“Gender identity is understood to refer to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth including personal sense of the body and other expressions of gender including dress speech and mannerisms” (Yogakarta principles 2006)
I would like to thank Ms Sandra Duffy for giving up her time to deliver a lecture to Kent LLM students during the International Human Rights Law module. Ms Duffy is based at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway and her work focuses on international and domestic approaches to gender and sexuality, covering questions related to abortion to the intersection of law and gender identities. She has been a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Scholar and a co-holder of the National University of Ireland EJ Phelan Fellowship in International Law. She is an active member of Lawyers for Choice which campaigns for access to reproductive autonomy in Ireland and overseas. The fact that she did an LLM in International Human Rights Law and Public Policy from University College Cork is a perfect example of what LLM students can accomplish.
Ms Duffy was invited as a guest lecturer to discuss with us “The Woman” in international human rights law. She started the lecture by stating she was a queer cisgender woman and was not transgender herself in order to make sure students understood her standpoint position and from where she was coming from in her challenges to established legal systems. This automatically created a trusting relationship with the students, as she explained her lecture would be dedicated to understand the place of women in society and how new sets of understandings of the woman have come to affect traditional legal categories and conceptualisations.
The lecture went into explaining what the term woman means and how it is understood in today’s society. Ms Duffy based her analysis on Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as a social construction, which proposes that everything one knows or sees as a reality is partially or even completely socially made.
Ms Duffy went further to demonstrate that a particular gender is attributed at birth disregarding the potential effects this could have on the wellbeing and the wish of individuals. What was fascinating and important for the students were the personal stories she brought into her lecture. Having a friend who identifies as a transgender woman, she explained the importance of realising that maybe biology is not a destiny but more a man-made construction, which only operates according to a binary system of male and female. She further explained that law tends to take men as its ideal and central subject – often heterosexual, cisgender and white. This immediately creates power asymmetries and does not recognize sexual and gender variance within societies.
This was the focus of our attention during the seminars, which Ms Duffy also attended. When looking at international law, students realised that most conventions or treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)[1] were not sufficiently inclusive in order to protect other gender identities.
Ms Duffy, using as her main reference the article by Professor Dianne Otto “Queering Gender [Identity] in International Law”[2], invited us to appreciate the importance of using a broader understanding of gender rather than solely the category of woman when thinking about what kind of social relations and human rights agendas we want to advance.
This guest lecture and seminar were excellent means to question law’s relation to gender and its effects across the globe. As students of the International Human Rights module and through Ms Duffy’s participation in our class, we were challenged with new perspectives on “the woman” and how gender identities are being productively redefined at the moment. The lecture and the seminars enabled us to have a very interesting debate and to explore how students understand the place of various genders within human rights law.
On behalf of the students of the International Human Rights Law module, I would like to thank once again Ms Sandra Duffy for giving us such an interesting opportunity to think in new ways the place of women and other genders in the current global legal order.
[1] Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women (1979) http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/
[2] Dianne Otto, ‘Queering Gender [Identity] in International Law’ (2015) 33(4) Journal Nordic Journal of Human Rights 299.