Policing the social body: Medicine and the administration of legal gender recognition in France and Italy, an historical perspective

This paper explores the role of medicine in the regulation of legal gender recognition for trans and gender diverse people in France and Italy. I focus on the processes that led the two countries to establish for the first time a procedure for legal gender change in the 1980s/1990s. Despite the differences, both in France and in Italy medical knowledge and technologies were embedded in the procedures for legal gender change and health professionals took a role as gatekeepers to gender recognition. The medicalization of legal gender recognition, I argue, was part of the deploying of a bio-political apparatus that aimed at regulating and controlling "gender transitions" through regulation and normalization rather then through repression.