Gender Outlaws before the Law: the Courts of the Borderland*

This Article considers four trials held in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, in which gender outlaws were accused and convicted in a criminal court for fraudulent gender presentations. These trials raise questions at a number of junctures that touch on the regulation and politics of sex, gender, and sexuality. I argue that these cases manifest not only the unresolved tension between sexual and gender identities, but also the internal conflicts within the identities themselves, as well as the difficulty of maintaining boundaries amongst them. Furthermore, I argue that, contrary to the rhetoric used by the various courts, the primary goal of the law in all of these cases was not to protect sexual autonomy against fraudulent solicitation of sex, but rather to protect gender norms and compulsory heterosexuality. I will assert that the convicting judgments in the four trials represent instances of the law attempting to restore compulsory heterosexuality against what I will call the queer reality that emerges from the facts of these cases. The stories of the trials analyzed in this Article challenge not only compul-