Alex Sharpe, Sexual intimacy and gender identity ‘fraud’: Reframing the legal and ethical debate

DOI10.1177/0004865819854589
AuthorMatthew Ball
Published date01 December 2019
Date01 December 2019
Subject MatterBook Reviews
SG-ANJJ190022 443..443 Book Reviews
597
Taking all of the above into consideration, we have to praise Ruggiero for offering us
such “radical” and “extremist” perspectives on financial delinquency and reassure him
that there is absolutely no reason to be “infuriated” with himself as he claimed to be at
the end of the introduction.
Alex Sharpe, Sexual intimacy and gender identity ‘fraud’: Reframing the legal and ethical debate.
Routledge: Oxon, 2018; 204 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-50255-0, $252.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Matthew Ball, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
In Sexual Intimacy and Gender Identity ‘Fraud’, Alex Sharpe takes on the ambitious goal
of reshaping conversations around sex, consent, and gender, specifically as these impact
on transgender and gender nonconforming people. The book responds to the recent
prosecutions in the UK of transgender men for sexual offenses. Specifically, these pros-
ecutions occurred after the cisgender women that these men had sex with discovered that
those men had been assigned female at birth – information which was not shared with
the complainants prior to sexual intimacy. This issue provides broad scope for Sharpe to
explore the cis- and heteronormative assumptions that inform the law and our under-
standings of sexual ethics, the social and legal inequalities that these assumptions create
for transgender and gender nonconforming people, and the myriad legal and ethical
issues that arise out of such prosecutions.
After neatly introducing the complex themes that the book covers, as well as out-
lining the development of the category of fraud in sexual offences law and the prose-
cutions the book discusses, Sharpe details a variety of principled objections to these
prosecutions. Sharpe first considers criminal law overreach in these prosecutions, given
that each case involved “desire-led intimacy” devoid of coercion. She questions why the
right to sexual autonomy for cisgender people in these cases becomes non-negotiable
and trumps any right to privacy...

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