Beyond Recognition: Transgender Antidiscrimination Law, Rhetoric, and Ethical Responsibility

Beyond Recognition offers a groundbreaking rhetorical analysis of transgender antidiscrimination law, revealing how legal actors, advocates, and critics alike are driven by a cultural desire for certainty in sex. Drawing from landmark cases and legislative debates, Laura Jane Collins reframes these legal struggles not as efforts to resolve identity but as reflections of our collective anxieties about recognition, power, and the instability of legal meaning.

Laura Jane Collins is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Collins’s work has appeared in Law, Culture, andthe Humanities and Rhetoric & Public Affairs.