Dr Aileen Kennedy is a leading scholar on Australian law relating to sex and gender, with particular focus on intersex human rights. Aileen chaired Intersex Human Rights Australia between 2022 and 2024. She is a member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights LGBTIQ Sub-committee. She was recently appointed as a national director of Pride in Law. Aileen joined UTS Faculty of Law in the Law Health Justice Research Centre in April 2023 as a Chancellor’s Post-doctoral Research Fellow.
Her post-doctoral project is to provide an analysis of Australian law as it impacts on the intersex population, and comprehensive recommendations for law reform. Aileen completed her PhD at UTS, and her thesis considered the impact of neurological theories of binary gender on judicial decision-making for transgender and intersex minors in Australia, Aileen has an extensive record of research and advocacy on intersex human rights law. Her forthcoming book ‘Law, Gender Identity and the Brain’ published by Routledge Press, sits at the cutting edge of law and medicine’s engagement with sex and gender to argue that law must develop greater acceptance of dynamic complexity and diversity in the domain of sex/gender.
Law must retreat from its determination to create, define, and regulate artificially bounded sex categories of male and female which can lead to violations of embodied integrity and a betrayal of autonomous rights of intersex minors. Aileen is currently investigating Australian privacy laws in relation to the history and ethics of medical photography of intersex minors. She is researching fertility issues in the context of intersex variations. In her previous academic job Aileen was a Senior Lecturer at University of New England in Armidale NSW.
