Tani Newton
THURSDAY at 5 pm is the deadline for making a submission to the Law Commission on their Issues Paper, “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.” Briefly, the commission is suggesting that there is insufficient protection in the law for these people and that the Human Rights Act should specifically mention them.
If this continues in the direction it’s going, it would mean, among other things, that public facilities could be required to be unisex, and ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ could become offences or crimes.
You can make a submission here. The Free Speech Union also has a helpful resource here for people who are struggling to express themselves.
For your encouragement, below is my submission. I bypassed the other 79 questions and entered this as my answer to Question 80:
The plight of people who are born sexually ambiguous is severe and lifelong. These unfortunates deserve our sympathy and concern and should be listened to and consulted so that the community can better understand their experience and needs.
But such cases are exceedingly rare. The concern of this discussion paper is mostly with those claiming to be ‘transgender’, etc., in other words, people who choose to pretend to be a sex they are not.
It is a mildly ingenious procedure to recast a form of behaviour as a category of people, so that disapproval of the behaviour can be reinterpreted as discrimination against a class of people. Among other things, it can obviate the need to discuss the issue. The method has been used with great success, for instance in legalising same-sex ‘marriage’.
It should be noted, however, that the same process can be used in any number of ways. If I wanted to take someone else’s wallet, I could simply claim that I am a kleptomaniac, and that I was born that way and can’t change it. Or I could argue that the desire to steal is fluid and that I can choose to identify as a kleptomaniac, or not, at any time. If challenged or prosecuted, I could have recourse to the claim that I am being unfairly discriminated against. Why should the rights of kleptomaniacs not be protected by law? Who gets to decide what category of miscreants will next be awarded martyr status and granted indemnity from criticism?
Actually, the issues paper itself volunteers the information that the pressure is coming from the United Nations. I ask why this should be. Those people are neither the government nor the citizens of our country. We did not vote for them or authorise them to speak on our behalf. What business is it of theirs to influence our laws?
If this discussion achieves its evidently intended outcomes, we will eventually have laws against ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’. That would amount to a loss of freedom of speech, or even to forced speech. Personally, I would regard the desired speech patterns to be a form of lying or falsehood. If you are going to make correct English illegal, then you will have to throw me in jail until I rot. And I don’t particularly care, since there can’t really be much to pick between being in jail and living in a country without freedom of speech.
But seriously, making such changes to the law poses real danger to real people. Is the Commission sincere in saying that “[g]ood law reform is evidence based”? There is ample evidence already that women and children are put at serious risk when men can gain access to women’s spaces and activities by pretending to be women. And there is something else that I would like to add. Although I am not qualified to speak on behalf of those who have sadly been born sexually ambiguous, I anticipate that they could be seriously jeopardised by the backlash against any laws protecting people who choose to engage in sexually incongruous behaviour. This may have happened already. Has the Commission, in its researches, enquired into this? If not, does it intend to do so?
