As the subject of multiple laws, court rulings, and vested public interest, sex and gender nonbinary people are increasingly subjected to scrutiny and enforced politicization, medicalization, and criminalization. By legally defining sex and gender as permanently interconnected and bodies as either male or female from birth based on the perceived ability of sexual reproduction, proponents of sex-gender-confirming proposed legislation seek to establish that one's sex-gender is determined through scientific, thus inarguable, fact. In January 2019, the Utah Vital Statistics Act Amendments bill (H.B. 153, 2019), was proposed, which would legally define sex and gender – assumed congruent – as inherently and permanently either male or female. However, the strict language used in the proposed bill provides definitions for what is considered legally male and female that are so explicit that nonbinary bodies, even those bodies that doctors would typically assign as male or female, would ‘literally fall outside of the only categories the court recognizes as human’ (Lloyd, 2005, p. 170). A failure of the proposed legislation to account for the myriad of natural bodily formations beyond the binary male/female indicates a failure to include personhood or humanity for people whose bodies do not match the required function in the text of the law. This potentially marks transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people as existing outside the category of legally human by denying their identity in relation to the available legal male/female markers, such as accurate birth certificates and legal identification documents, which, in turn, impact access to employment, housing, healthcare, finances, education, and interactions within the criminal justice system.

By examining the purposefully specific language used in H.B. 153 and comparing it with previous incarnations of similar legislation, I show how exclusionary legislation fails to represent the vast differences in sexgender present within the human body, potentially defining multitudes of people out of societal and legal existence. Through an examination of the structure and language of the proposed bill and an examination of how the sciences noted in proposed legislation fail to account for the variances in bodily formations, I position sex and gender nonbinary people as not only not included in, but intentionally prevented from, being considered legally human.