Prophecies of Fraud: unacceptable marriages and dangerous subjects in judicial decisions about rectification of transsexual people’s “sex”

Abstract

This paper investigates representations and values underlying the mobilization of a recurrent argument in judicial decisions that evaluate rectification requests for the category “sex” in identification documents, demanded by transsexual people: that a probable future marriage between the plaintiff and a third party would mean the former is misleading the latter. Through the analysis of decisions elaborated by magistrates in several Brazilian State Courts, from 2000 to 2014, I noticed: a) the production of meanings of legally possible and legitimate marriage and family; b) the formation of suspicion around transsexual people, viewed as dangerous and potentially deceitful; c) the concomitant creation of good-faith individual and collective victims that would be potentially deceived; d) the mobilization of time dimensions as a way of crystallizing normative patterns of gender and of materializing future threats.