Fiat is a useful means for radical ends. Imagining and debating about a policy proposal in a game setting hones imaginative capacities that spill outside the activity to reshape social relations.

Through the course of this research project, we approached decertification as an experimental and reflexive law reform process—that also involved others. 11 Developing decertification as an experimental prefigurative law reform practice is the fourth use to which decertification was put. Legal and governmental simulations can take different forms. Young people’s parliaments and model United Nations, for instance, are intended to get children and youths roleplaying core political institutions to understand how they work. Similar processes occur in mainstream legal education when law students are asked to act as judges, writing judgments for legal cases. Learning is invariably part of any roleplay but drawing on prior examples of critical institutional play (such as feminist judgment writing), our aim was to simulate law with a difference. This difference had several aspects. One aspect, discussed further by Cooper (2023b), involved experimenting with legislative form to capture the limits, possibilities, and challenges of writing speculative law. In other words, could a legislative text on decertification be crafted that did not simply mimic the formalistic ambition and confidence of a conventional English statute, but was instead self-reflexive and polyphonic? A second aspect was to produce a law reform proposal outside the bounds of current political debate (even as it might capture the broad societal direction of travel). Decertification might be considered politically outlandish. We wanted to give it careful thought; to treat it as a legitimate proposal, worth paying attention to.

In her Afterword, Davies (2023) reflects on the plural temporalities that decertification invokes. Treating a contentious legal proposal associated with the future as if it was a currently viable reform is an exercise in prefigurative institutional experimentation. Prefiguration is a helpful framework for thinking about initiatives that anticipate and embody hoped-for future possibilities (see Monticelli 2022), by enacting changes that are sought (Yates 2015; Mensink 2020; see also Carroll et al. 2019). Such a move refuses the conventional political division between means and ends (Van de Sande 2013; Swain 2019). Against the notion that bad means can be justified if they secure good ends, prefiguration treats the means as part of the ends and, also, as anticipating them—since how politics is conducted shapes the society it gives rise to. Prefiguration also treats desired ends as operationalisable and as doing stuff. Rather than await a better society in the future or rely on campaigning and political pressure to induce more powerful forces to secure it, prefigurative politics embodies hoped-for changes in the now. Prefiguration has become a popular and influential framework within anarchist and social movement circles. However, the critical orientation that many social movement activists and anarchists adopt towards state and law means prefiguration’s terms have been little utilised in relation to them. Yet, state and law can be sites of prefigurative practice, where hopeful practices (such as British local government’s 1980s introduction of nuclear free zones) exceed what can be realised (Cooper 2020). Prefiguration may be carried out, officially, by state bodies. It can also be undertaken by actors, informally, within or in relation to state apparatuses.

But what does it mean to formulate a prefigurative law reform proposal within the course of research; and does it necessarily function as ‘a proposal’? Can a proposal not be proposed? Approaching decertification, prefiguratively, emphasises its status as an experimental legal proposal that imagines and rehearses future law, but this does not mean decertification should be introduced in England and Wales today. We do not argue, in this special issue, for decertification’s implementation as a contemporary law reform. Instead, we outline some legislative principles for its future enactment mindful that these principles carry the DNA of the geopolitical time of their imagining—namely, of early 2020s Britain, where views on different sides, and particularly the hesitations and anxieties that decertification elicited, shaped the legislative principles formed. These anxieties also provide reasons why decertification may be a candidate for ‘slow law’ rather than something to advance immediately in this jurisdiction as Cooper (2023b) explores in her article.

This special issue focuses on the decertification of gender and sex, but the prefigurative law reform methods developed in the research discussed have wider reach—being applicable to many ideas for progressive policy and legal reform currently identified as too radical for governmental attention. 12 Some may characterise the deliberate take up of speculative policy reforms as a form of play—a characterisation that is often made dismissively. Play is a tricky description given its association, for many, with light-heartedness, frivolity, and messing about, where little or nothing is at stake. In the context of decertification, the different stakes and investments in gender-related law reform were sharply evident. At the same time, play has been used, in other contexts, as a modality of action that can be serious and developmental (see Statler et al. 2011), and that can have consequences beyond its ‘magic circle’. What play foregrounds, beyond experimenting and roleplaying structures differently, is a testing, stretching, and knotting that pulls things into different connections and relations with others—and sometimes holds things apart (see Cooper 2019). Parliamentary law-making may rarely feel like play (or, to the extent that it does, this is typically a negative assessment). But academic research can be a space where experimental play—including through legislative design—imagines, rehearses, and takes seriously different futures, free of the pragmatism and short-term political calculation that dog proposals developed for immediate introduction.

In reaching out to hoped-for future possibilities and retrieving them as worthy recipients of present-day attention, the involvement of others is central. In the articles that follow, we discuss some of the challenges of engaging stakeholders given the polarised and increasingly bitter character of disputes over sex and gender categories. However, holding on to play is to hold on to an important source of invitation. This is about something far more than being playful. It is about inviting others to participate in the testing and reshaping of social relations. Reimagining gender’s relationship to legal categories is not sufficient to bring them into being. But it plays a part.