gender," it affords a site to study how legal recognition enables and forecloses the possibility of a pluralistic democratic society. The parliamentary debates and the Act itself suggest that legal recognition offers marginalized individuals the ability to take up a place within a community. Reading these debates and the law itself, this paper argues that political-theoretical accounts of recognition fail to fully explain this act of taking place. Employing a rhetorical perspective, I argue that "taking up a place" is a double act in which individuals are constituted through norms of recognizability through which they lay claim to rights. In the Act, this double moment of taking-place appears as a problem of who can speak for the subject of recognition. This argument is valuable because it demonstrates, first, that subjects appear in and through the language of law and, second, that positive law cannot contain or frame acts of recognition as the place of law itself is called into question through recognition practices.