Abstract

We could perhaps view social policies as part of the discursive field surrounding bodies in modern society. Social policies primarily refer to strategies and interventions for the shifting, safeguarding or establishment of living conditions that are favorable to human welfare. Thus, social policies are part of public policy that has to do with social issues. Social policies aim to improve human welfare and to meet human needs for education, health, housing and social security. We can look at legal edicts in much the same way and both the legal framework and social policies can act as both a determinant valuer of bodies and a source in which to reverse unjust treatment and claim rights in relation to bodies. I suggest though that the edicts and social policies must be complimentary in their appraisal of bodies to be able to function in a coherent way, especially, I argue, in relation to the new legal possibilities of transgendered bodies granted by the Gender Recognition Act.
Transgender bodies and disabled bodies occasionally cross paths in citizenship literature studies as illustrations of the medical model’s negativity towards unsound body morphologies. Dehumanisation, or at least infantilisation, of disabled and transgendered bodies through medical discourse shape cultural perceptions of people with impairments and structure social interactions between normative and nonnormative bodies. Medical discourses endorse the normatively gendered, nondisabled body as nature’s ideal, and the transgendered or disabled body become metaphors for moral and physical degeneracy. We can assume from this that medicine regards a body that is transgendered and disabled as doubly ‘broken.’ Disabled and transgendered bodies have difficulty entering into normative citizenship rights on many levels; however, arguably none more so than within sexual citizenship.