Ideological Birth Certificate Proposal Rightly Deferred

Welcoming a decision by Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin to defer a bill that would make it easier to change gender on birth certificates. The Government and Administration select committee had recommended that birth certificates be based on the choice of the person, including the fact that no medical evidence is required for the change.

The effect of this proposal would be to insert a biological lie. By choosing your own gender on your birth certificate, the certificates would become an object of unscientific gender ideology and effectively tell medical professionals that they got it wrong at time of birth.

It is disturbing that some politicians want to ignore biological reality and, in the process, bring about confusion and ambiguity. A birth certificate is a historical record based on fact – not a political tool to further an ideology.

Also concerning that the bill continues to allow the birth certificate of an ‘eligible child’ to be changed to the ‘nominated’ sex simply through an application of ‘the guardian’. It is well-established today that the overwhelming majority of such children – from 75% to 98% – who experience gender dysphoria grow out of it by the time they reach puberty. It is not inborn. Thus, the leading clinics seeing such children – such as those in Canada and the Netherlands – do not recommend parents and schools facilitate gender changes in such children. The push in culture today to embrace and affirm such children’s wishes is founded more upon a political and parental ideology than it is in careful science and experience.

This latest decision follows on from the Department of Internal Affairs last year removing the need for fathers being recorded on birth certificates, also ignoring biological reality, and rendering birth certificates as manipulated and misleading.

Removing the biological father – or the biological mother – from a document that records biological history is wrong. Biology tells a story – but the state seems dead-set to distort that story, and we should be concerned at that direction being taken.

For politicians and the state to be manipulating birth certificates in these ways is deeply concerning.

The Department of Internal Affairs website says – “A New Zealand Birth Certificate is an official document containing registered information about a person’s birth as at the date of issue. A birth certificate can only be used as evidence that an identity exists. The birth certificate should not be used as the sole form of evidence for asserting an individual’s identity, as it does not provide any link to the person presenting it.” (our emphasis added)

(This is the same select committee who almost attempted to remove husband and wife from marriage certificates during the same-sex marriage debate but were forced to backtrack.)

READ Family First’s Submission on the bill