Mitchell Travis

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Leeds

When is it ethically permissible for clinicians to surgically intervene into the genitals of a legal minor? We distinguish between voluntary and nonvoluntary procedures and focus on nonvoluntary procedures, specifically in prepubescent minors ("children"). We do not address procedures in adolescence or adulthood. With respect to children categorize...

In 2015, Malta introduced ground-breaking legal reform designed to protect the bodily integrity of intersex infants in Malta. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals, lawyers, policy-makers and advocates, this article considers the extent to which this reform has improved the cultural visibility and recognition of inters...

This article addresses a growing social and legal debate around healthcare provision for gender diverse children. Temporality is used as a theoretical lens to highlight how biological determinism has informed legal approaches to gender diverse children in a series of recent cases. In these cases, accounts of sex and gender as temporally linear are...

This book examines the divergent medical, political and legal constructions of intersex. The authors use empirical data to explore how intersex people are embodied through these frameworks which in turn influence their lived experiences.

Introduction Accounts of legal embodiment are impoverished if they do not explore the ways in which other institutions contribute to our understanding of bodies. In the case of intersex embodiment, medicine is crucial for understanding how intersex people have been framed – indeed, and as we shall outline, medical accounts offer the paradigmatic ac...

This book set out to examine what intersex embodiment means in the 21st century in predominantly Western societies. In doing so, it has demonstrated that there are multiple disjointed and fragmented accounts of intersex embodiment which are produced through a range of different regulatory frameworks. Each of these frameworks arguably set out to imp...

Introduction While the past three chapters have explored the multifaceted framings of intersex within law and policy, this chapter returns to the realms of healthcare and unpicks the ways in which intersex has been embedded within psychology. We do so to consider the extent to which psychosocial frameworks could disrupt medical embodiment. The inst...

This book engages with intersex people to understand the choices they have and the impositions they face in predominantly Western societies. As part of this, the main question the book asks is ‘What is intersex?’ To answer this question, we rely heavily on the accounts of intersex people gathered from our own empirical research while also paying cl...

Introduction The last two chapters have traced the problems inherent to law and policy framing around intersex embodiment and the consequences of their enactment. Within law, intersex embodiment is most frequently constructed through lenses of LGBT and non-binary embodiment. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, states have turned to anti-discrimination leg...

The Law, Society, Policy series publishes high-quality, socio-legal research monographs and edited collections with the potential for policy impact. Cutting across the traditional divides of legal scholarship, Law, Society, Policy offers an interdisciplinary, policy engaged approach to socio-legal research which explores law in its social and polit...

This book examines the divergent medical, political and legal constructions of intersex. The authors use empirical data to explore how intersex people are embodied through these frameworks which in turn influence their lived experiences.

Introduction In Chapter 3, we set out the problematic ways in which states frame intersex embodiment through a non-binary lens. This form of recognition misrecognizes many intersex people, constructing intersex in a way that is often unsuited to their lived experience. As we found from our interviews, many intersex people identify strongly within t...

Introduction The last chapter traced the historical pathologization of intersex and how medicine came to dominate contemporary understandings and approaches to intersex embodiment. The result of this medical framing has not only been routine irreversible interventions performed on intersex children, but also the cultural and institutional disappear...

This chapter explores how psychosocial care within healthcare is an essential element of reframing intersex embodiment and care for intersex people away from paradigmatic medical narratives ‘fixing’ a ‘disorder’ and towards supporting a person. Many biomedical accounts of intersex as a ‘disorder’ remain prominent in psychosocial provision with care...

This chapter explores how, since the 19th century, in the West intersex bodies have become primarily constructed through a medical lens of ‘disorder’. The increasing pathologization throughout the 20th century and technological advancements gave medical professionals the ability to ‘correct’ intersex bodies in infancy. The result of such early ‘cor...

This chapter problematizes the contemporary ways in which third markers have been used to recognize intersex embodiment as synonymous with non-binary identity by law, academia and policy makers. While historically intersex was depicted as a place-holder for binary sex, the use of third markers has become the most prevalent way in which intersex has...

This chapter focuses on Malta’s rights-based approach to intersex, which specifically prohibits unnecessary sex-assignment treatment and surgery on intersex minors. This approach has placed the framing of intersex outside simplistic medical and LGBT accounts. As a result, it offers the potential for significant new framings of what intersex is and...

This chapter outlines a working definition of intersex and highlights its multiple and contested nature with particular reference to a community retreat (The Darlington Statement, 2017), the European Parliament (Promoting the Human Rights of and Eliminating Discrimination against Intersex People (Resolution 2191) 2017) and a consensus statement of...

This chapter outlines the ways in which intersex embodiment has been framed through an LGBT approach. This results in two contrasting perspectives: a ‘queer’ approach that problematizes heteronormative and binary institutional accounts; and a homonormative approach that tends to replicate existing institutional structures. It is this latter account...

This book outlines the ways in which institutions such as law and medicine play a key role in framing understandings of intersex embodiment. Embodiment takes place at the intersection of materiality, discourse and institutions. The dominant conceptualizations of intersex are outlined and empirical data is used to explore their effect on the lives o...

This chapter outlines intersex embodiment as inherently pluralistic in its production through materiality, institutions and cultural knowledge that are contingent to particular times, places, contexts and regulatory frameworks. These different intersecting dimensions produce diverse understandings of intersex embodiment at different times and place...

This book examines the divergent medical, political and legal constructions of intersex.

This book examines the divergent medical, political and legal constructions of intersex. The authors use empirical data to explore how intersex people are embodied through these frameworks which in turn influence their lived experiences. Through their analysis, the authors reveal the factors that motivate and influence the way in which policy make...

Why Jurisprudence of the Future Within the Western legal, philosophical and social-theoretical mainstream, many contemporary conceptions of justice have been found wanting. 1 Concurrently, within legal and political practice, our institutionalisations of justice have often been marked by stagnancy, a failure to take radical action and, consequently...

The future is in flux. There are many vectors of change, and none seem positive. Dark dystopian futures of war, climate catastrophe, polarising inequalities and digital disruption seem to be looming. This narrating of the future suggests the significance of science fiction. Science fiction acts as a storehouse for the imagining of the future. It al...

This article examines how justice is conceived of and constructed through temporality in different traditions of normative jurisprudence. Three non-exhaustive and overlapping temporalities are discussed: counterfactual histories, the near future and science fiction. All of these temporalities are examined in terms of when and how they envisage the...

This article considers the extent to which human rights mechanisms can ameliorate intersex rights at a sub-national, or medico-local, level. It engages with both intersex activism and the academy where the United Nations (UN) has become understood as a key mechanism through which to challenge day-to-day practices of healthcare practitioners and bri...

Non-therapeutic medical interventions on the bodies of children born with disorders of sex development (DSD)/intersex variations have been subject to increasing critical scrutiny. In response to recent criticism directed at the United Kingdom, and early moves to consider reform, we report on a freedom of information exercise that sought to evaluate...

This chapter problematises the automatic (and unquestioning) inclusion of intersex experiences “inside” broader lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer advocacy movements. It draws upon the findings of a small-scale empirical research project, which the authors conducted with intersex rights activists both in the UK and farther afield. The chapter...

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which temporalities are institutionally constructed. To do so, the chapter engages with intersex embodiment to show how the institutions of healthcare, psychosocial care, and law offer different temporal constructions of the same body alternating between emergency and emergence. Whereas intersex embodiment has...

This chapter provides a conceptual overview of the place of the body in health jurisprudence. It begins by outlining an initial conceptual lack and theoretical aversion to materiality within the positivist tradition. The chapter then considers liberalism as a conceptual space where bodies were considered to be interchangeable and largely removed fr...

Through consideration of new developments in the United Kingdom's intersex policy, this article traces the ways in which responsibility is produced, naturalized, and avoided by individuals, institutions, and the state. Jurisdiction is identified as a barrier to the attribution of responsibility that must be overcome to achieve progress in relation...

This book brings together a range of theoretical perspectives to consider fundamental questions of health law and the place of the body within it. Health, and more recently health law, has long been animated by discussions of particular bodies - whether they are disordered, diseased, or disabled - but each of these classificatory regimes claim some...

This article considers the institutional frameworks that privilege heterosexuality, police notions of sex and gender and individualize discussions and responsibilities around consent. In doing so, Vulnerability theory is drawn upon and added to through the introduction of a richer conception of embodiment. By understanding embodiment as a product...

This article presents the findings from the first qualitative study to consider the relationship between intersex experience and law; representing a significant contribution to a currently under-researched area of law. Since 2013 there has been a global move towards the legal recognition of intersex, with Australia, Germany and Malta all using diff...

The LETR urged UK law schools to consider how they might do more to encourage the development of professional ethics. This article engages with that call and reflects on the experience of teaching professional ethics through popular culture. It begins by outlining some of the theoretical work that has been undertaken in establishing law and popular...

This article argues that whilst concepts of law and justice can be seen as prominent in much science fiction, the role of lawyer is mostly absent. This article interrogates these absences and asks whether they can be traced back to contemporary concerns around professional ethics. Three potential absences are noted; firstly, justice is considered a...

This article considers the relationship between EU anti-discrimination law and intersexuality. Recent changes in German legislation that recognise intersexuality have prompted consideration of sex and gender throughout Europe. This article considers some of the disadvantages in the way the German legislation has been adopted and attempts to remedy...

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultim...

This article questions how legal personhood is constructed by law. Elective amputation is used as a way of interrogating the institutional, material, and discursive relations that combine in order to suspend legal personhood. Elective amputation is introduced in terms of medical and psychological explanations. Additionally, the perspective of self-...

In this article I argue for greater attention to be paid to science fiction within sociolegal scholarship. In the first half of this paper I highlight that science fiction and law are already intertwined, science fiction having been commented on in a number of judicial decisions and law having been the focus of a number of science fiction texts. I...