A report that the Minns Government is considering amending the NSW Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration (BDMR) Act to allow anyone to register a legal change of sex based on their self-nomination is of great concern to women’s groups fighting to protect their hard-earned spaces.
NSW State Director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), Joshua Rowe, said, “Amending the BDMR Act to allow unregulated alteration of ones legal sex on their NSW birth certificate facilitates the falsification of one of our most important identification documents. A biological male would be able to self-nominate as a ‘female’ on a whim, affording him unrestricted legal access to women’s-only spaces.
“A person’s ‘gender’ must be understood as the expression that proceeds from their biological sex. The two cannot be detached. One’s identity as ‘male’ or ‘female’ is not determined by self-designation but by the reality of their unalterable biological sex.
Joshua Rowe concluded, “If the NSW Government begins to legislate on the basis that ‘sex’ is a self-designation as opposed to a biological reality, women’s prisons, DV shelters, toilet facilities, sports and changerooms will be just some of the places under threat in our State”.
ACL calls on the Minns government to protect women by abandoning the sex self-ID proposal and to maintain biological sex as the determinating legal capacity.
