MEDIA RELEASE: Law Commission officially untethers from reality

If there was ever a Masterclass in wrecking an organisation’s credibility with New Zealanders, it was delivered last week by the Law Commission in its report, Ia Tangata, A review of the

protections in the Human Rights Act 1993 for people who are transgender, people who are non-binary and people with innate variations of sex characteristics.

The report recommends inserting “gender identity” as a new ground of discrimination under section 21 of the Human Rights Act 1993 (HRA) and amending other provisions that currently provide essential sex-based protections for women and girls.

“These recommendations represent an alarming departure from decades of progress in women’s rights,” said SUFW spokesperson Suzanne Levy.

The Commission had an opportunity to bring a sober and considered contribution to a complex and contested contemporary issue. Instead, in a laborious word salad of a report, the recommendations demonstrated not only its total capitulation to its panel of “experts” that represented only one point of view, but its total removal of, and contempt for, the interests of women and girls in having access to single sex spaces, sport, and services for reasons of privacy, dignity, and safety. This report is nothing short of a betrayal.

Women and girls, in their view, should in many instances be compelled to share single sex spaces, sport,  schools, and services with any male who proclaims a female inner gender identity because the “harm” of excluding that male will outweigh the interests of women and girls in single sex provision. Ridiculously, the onus is on women to prove otherwise.

In doing so, the Commission have revealed themselves to be utterly divorced from the realities of most New Zealanders with polling over the last few years showing strong, and increasing, support for single sex provision. 

Speak Up for Women’s submission to the Commission supported the interests of people who identify as gender diverse to have specific protections in the HRA as separate from and distinct to sex, while preserving sex specific exceptions. An approach such as this would have struck a reasonable balance between sometimes competing interests and would have been supported by many New Zealanders as a considered compromise. 

The Commission’s insistence that their recommendations deliberately gutting single sex provisions in the HRA for women and girls “strike an appropriate balance” shows that they can no longer be trusted to opine on matters of reality. Alongside this, other recommendations would also make parts of the Act more ambiguous, confusing, and unworkable. 

NZ ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1985. As a party to the convention, the New Zealand government is obligated to work towards eliminating discrimination against women and girls in all areas of life and their definition of discrimination against women is “any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex”. To put the feelings of some men over the rights of all women is to breach this international convention and we are astounded at this considerable oversight.

We wish the Government well in its attempt to salvage something of use from a significant amount of taxpayers’ money sunk into a report that only further demonstrates the chasm between elite institutions and everyday New Zealanders. 

SUFW calls on the Government and Parliament to reject these dangerous recommendations outright. Women’s rights must remain grounded in biological reality, not political fashion.