Gender Neutrality in Law, State and Society

Abstract

An interdisciplinary approach is attempted in this paper to analyse the interplay between gender neutrality and access to justice. While gender neutrality is often said to be a very progressive idea in law, a host of new problems are generated when it is applied in a postcolonial society like India. The paper draws from the disciplines such as law, political science, international relations, history, and statistics to criticize the assumption that neutrality would bring forth justice all by itself. Legal analyses show that gender-neutral laws may in fact sometimes uphold patriarchal structures when no steps are taken to address the underlying inequalities. The political approach ponders over the questions of how governance, policy language, and representation impact the availability of justice for gender-diverse individuals. From a data standpoint, it illustrates how binary data catapult non-binary identities into the margins. From a historical and international perspective, the modern laws are seated within colonial legacies and critique the global human rights discourse for its limited inclusiveness. We argue that gender neutrality, though important, remains alone insufficient. A meaningful framework of access to justice must be context-sensitive, historically aware, and structurally inclusive of all gender identities.