Recrear el sexo: Construcción discursiva del sexo en la jurisprudencia de la Corte Constitucional (1993-2019)

Abstract

Sexual assignment is a socio-legal process by means of which a subject is assigned some sex available in the normative order through institutionalized procedures. In countries like Colombia in which sex is a requirement of legal personality and, therefore, a condition to become a subject of rights and obligations, sexual assignment is a fundamental performative act to empower people socially. However, the complex biopsychosocial nature of sex implies problems in the processes of sexual assignment, conflicts that under certain conditions can enter the legal trade and even reach the orbit of constitutional analysis. Between 1993 and 2019, the Colombian Constitutional Court analyzed conflicts related to sexual assignment in 21 judgments that deal with legal issues such as the change of name from male to female; the mechanisms for correcting the sex component in identity documents; the civil registration of children with sexual indeterminacy; informed consent in child genital readjustment surgeries; and the health assurance of sexual reaffirmation surgical procedures; among others. Through the analysis of critical-genealogical discourse of these judgments, this research shows that constitutional jurisprudence constructs sex in a variable, contingent and inconsistent way, which has effects on the ways in which this court defines legal problems and makes decisions with effects. performative in the construction of personal and collective sexual identities.