Latest updates

(December 2021) Key findings: As we enter the final stages of our project, we have updated our website with new pages on our key findings. Members of the FLaG team have shared insights from their strand of the research. These strands sit across four key areas: single-sex services/spaces; social justice and equality; legal gender in everyday life; and equal pay.

(November 2021) Podcast series: We have launched a short-series podcast to discuss key findings from our research. Episode 1 marked the launch of our special issue with feminists@law, Episode 2 discusses single-sex schools and domestic violence services, and Episode 3 is about using imagined law reform to tackle gender inequality.

(August 2021) New blog post: We have published a short piece by project member, Prof Liz Peel, asking what can legal consciousness studies and discursive psychology reveal about talk on legal gender?

(May 2021) Sex, gender and a future of freedom: We have posted a new response to our discussion prompt asking, What future do you want for gender? Send us an email with your thoughts to be featured in our discussion forum.

(January 2021) Special Issue of feminists@law: We have published key findings from the project’s research which are free to read at the journal’s open access website.

 

About the project

What should gender’s future be? Should gender fade in significance, become a matter of personal choice, define new ways of living and being, or remain a category of domination and inequality? And what can law contribute to these changes?

Currently in Britain, we all bear a legal gender, starting with the sex we are registered as having at birth.  But are there good reasons for retaining a system in which people are gendered in ways that carry formal legal status? What might change involve? And what are the implications, in terms of the challenges, risks and benefits, of radical reform?  These questions form the basis for our four-year critical law reform project, begun in May 2018, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

 

 

 

Find out more about the project here.

Who we are

The Future of Legal Gender project is led by researchers at King’s College London, and the Universities of Kent and Loughborough, with the support of an international advisory board.

Find out more about who we are here.

 

 

 

 

Logo by Sabrin Fetih,  second and third images by Ben Kanter.  Main image from Shutterstock (unattributed).