"Hegemonic in nature, the heterosexual cultural system of gender pervasively regulates many (if not every) aspect of all bodies’ lives and being, including by legal means. The law upholds and certifies that specific gender regime, inter alia, by assigning a sex to individuals at birth (through the registration of a claimed evident, objective, natural element to be found on or in the body by inspection). Policies of mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration therefore constitute the cornerstone of the legalisation of the heterosexual cultural system of gender, which produces not only the conventional feminine and masculine gender identity (i.e. women and men) but also sex (i.e. females and males). As long as the law continues to register sex/gender (be it in a non-binary fashion), it facilitates the belief in ‘gender as an ahistorical and apolitical, natural, pre-existing fact that ought to be correctly recorded on government documents’ (Neuman Wipfler, 2016, 523), whereas feminist and queer (legal) theory has demonstrated that both sex and gender are socially constructed notions. Indeed, even the binary interpretation of sex, traditionally understood as a matter of biology, turns out to be the product of culture, serving to legitimise by naturalising socially constructed gender.
Because binary sex and gender are regulatory ideals instead of verifiable truths, which imperfect or “deviant” gender embodiments expose, the heterosexual cultural system of gender producing this binary interpretation mandates the institutionalisation of material and discursive gendered violence, in order to rein in diverging gender performances and hence keep the system in place. Thus, these types of gendered violence induce the (re)production of traditional gender, including the unequal hierarchy between masculinity and femininity – the heterosexual cultural system of gender defines, limits, and suppresses all bodies’ possibilities of being-in-the-world. Whereas, trans* and intersex individuals (as well as other sexual minorities) most affirmatively defy that system and are therefore more likely to consciously experience these types of gendered violence, the psychological and physical negative consequences associated with rigid cultural impositions of gender expectations (and, in particular, gender role strain), at least to a certain degree, unconsciously affect all persons, including cisgender persons. Eradicating the (gendered violence produced by the) heterosexual cultural system of gender is,
therefore, a matter of global justice and requires the practice of mandatory (binary) sex/gender registration to be abolished."
-Cannoot, Pieter and Ariël Decoster, (2020). "The Abolition of Sex/Gender Registration in the Age of Gender SelfDetermination: An Interdisciplinary, Queer, Feminist and Human Rights Analysis" International Journal of Gender Sexuality and Law, pages 48-49.