Modern states are erected on a sex-gender system that constructs human nature as dual and citizenship as binary and dichotomous along male/female lines. It is a hierarchical sex-gender system, one that prioritises male features and roles over female ones and is at the roots of women’s discrimination and structural subordination to men. It is also responsible for the construction of strict male and female identities, pre-defined and imposed as mutually exclusive, in open contradiction with the central democratic principle of self-determination (self-normativity) or (relational) autonomy.

This rigid sex-gender system affects everyone. Yet it particularly affects women and individuals who do not conform with modern binary strictures, who increasingly question it. While women challenge the construction of male supremacy and female subordination, trans and non-binary identities challenge the modern male/female dichotomy at its core, thus questioning the basic structure that sustains modern states.

The BINASEX project purports to explore these challenges and to address them in their interdisciplinary complexity from an international, comparative perspective. It aims to explore the need for gender de/reconstruction in terms that allow for diversity beyond traditional binary criteria, to cast critical light on current responses to this need, and to propose more suitable ones where appropriate. The team is both international (its members work in Spain, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, UK and Ecuador) and interdisciplinary, covering the fields of constitutional law, jurisprudence, European law, international human rights law, anthropology, philosophy, cultural gender studies and political science and theory.

De/reconstructing gender in non-binary terms is particularly important in a regional context like the European Union, where some countries have gone further along this line than others and where citizens’ right to free movement cannot come at the cost of their personal status (ECJ, 5 June 2018 -C-673/16 Relu Adrian Coman & Others/Inspectoratul General pentru Imigrari & others). A binary sex-gender thus affects democratic citizenship not only at a national, but also at a regional level. All this points to the urgent need to address and integrate sex-gender diversity in our democratic states. Exploring ways of doing so is the purpose of this project.