International Human Rights Law (IHRL) has long been driven by a compelling Universalist mandate: to provide a complete protection against governmental overreach, arbitrary violence and structural injustice. But that cover frequently crumbles when confronted with the actual reality of transgender sex workers, who are located at the strong intersection of governmental violence, criminalization, economic precarity, and social ostracization. For people on the edges of gender identity and informal work, IHRL frequently acts less as an empowering tool of freedom and more as a reflected mirror of patriarchal, bourgeois, and binary institutional goals. With considerable theoretical ambition, Giovanna Gilleri’s monograph, Sex, Gender and International Human Rights Law: Contesting Binaries, explores this contentious territory. The book offers a profound structural criticism of the ways in which international legal systems replicate and reinforce inflexible conceptions of sex and gender. Throughout this study, sentences are flagged to underpin the doctrinal tools and academic literature under investigation.