Recognition, Misrecognition and Human Rights

Abstract

This chapter contextualises the UK GRA (2004) within human rights discourse and law. As the chapter explores, the GRA could not have been conceived outside of the language of human rights or without a framework for human rights law. Thus it was a deficiency in human rights for transgender people in UK state law that led the ECHR to caution the UK government about the lack of rights for transgender people and a discourse of human rights that carved the way for claims to the ECHR by transgender people. First the chapter examines a series of claims brought by trans people to the ECHR and locates these claims as forming the backdrop to the GRA. Central to each of these claims was the language of ‘rights’ — in particularly, the right to privacy and the right to family life (as set out in the HRA, 1998). In examining the language and the execution of these recognition claims, the chapter explores the ways in which gender is constructed and reconstructed through discourses and practices of human rights.