Date : 2018-09-19
Time : 12:30pm – 2:00pm
Venue : Room 109, Chen Kou Bun Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Speaker:
Prof. Jens M. Scherpe (Universities of Cambridge, Hong Kong and Aalborg)
Moderator:
Prof. Suen Yiu Tung (Director of Sexualities
Research Programme, CUHK)
Registration:
https://bit.ly/2wXYghqAbstract:
This talk questions the need of legal gender.
Gender, as a defining status element vis-à-vis
the state, increasingly is under pressure. First, there is overwhelming
evidence that the gender of a person cannot be conclusively determined at birth
by looking at their body, and that therefore any legal allocation of gender on
that basis may be false and in need of correction (as exemplified in the W v.
Registrar of Marriages in Hong Kong, [2013] HKCFA 39). Second, an increasing
number of jurisdictions have or will extend legal gender beyond the binary by
allowing legal genders other than male or female. Taking into account these
(and other) developments, and the fact that there is an increasing trend
towards self-determination of gender internationally, the time may have come to
begin to de-gender the law. While this is likely to be an incremental process
and may not be appropriate (yet) in all legal areas, societies and cultures, we
should start now by questioning existing legal provisions that refer to
gender/have gender requirements.
Biograhy of Prof. Jens
M. ScherpeJens is Reader in Comparative Law at the
University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College/Cambridge,
Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong and Honorary
Professor at the University of Aalborg. He also is an Honorary Fellow of St.
John's College/Hong Kong and an Academic Door Tenant at Queen Elizabeth
Building/London. Jens has held visiting positions in many institutions,
including Sydney, Auckland, London, Vienna, Leuven, Barcelona, Padova and
Louvain-la-Neuve.
His publications include major comparative
studies on cohabitation (2005), same-sex relationships (2000), the legal status
of transgender and transsexual persons (2004 and 2015) and the legal status of
intersex persons (2018), matrimonial property and marital agreements (2012),
registered partnerships (2017) and on ‘Eastern and Western Perspectives on
Surrogacy’ (forthcoming January 2019). In 2016 he also edited a four-volume
book set on European Family Law, including a monograph on ‘The Present and
Future of European Family Law'.