The Legal Status of Intersex Persons provides a basis for discussion regarding all legal aspects concerning persons born with sex characteristics that do not belong strictly to male or female categories, or that belong to both at the same time. It contains contributions from medical, psychological and theological perspectives, as well as national legal perspectives from Germany, Australia, India, the Netherlands, Columbia, Sweden, France and the USA. It explores international human rights aspects of intersex legal recognition and also features chapters on private international law and legal history.The book is a timely one. Until very recently, the legal gender of a person both at birth and later in life in virtually all jurisdictions had to be recorded as either male or female; the laws simply did not allow any other option, and, in many cases, changing the recorded gender was difficult or impossible. However, there are many cases where this gender binary is unable to capture the reality of a persons physical presentation and/or perception of self. Consequently, this gender binary is increasingly being challenged and several jurisdictions have begun to reform their gender status laws.For example, in 2013 Germany became the first Western jurisdiction in modern times to introduce legislation allowing a person's gender to be recorded as 'indeterminate' at birth and thus give them a legal gender status other than male or female for all intents and purposes. However, this legislation has proved problematic in many ways and rightly was subject to pertinent criticism. In 2017 the German Constitutional Court then held that these rules were in violation of the German constitution as they only allowed a non-recognition, as opposed to a positive recognition of a gender other than male or female, and mandated law reform. Similarly, the Austria Constitutional Court held in June 2018 that current civil status laws had to be interpreted to allow registration of alternative gender identities. Therefore, two European jurisdictions will now have legal gender recognition beyond the binary.This book looks at law reform taking place around the world, with diverse perspectives from relevant fields, to provide the reader with a comprehensive analysis of the legal status of intersex persons and related issues.

This volume contains a selection of articles based on papers presented at an international workshop held at Frankfurt am Main, Germany from the 27th to the 28th of October, 2012. The workshop was organized by members of the Research Training Group 1576 "Value and Equivalence" and the Tell Chuera Project. The articles address a wide range of materials (lithics, terracotta figurines, domestic architecture and installations, glyptics) and topics (the organization of space within residential areas, the economic base of 3rd millennium settlements, an anthropological perspective on the study of domestic remains) which are related to the study of 3rd millennium BCE houses and households in northern Mesopotamia. Many articles focus on recent archaeological excavations and observations from Tell Chuera, but hitherto unpublished field data from other sites (Tell Mozan, Tell Hazna, and Kharab Sayyar) are also presented. The archaeological focus of the volume is broadened by a philological treatise dealing with the study of households in southern Mesopotamia.