Sex, Gender and Law: Considerations in the Light of French and Brazilian Legal Systems

Abstract

This article seeks to track down the legal content and the functions of the terms sex and gender in the French and Brazilian legal systems’ perspective. Although both words are usually employed by Law as identifying elements in the construction of human persons’ identities, they end up being managed as tools of discrimination. In this measure, sex and gender, instead of serving for the protection of the individual, are converted into a reason for restringing their rights. One should doubt, thus, how much it is fair to classify the human species in two sexes/genders and to protect such a division with the material and symbolic force of Law. This article proposes, therefore, that the legal pertinence of that double and restricted qualification be put to test, so as to conclude that the extinction of the category “gender” in birth certificates would constitute an advance in the protection of the human person, emancipated from a binary logic tied to the necessary association between sex and gender.