Roen Meijers of Transforming Tasmania continues to be confused about the issue of Birth Certificate registrations as it is not gender that is recorded, but sex.
Additionally, the Options Paper on transgender law reform released for public consultation by former Anti-discrimination Commissioner, Robin Banks, in 2016 was only that – an Options Paper.
The consultation process for this paper was not widely publicised, the submissions were not made public and Ms Banks did not prepare a final report for the Attorney-General before leaving the position of Anti-discrimination Commissioner in early 2017.
There was, however, controversy in the media over the manner in which the consultation was conducted and the lack of public information about the process.
Today, most Tasmanians are not aware of this previous consultation, nor do they understand what the issues concerning transgender law reform entail.
It is disingenuous of Roen Meijers to suggest that further consultation will harm transgender people when most Tasmanians know nothing about the issues or the impacts on the wider community of Labor and the Greens’ proposed reforms.
Further, last year’s vote concerned same sex marriage, not transgender law reform aimed at allowing self-identification changes to sex markers on birth certificates by transgender persons. The latter has nothing to do with discrimination on grounds of sexual preference.
To suggest that fearmongering in the same sex marriage debate was aimed at transgender people is spurious indeed.
The continued stream of wild assertions coming from Transforming Tasmania in order to fast track their agenda and shut down public scrutiny of the proposed legislative changes begs the questions why the transgender rights activists want to curtail freedom of speech on this issue.
There are alternative legislative reform proposals that will protect the sex-based rights of women and girls, and allow transgender persons to have formal recognition of their chosen ‘gender identity’, without the need to change the historical record of a birth certificate.
We believe all options should be carefully considered in a broad-ranging public consultation process.
Joanna Pinkiewicz
November 17, 2018 at 13:06
In today’s modern world we have less and less time to discuss and understand complex issues. We jump to quick fixes. It is good to acknowledge that people are suffering, and that this culture has traumatised us and the way we relate to our bodies, the earth and each other. We need time to have discussions about sex and gender in our community. We need to unpack traumas and find solutions that don’t create new traumas and fears.
Adhering to ideological demands of the global transgender movement prohibits local discussion and understanding of various perspectives and needs. Forcing half-baked policies based on emotional reactions or ideological mantras further polarised our views.
Lola Moth
November 17, 2018 at 13:24
This proposal is dangerous, and if Labor and the Greens are in favour of it then they have lost my vote forever.
Let’s say there is a young male sex offender who is looking at a significant prison sentence for his crimes of rape and sexual assault against women. He is scared about going to jail so he gets his birth certificate changed to identify him as female. He doesn’t have to do anything to change his sexual identity under these proposed laws, so he just signs a form and becomes female. He now is sent to serve his sentence for sexual assault and rape in a women’s prison among all those possibly new victims.
To allow men to legally become women without ever taking hormones or having any surgery to take their manhood away is the most dangerous and stupid suggestion I have come across.
Christopher Eastman-Nagle
November 17, 2018 at 15:48
The transgen campaign construct is that they are now ‘sexistentially’ identity mainstreamed which is justified and legitimated by gender studies ‘science’. Yet still they are vulnerable ‘poor things’ blighted by irrationally backward, prejudiced, deluded and bigoted opponents who are only motivated by irrational fearmongering and hatred of their utterly reasonable and fair demands.
It is just too bad for them that some feminists do not seem to know their place and have the awful temerity to call their bluff, and call out their ideological slip, slide, weave and duck.
And what this says to me is that the old ‘progressive’ front is breaking up between the social libertarian deregulators and privatisers who represent the interests of indulgence economics and culture, and those who have a substantial sexual political agenda that goes to the heart of a very badly damaged sexual politic that is disintegrating as we speak .. and doing in women and children.
The sexual revolution was not ever about empowering women so much as ‘freeing them up’ into sexual and economic commodities. The only people benefitting from that ‘revolution’ are predatory men and sexual minorities who are leveraging that commodification of sex (and residualisation of its real biological purpose) to give themselves a status that they would never otherwise have.
And in the case of the transgen lobby they are actually treading on womens’ hard won, but all too few defences, refuges and compensatory allowances.
Isla MacGregor
November 17, 2018 at 16:14
The Mercury, Examiner and ABC are not reporting on our numerous media releases sent out over the last few weeks, including our alternative legislative proposals.
We previously wrote on TT about Mercury journalist Tim Martain’s rejecting of our request for an interview to share our perspective:
‘Mr Martain said he raised the issues about which I was concerned with the interviewees for his original article and was entirely satisfied with their ‘ready responses’. To run a story as I suggested, from a women’s rights position, would be ‘fear-mongering’.
Mr Martain also offered the following: ‘there’s a myth that balance is needed in journalism’ that journalists need to present alternative views. In his opinion an alternative view in this article would have created ‘conflict, not balance’, and was therefore unnecessary.
Because, after all, balance in journalism is just a myth .. too bad if readers are relying on it.
Finally, Mr Martain said he was ‘not prepared to write this story’ and assured me his editor, Chris Jones, and the TasWeekend magazine editor, Kirsty Eade, would ‘back him up’.
More: https://tasmaniantimes.com/2018/10/is-mainstream-media-in-australia-afraid-to-cover-womens-views-on-the-transgender-rights-debate/
Well, TT readers don’t need to ask why the media is ot covering our views, but I think it is obvious that they don’t want the public to be fully informed about the alternative views on this issue.
The silencing and censorship in the trans rights debate has been a common theme impacting on women being heard on this debate.
It is shocking that the promoters of trans ideology, including Cassy O’Connor and Rebecca White, still won’t answer the questions we are constantly raising about the impacts on girls and women of these proposals.
Like most adversarial political operators, they understand the principle of not giving their opposition ‘air time’ .. and the media in Tasmania is making sure of that.
Simon Warriner
November 18, 2018 at 07:02
O’Connor and White need to understand that the cause they are championing is for the benefit of a tiny proportion of their constituents, while those potentially negatively impacted comprise some 50% of the people who are paying them for representation. Perhaps a class action for fraud is in order.
That aside, perhaps you need to have a chat with the Country Women’s Association. They have a knack of getting stupid ideas killed off very efficiently.
Clive Stott
November 17, 2018 at 22:57
https://www.justice.tas.gov.au/bdm/sexual-reassignment
Lola Moth
November 18, 2018 at 08:51
Yes Clive, that is the current legislation on how to change your sex on a birth certificate. The proposed changes to these laws remove the condition that you need to have sexual re-assignment surgery to go from legally male to legally female.
You would just have to say you ‘feel’ female to be able to change your birth certificate.
Isla MacGregor
November 18, 2018 at 09:27
Here is Women Speak Tasmania’s Policy on Birth Certificates:
– Changes to sex registered on birth certificates not permitted. Part 4A – Registration of Change of Sex – of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1999 (Tas) to be removed and replaced by a part titled ‘Recognition Certificates’.
– A Sex Reassignment Board established to consider applications to issue a recognition certificate to persons who have a social identity that is incongruent with their biological sex, or incongruent with the sex registered in their name at birth in the case of intersex persons.
RATIONALE
• A birth certificate is a historical record of the sex phenotype of an individual, observed at birth. Subsequent changes in the individual’s sense of personal congruence with this record are not a sufficient basis to rewrite history.
• Birth certificates in general serve an important demographic function, informing numerous
aspects of government and social policy in health, education, policing and justice, and other services. Altering this record compromises the integrity of the data derived therefrom.
• It is recognised, however, that individuals who have adopted a social identity incongruent with their biological sex should have the opportunity to apply for a recognition certificate. Intersex persons who have a social identity incongruent with the biological sex registered in their name at birth should have the same opportunity. A recognition certificate is not a substitute for a birth certificate, but an acknowledgment of social identity for those who require it.
• In considering applications for a recognition certificate, the Sex Reassignment Board will take account of evidence that shows the claimant has lived, and intends to live in the future, with a social identity incongruent with their biological sex.
• Such applications can only be made by persons over the age of 18 years.
Christopher Eastman-Nagle
November 18, 2018 at 12:30
I understand that Bronwyn and Isla have to have a very specific agenda here, because the transgen lobby has created an immediate problem for women and children who need some kind of defence against an unconscionable and opportunistic sexual-political identity hijack by manipulating the births register.
However, the fact that as feminists they are having to do this is reflective of a much deeper malaise that goes to the heart of not just the sexual revolution, but the economic and cultural changes that rolled it out.
The sexual revolution has not been benign or empowering for women, children and the reproductive infrastructure they need for secure, loving, reliable, honest, respectful, considerate, fair and firm socialization, and the equitable/other regarding adult relationship necessary to produce and replicate it into the next generation so that children instinctively know what it means to be a good woman and man, husband and wife and mother and father, because it has been consistently structured and mentored to them throughout the reproductive cycle.
The laissez-faire deregulatory sexual politic, and the privatisation of moral behaviour at the expense of the collective good, has done enormous damage to women and children and brought out the worst in men.
The dysfunctional vacuum this has created has left us a welter of alienated behaviour, commodification of sex, residualisation of its fundamental life producing purpose in favour of sexual ‘lifestyles’ and exploitation of women and children as sexual commodities. The rather hopeful expectation that ‘liberation’ would give women more control, dignity and authority has been comprehensively squibbed both at home and in the workforce. And children find themselves grossly prematurely sexualised, and sexually active long before they have any capacity for appreciation beyond its immediate pleasures, of its massive sexual political implications.
The transgens, like any normally off message sexual minority, can’t believe their luck as the ordinary barriers and reproductive defenses against sexual off messaging disintegrate around them, as reproductive infrastructure falls to bits .. and gets colonised by market forces whose only interest is turning citizens into helpless egoists who have no internal control software left, and who will buy absolutely anything when the right buttons are pressed.
The transgens find themselves confronted by a vacuum as our social infrastructure implodes. So why wouldn’t they try to fill it? I would, if I weren’t thinking too hard about the longer term implications and how temporary vacuums are, as everyone and their dog jumps in to try their luck, and mainstream majorities begin to appreciate just how damaging a deregulatory free-for-all really is.
When that happens, some very traditional players are going to reappear in force. If we are to have any chance at all of heading them off, we have to support people like Isla and Bronwyn who bring a traditional feminist perspective that has the bones in it for being a serious contender in an emerging new world order as we find ourselves obliged to fight for our future and rebuild our ruined social infrastructure pretty much from scratch.
The traditionalists have the enormous advantage of already owning completely established mechanisms for restoring order, which is why, worldwide, religious fundamentalism is already getting so much traction, and why wars over secular governance are breaking out. The children of The Enlightenment haven’t even begun to think about it. The feminist sexual politic that might become the basis for a new social order is hardly more than an imaginative sketch of worthy intentions.
And the thing is folks, history is coming, ready or not. Preventing a transgen hijack of our birth registers is an important start, albeit small, but one has to start somewhere.
Support them. They need all the help they can get. Transgens are not the enemy, but they do need to be batted off. Bronwyn and Isla have all the credentials to do it, and for that we are in their debt.
Clive Stott
November 18, 2018 at 13:51
The fact that Labor and the Greens support changing birth certificates with no medical justification is a real worry.