The “Normalization” of Intersex Bodies and “Othering” of Intersex Identities in Australia

Once described as hermaphrodites and later as intersex people, individuals born with intersex variations are routinely subject to so-called “normalizing” medical interventions, often in childhood. Opposition to such practices has been met by attempts to discredit critics and reasserted clinical authority over the bodies of women and men with “disorders of sex development.” However, claims of clinical consensus have been selectively constructed and applied and lack evidence. Limited transparency and lack of access to justice have helped to perpetuate forced interventions. At the same time, associated with the diffusion of distinct concepts of sex and gender, intersex has been constructed as a third legal sex classification, accompanied by pious hopes and unwarranted expectations of consequences. The existence of intersex has also been instrumentalized for the benefit of other, intersecting, populations. The creation of gender categories associated with intersex bodies has created profound risks: a paradoxically narrowed and normative gender binary, maintenance of medical authority over the bodies of “disordered” females and males, and claims that transgressions of social roles ascribed to a third gender are deceptive. Claims that medicalization saves intersex people from “othering,” or that legal othering saves intersex people from medicalization, are contradictory and empty rhetoric. In practice, intersex bodies remain “normalized” or eliminated by medicine, while society and the law “others” intersex identities. That is, medicine constructs intersex bodies as either female or male, while law and society construct intersex identities as neither female nor male. Australian attempts at reforms to recognize the rights of intersex people have either failed to adequately comprehend the population affected or lacked implementation. An emerging human rights consensus demands an end to social prejudice, stigma, and forced medical interventions, focusing on the right to bodily integrity and principles of self-determination.     

Fragmentation,Cooperation and Power: Institutional Dynamics in Natural Resource Governance in North-Western Namibia

Contemporary theoretical accounts of common pool resource management assume that communities are able to develop institutions for sustainable resource management if they are given security of access and appropriate rights of management. In recent years comprehensive legal reforms of communal rural resource management in Namibia have sought to create an institutional framework linking the sustainable use of natural resources (game, water, forest) and rural development. The state, however, ceded rights to rural communities in an ambiguous and fragmented manner, creating a number of instances of overlapping property rights and different legal conditions for different natural resources. Nowadays communities grapple with the challenge of developing institutions for these resource-centered “new commons”. This paper describes the process of local institutional development, focusing on the challenges arising from the necessity to define group boundaries, the issues arising from monitoring and sanctioning within newly defined institutions, and the ideological underpinnings of different trajectories of communal resource management.     

Mental health law: civil liberties and the principle of reciprocity.

At a conference organised by the Law Society, Mental Health Act Commission, and Institute of Psychiatry possible reform of mental health legislation in England and Wales was discussed. It was concluded that radical legal reform was required, and that the law should be designed specifically for provision of care in both hospital and the community. Reform should be based on principle rather than pragmatism, particularly the principle of reciprocity--patients'' civil liberties may not be removed for the purposes of treatment if resources for that treatment are inadequate. Protection of society from nuisance or even violence is insufficient reason for detention. Legal provision for compulsion of patients, whether in hospital or the community, must be matched by specific rights to treatment.     

A Critique of the Gender Recognition Act 2004

This article critiques recent UK transgender law reform. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 is to be welcomed in many respects. Formerly one of the European states most resistant to social change in this area, the UK now occupies pole position among progressive states willing to legally recognise the sex claims of transgender people. This is because the UK is, at least ostensibly, the first state to recognise sex claims irrespective of whether applicants have undertaken any surgical procedures or had hormonal treatments. The article highlights the significance of this development through providing an overview of the trajectory of common law reform around the world. The legislation clearly benefits transgender people unable to undertake surgery due to financial reasons and/or medical contra-indications. It also benefits transgender people whose search for harmony does not require surgical intervention. However, the Act also perpetuates a mental illness model for understanding transgender desires; contributes to the break-up of legally recognised marriages; insists on the permanence of gender crossings and assumes that surgery will occur. The Act also contains exceptions to the generality of legal recognition provided by the state. In this respect the article considers concessions to religious and sporting lobbies. Finally, the article highlights how non-disclosure of gender history prior to a marriage assumes a kind of legal significance under the Act which non-disclosure of other facts generally lacks in relation to marriage. In this regard, the article will contend that a biological understanding of sex operates as a subtext within the Act.     

New developments in the law for obesity discrimination protection

Background:

Obese individuals are frequent targets of weight‐based discrimination, particularly in the employment setting. Victims of weight discrimination have sought legal restitution like others who have suffered from different forms of discrimination. However, in the vast majority of the United States, body weight is not a protected class and weight‐based employment discrimination does not provide a basis for a legal claim. Some have attempted to seek legal recourse under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (collectively, the ADA), which protect against discrimination based on mental or physical disabilities in a variety of settings. Until recently, claims of weight discrimination under the ADA have also been largely unsuccessful. However, Congress recently passed the ADA Amendments Act, expanding the definition of what constitutes a disability and incorporating a broad view of ADA's coverage.

Objective:

This short communication provides an update of the law as it relates to employment based discrimination of obese people. The authors propose a legislative direction for future legal recourse.

Design and Methods:

The authors conducted legal research into the ADA Amendments Act, and synthesized this work relating to discrimination against weight in the employment context.

Results:

In light of the ADA Amendments Act, courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have provided protection for severely obese people from discrimination based on actual or perceived disability in the employment context.

Conclusion:

The authors discuss this positive legal development and additionally propose a targeted solution to address weight discrimination in the employment setting. National polling suggests there is considerable public support for such a measure. The authors thus recommend the implementation of a “Weight Discrimination in Employment Act” modeled after the Age Discrimination in Employment Act to adequately address this pervasive and damaging injustice toward individuals who are affected by obesity.     

“Capacity”, “best interests”, “will and preferences” and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is the most up‐to‐date international legal instrument concerning the rights of persons with disabilities. Such persons are taken to include those with serious mental disorders. According to an authoritative interpretation of a crucial Article (Article 12 ‐ Equal recognition before the law) by the UN CRPD Committee, involuntary detention and treatment of people with mental health disabilities are prohibited under the Convention. Both conventional mental health law and “capacity‐based” law are deemed to violate the Convention. However, some other UN bodies are not in full agreement (for example, the UN Human Rights Committee and the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment), while others are less explicitly absolutist (for example, the Human Rights Council). Furthermore, strong criticisms of the position of the CRPD Committee have been mounted from a number of academic quarters. These criticisms center on whether the role of a person's ability to make a decision can be ignored, no matter the circumstances. Much of the above debate turns on the concept of “legal capacity” and the now often‐repeated precept that one must always respect the “will and preferences” of the person with a disability. However, “will and preferences” remains undefined. In this paper, I offer an analysis of “will and preferences” that can clarify interventions that may be acceptable or non‐acceptable under the terms of the UN Convention.     

The weaker sex: Is being male a legally cognizable defect,impairment, or disability?

Compared with women, men die from cancer and coronary artery disease in disproportionately higher numbers and are more susceptible to a host of emotional and developmental disorders. The authors of this article consider what scientific proof or evidence would be required to legally recognize “being male” as a disability, based on the overwhelming number of physical deficiencies to which males are genetically predisposed. The article summarizes major scientific findings on male health problems and explores various laws and policies that might be implicated by treatment of males as a special category recognized by the law. How the law creates categories of individuals and the reasons why these categories are created for legal classification are reviewed. In addition, the potential for a “maleness” defense in the context of criminal law and procedure is assessed. Lastly, the authors examine the policy implications of treating men as a disabled class, and consider how judges, juries, and legislators would view a scientifically based approach to the creation of a class. Given the many false starts in the past, in which the law had embraced what later was shown to be bad science, substantial historical baggage will have to be overcome to convince judges, juries, and legislators that science has now got it in the sense of having established a valid, causal, genetic or biological determinant for behavior. The consideration of a “male deficiency” theory under the law would have to rely on a more inclusive view of legal “disability” and a willingness to allow technologic advances in genetics to inform our understanding of criminal behavior.     

Human rights as a framework for eliminating female genital schistosomiasis

Female genital schistosomiasis (FGS) affects tens of millions of women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa, yet this inequitable threat is often overlooked by advocates in both the neglected tropical disease (NTD) and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) communities. FGS causes both acute infection and long-term sexual and reproductive health harm to marginalized women and girls, with gender, poverty, and rurality combining to invisibilize the disease. Human rights and gender imperatives can help to galvanize efforts to control and eliminate FGS, as they have for other NTDs. Specifically, international human rights obligations can frame state efforts to address FGS across healthcare settings, upstream social determinants of health, scientific research, and policy implementation. This article analyzes human rights–based approaches to FGS control and elimination efforts, outlining several areas for forward-looking reforms to health policy, programing, and practice. Building from the lessons learned in applying human rights–based approaches to advance progress on other NTDs, this analysis seeks to provide the NTD community with shared understanding around international legal obligations to engage SRHR advocates and draw heightened attention to FGS. Such human rights–based approaches to FGS control and elimination can help to reduce stigma and improve care for the millions of women and girls currently affected by this preventable disease.     

Legal Regulation of Plant Genome Editing with the CRISPR/Cas9 Technology as an Example

The product-oriented and the process-oriented legal approaches to the regulation of genome editing technologies, CRISPR/Cas9 in particular, are considered. The relevant legislation of the United States and the European Union and some international treaties are analyzed. The issue of genome editing that is within the scope of GMO legislation and general legislation on risk assessment and regulation is addressed. The issue of patenting of gene editing technologies in the legislation of the United States and the European Union and under international law is considered. “Patent wars” between research teams that developed the CRISPR/Cas9 technology are described. The possibilities of obtaining patent protection for plants produced by genome editing are considered.     

Anonymat des dons d’engendrement: le grand malentendu du débat français

The French debate about the anonymity of donors in an assisted reproductive therapeutics is actually the theatre of a great misunderstanding. Those who defend the legal status quo accuse the partisans of a new legal access for the children to their origins of promoting a terrifying trend towards a “biologization of filiation”. But, when we look at the real change in the countries, which have suppressed the anonymity of donors, we discover that this fear is a pure fantasy. Far from biologizing the filiation, these countries have promoted in reality a strong confirmation of the receivers of the gift as the legal “parents” of the child, the only ones to have parental status, rights and duties. The law, for the first time, surpasses the old implicit competition and poses a principle of complementarity between the donors and the receivers/parents.     

Jural relations of middle‐class marriage and women as legal subjects in the imaginary of ‘new India’

In India's capital New Delhi, four Family Courts were set up between 2009 and 2012, and 12 mediation institutions known as Crime Against Women Cells (CAW cells) were established during the same period. The Indian state has also endorsed gender‐equalising family legislation, mutual‐consent divorce and introduced new language of and for mediation. Together with India's projection of a rising global economy, these recent legal changes have engendered perceptions of a dramatic upturn in formal divorce and of women as liberal legal subjects. In the anthropology of Asia, marital practices have crucially informed our comprehension of modernisation, family formations and moral panics. This article explores the impact of new forms of legal availability on marriage, family and kinship among the metropolitan middle classes. It ethnographically engages with important structural shifts reflected in the intimate lives of Hindu couples, but also foregrounds a cautious narrative of newly imagined jural relations.     

Gender,Ethnicity, Marital Status,and Body Weight in the United States

Married individuals tend to be heavier than those who are unmarried, particularly men, and individuals in different ethnic categories vary in their involvement in marriage and in their body weights. We examined gender and ethnic differences in relationships between marital status and body weight using cross‐sectional data from the 1999–2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) for 3,947 women and 4,019 men. The findings revealed that compared to married men in the same ethnic category, white divorced men, black never‐married men, and all Hispanic men except for widows had lower odds of being overweight. Compared to married women in the same ethnic category, white women's weights did not significantly differ by marital status, black separated women had greater odds of being overweight, and Hispanic never‐married women had lower odds of being overweight. Associations of marriage with body weight appear to be at least partly contingent upon gender and ethnicity, which may reflect larger societal patterns of involvement in marriage, commitment to family, and body‐weight norms and expectations.     

Knives and Sheaths: Notes on a sexual idiom of social inequality in North Yemen*

The following article, based on field work in a mestizo parish in Highland Ecuador, examines how women (and some men) describe and interpret marital violence. Their interpretations are analyzed with reference to the socio‐economic conditions of the area of study, and with reference to the dominant gender ideology in mestizo societies, characterized by machismo/marianismo. It is argued that discrepancies between an ideology of male dominance and a much more equalitarian practice, together with an ambiguous notion of masculinity as both powerful and extremely fragile, dependent on female sexual conduct, create an “insecurity of maleness” which under certain circumstances is dealt with in violent terms.     

Intellectual property in natural sciences

The way from scientific finding through invention to production line and finally to the consument is long and expensive and patent should be taken into account. This is evident because the investment connected with the new application needs clear definition of intellectual property rights. Independently what we personally think about patenting in nature sciences--this is a common practice around the world. The positive and negative parameters of patenting are focus on biotechnology. The development of biotechnology is a cumulative effect of co-operation of several disciplines: biology, biochemistry, chemistry, engineering, genetics, medicines and pharmacy and many more. Between not cited here is law and consequently the needs of cooperation between researchers and lawyers. There are several barriers in this co-operation, for example: nomenclature as well as the way of thinking. These borders could be pass only with intercommunication and cross-understanding. The dialog and transfer of knowledge is a must for understanding the nomenclature, terminology of nature by lawyers and by researchers in case of law. Polish legislation concerning intellectually rights is regulated by the law "Prawo w?asno?ci przemys?owej" (30 June, 2000; Dz. U. 2003, Nr 119, pos. 1117, with later amendments). This legislation is related to European Union directives and Munich Convention. Accordingly patenting of product and process is possible in Poland. However, the procedure is time and money consuming, particularly in the case of patent submission in several countries. Amendment of the Polish law to biotechnology made possible patenting of living organism and their parts. It is worth to stress that patented inventions can be used free of charge for research and teaching.     

Regional implementation of alternative entry control policies and their role in fisheries management

Abstract

This paper reviews and examines the development of the concept of entry control policies in fisheries management. With renewed expectations for U. S. fisheries surrounding the recent enactment of legislation that extends jurisdiction over living resources within 200 mi, optimal management of an open‐access resource becomes an increasingly important public policy problem. The paper reviews alternative entry control schemes and criteria in order to evaluate their effectiveness and suggests ways in which limited entry could be implemented incrementally. It is argued that the appropriate combination of alternative limited‐entry mechanisms should take into account regional variables that affect the feasibility of entry controls for each particular fishery. It is also postulated that exploitation of an open‐access resource such as a fishery implies certain types of political behavior and outcomes that are analogous to economic behavior and outcomes in a common‐property resource environment. These characteristics of an openaccess resource, along with physical characteristics, tend to inhibit severely the rate of development of clearly defined property rights that would enhance the overall efficiency of the resource industry. The rate of development of property rights in an open‐access resource is a function of the cost of defining and enforcing these rights. The paper urges further identification and analysis of these “transactions costs,” which are largely a function of the political environment.     

Enforcement of the anti-Racism legislation of the European Union against antigypsyism

The European Union (EU) became a pioneer of the promotion of human rights and democratic values especially during the last decades. However, the members of the EU are not immune from the human rights violations including the areas of “equality” and “non-discrimination” that are related to racism, discrimination and xenophobia. “Antigypsyism”, a form of racism, is among the most challenging human rights areas for the member states despite all recent initiatives. In this research, the use of EU competences to combat antigypsyism is analysed with case studies. It is argued that the use of the competences is limited.     

Primary care and abortion legislation in Chile: A failed point of entry

While Chile's partial decriminalization of abortion in 2017 was a long overdue recognition of women's sexual and reproductive rights, nearly four years later the caseload remains well below expectations. This pattern is the product of standing barriers in access to abortion-related health services, especially at the primary care point of entry. This study seeks to identify and describe these barriers. The findings presented here were obtained through a qualitative, exploratory study based on 19 semi-structured interviews with relevant actors identified through non-random sampling and snowballing techniques. Coding was inductive and complemented by semantic content analysis. The authors find that the key barriers in primary care to accessing legal abortion are unfamiliarity with the law, insufficient practitioner training, intersectoral discrimination, and the stigma surrounding abortion. They conclude that the government needs to exercise its constitutional mandate as guarantor of public health and act promptly to safeguard and guarantee the abortion rights of Chilean women.     

The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.     

Genes,symptoms, and the “asymptomatic ill”: toward a broader understanding of genetic discrimination

Since the early 1990s, the term “genetic discrimination” has been used to designate adverse treatment on the grounds of genetic makeup. However, the full spectrum of possible disadvantage associated with genetic information has not been addressed by either the international scientific debate or statutory arrangements on genetic discrimination. Informed by legal contexts, they almost all focus on one specific group: the “asymptomatic ill.” On the basis of the sociological study, “Genetic Discrimination in Germany,” this article proposes to revise the terms of the debate and discusses some limitations of the concept. Drawing on the experiences reported by affected individuals, it advocates a more expansive social understanding which does not require that a person has to be healthy to be at risk of genetic discrimination.