Contestations of Transgender Rights and/in the Strasbourg Court

Transgender rights are a highly contested issue, upsetting the ‘normal’ ordering of society. In Europe, transgender persons continue to suffer discrimination and harassment, and their rights are contested time and again. Eventually they can turn to the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) in Strasbourg. In such politically sensitive matters, how do judges in Strasbourg decide? Do they set European norms bolstering transgender rights, or do they refrain from interference in state affairs? Testing expectations based on rational and sociological institutionalism, this article analyses all 33 Court cases on transgender issues since 1980. As a judge’s low score on trans rights in their home country does not mean that they vote against trans rights, and as judges do no defend their home country but vote with the ‘pro-state’ or ‘pro-trans’ majority, rationalist expectations were not confirmed. Sociological institutionalist processes of widening and narrowing tell us more about the hesitant and uneven strengthening of transgender rights, if within the limits of binary thinking as regards the transgender body, marriage and family

Understanding network societies : two decades of large technical system studies

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In search of the networked nation. Transforming technology, society and nature in the Netherlands in the 20th century

In the Netherlands, the simultaneous construction of society and network technologies has a long history, yet it is only in the twentieth century that the Netherlands has become a veritable Network Society. Drawing on the vocabulary of the research field of 'large technical systems' and the empirical results of the Dutch national history of technology programme, this article argues that during this century technological, social and even natural landscapes were reshaped in processes of material network building. An investigation of selected cases (the development of the electricity supply, the food chain, the petrochemical industry, and nature conservation) shows a variety of development patterns, motives, interests, conflicts, and negotiations behind the seemingly universal human obsession regarding circulation and network building