Ido Katri

Ido Katri is a legal scholar and critical theorist working at the intersections of constitutional, administrative and international law with trans studies, queer and critical race theory. Their research examines how law produces and governs gender and sexuality, race and empire, subjectivity and materiality. Before entering academia, Katri co-founded the Gila Project for Trans Empowerment and practiced human rights law, representing residents of the Gaza Strip and trans people incarcerated under Israeli law. Katri holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where they were affiliated with the collaborative programs in Sexual Diversity Studies and Jewish Studies.

A former Trudeau Foundation and Vanier Canada Scholar, they received the 2021 Governor General’s Gold Medal for the dissertation Gender Self-Determination Troubles. From 2021 to 2025, they were Assistant Professor of Law and Social Work at Tel Aviv University. Katri’s current work is shaped by questions of academic and legal complicity and refusal. Working across disciplinary boundaries, their scholarship has appeared in venues ranging from the Yale Law Journal to Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Autoimmune Law asks how liberal legal orders turn rights into instruments of violent governance, beginning from a problem they cannot easily explain: trans rights expand rapidly even as the techniques for restricting and reversing them consolidate just as fast. The project theorizes this as ‘constitutional doppelgänger’, in which recognition appears in one register while the conditions that govern it are displaced into another: administrative classifications, evidentiary rules, forms of surveillance. What is officially absent returns as a constitutive presence, a ghost in the legal machine.

The project is organized through three dossiers: gender-affirming care and intersex normalization; legal gender recognition vs sex-as-truth; and the limits of genocide as a legal category in human rights law. Rather than locating authoritarianism outside liberal legality, it traces how legal systems absorb critique while sorting lives into protection and abandonment. Written from a position of rupture and disaffiliation, the project asks when institutional autoreduction ceases to appear merely destructive and becomes a condition for rethinking responsibility and survival.