Back in 2021, as part of its discussion document on hate speech, the Ministry of Justice proposed finally amending the prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Human Rights Act to include gender including gender expression and gender identity. Labour famously chickened out on hate speech, referring the issue to the Law Commission to get it out of the headlines for a while, and then National, whose coalition partners support and engage in hate speech, dumped it entirely. But it turns out that not all of it was dumped: while the Minister instructed the Law Commission to discontinue work on the hate speech proposals, it continued to work on amending the Human Rights Act. And today it released an issues paper on the subject, 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, which reaches a preliminary view that the law should be amended.
They give a bunch of reasons for this. While there has been a formal legal opinion from Crown Law that anti-trans discrimination is covered under the "sex" clause, there's been no definitive ruling from the courts, or even from the Human Rights Review Tribunal, and so the law remains unclear. An explicit clause would solve this, and it would also "have an important educational and symbolic function. It would make a clear statement about what forms of discrimination are not allowed in Aotearoa New Zealand". Ultimately though, it boils down to this: trans people are subject to discrimination, and do not feel protected, despite what Crown Law says. An explicit amendment would fix that, and protect their dignity as human beings.
Of course, there's a lot of details to sort out: what form an amendment should take, how it would interact with the various exemptions in the Act and with other law. The Law Commission is currently seeking submissions on all of this. The terfs will no doubt bomb this with hate, trying to pretend trying to pretend that they're something other than a tiny bigot cult, so if you care about this issue, please submit. Submissions are due by 17:00 on Thursday 5 September 2024.
