The Queensland Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Bill 2022 is open for consultation until 12pm midday Wednesday 11 January 2023.

​

This law will mean anyone, at any stage in their life, for any reason, will be able to change the sex recorded on their Birth Certificate by completing a simple statutory declaration form. There will no longer be a medical or family court gatekeeping process. A birth certificate will cease to be reliable evidence of sex.
 

We see three major harms to women, minors and families if this bill becomes law, which we expand on below;

1) The harms of self-identification on equality and rights of women, safeguarding & protection, rights of association, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and human rights to privacy and dignity. As well as the impact of the cognitive dissonance of laws based on subjective feeling rather than objective, evidence based reality.

Women and girls remain an oppressed majority and subject to violence and discrimination on the basis of sex, every day in Queensland, and internationally. To address those harms and discrimination, women and girls need to have specific protections, based upon sex.  As humans cannot change sex, and in light of mounting evidence from Australia and overseas that males who self-identify as transgender retain male patterns of entitlement, criminality and performance across a range of domains, there remains an inherent need for women and girls to have their sex class recognised and protected. 

​

2) This bill supports a minor being able to start on the path of social transition at any age with as little as a statement of support from a non-related 18 year old, and guardianship responsibilities of parents can be over-ruled. Social transition is the term used to describe the process where an individual, parents, or school, and influencers of minors decide on a change of social identity.  It is a new psychosocial trend that has been promoted in University gender studies, social media influencers, pharmaceutical funded trans gender lobbies, and media platforms like ABC, SBS etc complying to diversity and inclusion audits.  In schools it often involves changes to documentations, including a change of name; a change of pronouns (she/her, he/him or they/them); and a change of clothes, style, hair, grooming and even mannerisms to an expression of an identity that the individual believes better matches their inner sense of self. 

Social transition is not a neutral intervention. Many studies have highlighted the risk that, in the short-term, social transition can increase the likelihood of the persistence of a young person’s unease with their sex, and that it can interfere with children’s natural identity development. There is no quality long-term peer-reviewed evidence about the impact of social transition. As such, as with all new interventions, it is best practice for governing organisations to apply caution. In particular to not make a law based on the unsupported perception that since gender identity ideology is a 'modern trend' it should be adopted. The impact of supporting social transitioning of minors that studies show generally leads to medical transitioning, particularly in the current culture of 'gender affirming care'. This will impact a minors long term physical and psychological well-being and as such should be viewed with caution, given the issues at stake. There is an argument to be made that medical interventions that could result in future loss of reproductive capacity might be viewed rightly as in contravention of the UN Right of the Child, as surely every child deserves the opportunity to make decisions about having children when they are adults with full matured intellectual capacity. 

​

3) The removal of parental rights of care for a state supported fringe ideology  The rights of minors involves protection of their physical and psycho-social well-being; this Bill works against that and towards the removal of parental rights of care. The state can over-ride a parent or both parents who are against their child starting on the 'gender affirmation pathway of social, medical and lastly surgical transitioning. This interference goes against Articles 3, 5, 9, 17, 19, 33, 34, 35, 36 in the UN Convention on the rights of the child. 

This is especially important in the case of non-gender-conforming children, predominantly those coming from the LGB community, those suffering gender dysphoria, depression, mental health issues or are on the autistic spectrum girls and young women with sexual abuse trauma histories. Although the trans gender diverse community, say this bill will help the LGBQT community it is primarily the LGB youth who are targeted as being in 'the wrong body', relabelled 'trans' and encouraged to adopt an appearance of being heterosexual or the opposite sex, at the cost of their ability to have children, sexual pleasure, general health and well being.
 

REVIEW THESE KEY HARMS AND RESOURCES GIVEN AND TAKE ACTION: WRITE TO THE LEGAL AFFAIRS & SAFETY COMMISSION TO SAY NO TO SELF-ID, NO TO SOCIAL TRANSITIONING AND NO TO STATE OVER-REACH.

​

1) The harms of self-Identification will have significant impact on the following:

• Single sex spaces; prisons, schools, toilets, change rooms and high-security hospital;

  • We are now seeing male rapists put in with Australian female prisoners, of whom over 75% have been sexually abused and suffer stress and anxiety from the threat of further abuse. Prison leadership, at the request and direction of institutions like Queensland Human Rights Commission,  have spent years trying to make incarceration spaces trauma informed. This is all discarded when males are included in the space, and all parties well know this.  Not only that, Australia’s commitment to the Mandela Rules, and arguably, UN rules regarding torture during incarceration, are also contravened by the placement of males in the female prison estate. Why was this not discussed in the ‘Statement of compatibility’ lodged by the Attorney General?  

  • Women, children and the elderly have particular same sex needs around intimate care, due to dignity, dependency and vulnerability. It is essential that same sex care be placed into the Anti-discrimination Act, not all amenities for this removed via self-identification legislation. The Queensland legislature must recognise there are instances where same sex care is essential for safety, privacy and dignity. The privacy requests of some who wish to hide their sex from others must not ever override the bodily autonomy, safety and safeguarding of others. 

  • Disabled people may require same-sex intimate care again due to dependence;

  • In practice a fully intact bearded male can be where women and children disrobe, can be legally protected to indecently expose himself.

  • Sex specific medical screening service;

  • People with learning disabilities may struggle to cope with rapidly changing social conventions such as ‘misgendering’;

  • High levels of violence and sexual abuse are mitigated with the removal of males, regardless of how they identify from women only spaces.

  • Child protection and safeguarding;
     

• Short-listed-spots; sex-specific awards and bursaries;      

  • Sexism and sexist discrimination is a huge problem in Australia, short-listed spots go some way to re-address the balance. We have seen however males take these spots and women are put second, again to males.

  • A recent report into the status of women’s equality in Australia: Australia's gender pay gap is 22.8%. Women, on average earn, $26,596 less than men each year. Men are twice as likely to be in the top earning bracket and women are 1.5 times more likely to be in the lowest

  • Underrepresentation in political and economic positions is lessened as men further positions of influence and power.
     

• Single Sex Sports

  • Women lose the right to exclude male-bodied people from women’s sports, even where including males’ risks injury for females. We lose the right for fair competition for women, as women's rights are subsumed beneath the demands of trans-identifying males even where there is overwhelming evidence that male inclusion is in opposition to the interests of women and girls.

  • We impact the health and the benefits of sports for young girls, with the impact of learned helplessness, when they realise no matter how hard they work, the playing field is weighted towards males winning, hence they self-exclude. When girls and women realise they have no potential for competition, or safety, they will self-select out, leaving the field. This is the opposite of what sports organisations have worked for decades to achieve.
     

• Race & Religion

  • How will the rights of cultural groups, for whom single-sex spaces are particularly important, be upheld? i.e., Aboriginal, Muslim and Jews? We already know that women of some backgrounds will self-exclude. Why does not the Attorney General also know this?

  • The implementation of a process of self-declaration of legal sex will disproportionately affect people from religious backgrounds for whom single-sex spaces are particularly important

  • There are people who believe that gender is a social construct, and that gender identity is not innate or real. How will their rights to assert this fact be upheld?

  • There are many who do not believe in ‘gender identity ideology’ but see it as a regressive, sexist and homophobic set of ideas with no grounding in reality or objectivity. Should there be legislation that enforces belief and coerces speech upon those who do not believe? 
     

• The right of association

  • Women lose the right for women to meet in order to debate, organise, advocate, and campaign for female specific interests, without risk of harassment, violence, prosecution or loss of income.
     

• Women’s services,

  •  The commissioning of sexual and domestic violence support services, including those for prostituted women;

  • People with PTSD including women survivors in relation to male violence and their right to a single sex recovery space or counsellor.
     

• Data collection results in data corruption, especially for health, crime, political participation, and STEM programs.

  • Women lose the right to have male crime recorded as male crime, it means journalists falsely report male committed crimes as female. It also means that male perpetrated crime is recorded and reported as being committed by women, when that is not the case. How can we address male violence when some male violence is mislabelled as ‘female’.

  • Elimination of data collection of sex-based inequalities.

  • Elimination of data on the impact of male criminals on women prisoners, hiding the harm and impact of vulnerable women in support of state-sanctioned ideology, that in effect supports state-sanctioned rape.
     

• Sexual Orientation. In Australia there has been an impact on one’s right to express one’s sexuality as same sex.

  • There are attacks on lesbians who are asserting their rights as protected group to be same sex attracted;

  • There is ostracization of lesbians from the LGBT community and their demonisation as 'sexual racists';

  • The erasure of their sexual identity and nomenclature;

  • The demand on lesbians to consider male-bodied people as sexual partners (‘stigmatising homosexuality in women);

  • The substitution of ‘gender’ for ‘sex’ which directly impacts on the protected characteristic of lesbian and gay men and their right to same sex relationships.

 

​Sex based rights exist to address some of these problems. Any change to the law that effectively changes the definition of who pertains to which sex group, has the potential to undermine efforts to advance women’s equality, the recognition of homosexuality and rights of protection and safeguarding of children.

​

2) This bill supports a minor being able to start on the path of social transition.
The bill goes past recording one's sex or 'gender identity', it engages in social engineering with the promotion of social transitioning minors an act that strongly increases the likelihood of medical and surgical transitioning.

Birth certificates have historically always recorded a person’s sex. All people, even those with disorders of sexual development (intersex) conditions are either male or female. Biological sex has an objective basis, it is immutable and in the majority of cases clearly observable even prior to birth. In contrast ‘gender identity’ is subjective, it is based on a fringe ideology that one can have a ‘sexed’ soul, it is a belief that a person can be born in a wrong body, it is unobservable and there is no scientific verification process for determining a gender identity.

A birth certificate should deal with evidence based facts, not be promoting a belief, a trend or in this case an ideology. Changing the descriptor of a minor’s sex to a ‘gender identity’ that refers to a subjective feeling of being a man, woman or neither regardless of one’s actual sex is a falsehood. Therefore, it should not be entrenched in law that one’s ‘gender identity’ changes one's sex because it does not. Nor should one's internal sense of self; ‘gender identity’ be conflated with one’s actual sex.

No one can change sex. A law should not be created to adhere to an ideology, particularly an ideology that most Australians neither share in, are aware of, let alone have even discussed on a national level, a radical change in what it means to be human; that a man could be a woman or a woman a man, based on gender identity ideology.

A particular concern with this bill, is that with gender identity ideology the first part of the gender affirmation process is called ‘social transitioning’ which involves changing names, documentation, pronouns, clothing and bathroom use. This is not a neutral act, most youth if pushed to transition socially, nearly a hundred percent will move onto the second stage which is medical transitioning. This involves taking of chemical castration and endometriosis drugs used to interfere with puberty, cross-sex hormones that are associated with sterilization and the last stage is extreme body modification. Left alone those children that have an incongruence with their sex, up to 80- 98% grow out of it during puberty. This bill, takes part in this process, falsifying one’s sex in adherence to an ideology that will set a youth on a pathway of irreversible body modification.

​

3) The removal of parental rights of care for state supported fringe ideology. Parents in the states of Western Australia and Victoria, have seen the removal of their sons and daughters by the state for disagreeing with what has become a state sanctioned ideology. This has been devastating to families and is an abhorrent state overreach of power, to divide families.

​

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

This Labour legislation is now being considered by the Queensland Parliament’s Legal Affairs and Safety Committee, which is actively calling for submissions from Queenslanders, before midday on the 11th of January 2023.

 

WRITE A SUBMISSION, write a letter to the Legal Affairs and Safety Committee expressing your personal concerns with regards to this bill. Even if you are time poor, pick a major concern, how it impacts you, and if you can, try to educate. But most importantly ordinary Australians need to speak up. In our experience of meeting with 29 politicians this year, their knowledge of this topic is profoundly limited. They are heavily lobbied by trans gender diverse lobbies, who sell a narrative of an extremely marginalised community, that anyone speaking up for women, children and LGB are 'transphobic' and push the lie that this community will suicide if their demands are not met. 

WE HAVE FOUR RESOURCES FOR YOU TO USE:
 

• See examples of the impact of self-id as reported in media: lostwomensrights.com

• Read the testimonies of those impacted by self-id: noconflicttheysaid.org

• Read common arguments and insights that you can draw on to help write your submission, go to Resources. Remember do not simply cut and paste, make your submission unique, otherwise it will be ignored.

• If you are interested in the social transitioning of minors aspect, these pages are useful; https://indefenceofchildren.org and https://lostintransition.org.

 

Submissions may be emailed to:   lasc@parliament.qld.gov.au   

Committee Secretary
Legal Affairs and Safety Committee
Parliament House
George Street
Brisbane QLD 4000

​

Please note: If accepted, the author’s name and submission will be published on the committee’s inquiry webpage and the author’s name in the committee’s report, unless you request confidentiality and your name to be withheld. 

 

Submissions should include:

• the author’s name (your name)

• if the submission is made on behalf of an organisation, the level of approval (e.g., a local branch, executive committee or national organisation)

• email address

• mailing address, and

• daytime telephone number.

​

Please ensure your submission includes the above or it may not be considered by the committee.

The Committee is due to report back to the Queensland Parliament by the 24th of February 2023 following its investigation of this legislation and advise whether it recommends that the legislation be passed or not passed, or alternatively amended.
 

​

A LGB Defence project in collaboration with Fair Go for Queensland Women 

​

​