Governing Self-Determination: Reflecting on the Limits of the Gender Identity Law in a Pre-Milei Argentina

• In Event: Sociology of LGBTQ+ Rights in Times of Crisis

Abstract

In 2012, Argentina’s Gender Identity Law introduced self-determination as the sole criterion for legal gender recognition. Crucially, the law undercut state authority over gender by requiring institutions to uphold an individual’s chosen name and gender even when their state-issued identity documents indicated otherwise. By codifying gender identity, the text destabilized the rigidity of gender categories, their association with sex assigned at birth, and the legitimacy of biological criteria in determining gender. Since then, travesti, trans, and non-binary identities have become socially and governmentally legible and recognized as legally protected. Nonetheless, identity-based criteria coexist with enduring biological and cultural criteria embedded in institutional architecture, documentary infrastructure, and administrative procedures. Rather than dismantling binary sex as a structuring logic of governance, the Gender Identity Law has been absorbed into a cis-centered classificatory regime. Through shallow institutionalization, discretionary interpretation of sex versus gender, and the preservation of sex as an organizing administrative category, recognition operates as both inclusion and containment—expanding formal rights while intensifying expectations of legible gender coherence. Drawing on 22 in-depth semi-structured interviews, legal analysis of federal resolutions, and archival research, this paper examines how self-determination is enacted, negotiated, and constrained across levels of the state. In the context of President Javier Milei’s rollback of key provisions of the law, the Argentine case underscores both the fragility of rights-based legislation and the limits of legal recognition as a vehicle for dismantling binary governance.

Author

• Francis J Fabre, University of Chicago