Submission to New Zealand's Parliament: Sex Self-Identification

I presented a submission to a select committee of New Zealand’s Parliament regarding a clause in the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill (BDMRR bill) which would allow for the alteration of sex on one’s birth certificate.

Below is the transcript of my statement.

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“My name is Genevieve Gluck and I am a feminist essayist and researcher. I am speaking to you as an American citizen in opposition to sex self-identification which would be enacted under this bill.

What this bill calls ‘an administrative process’ allowing ‘people to have greater autonomy over identity’ is, as I understand it, the state approved falsification of a person’s identity by changing their sex marker on official documents.

Recording male people as ‘female’ effectively nullifies sex-based protections and rights of women and girls by allowing males to bypass sex specific safeguarding measures. Here I will detail how policies allowing for what is called a self-declared ‘gender identity’ are already being implemented in the United States to the detriment of women and children.

This year the state of California implemented a policy allowing convicted male offenders to transfer into women’s prisons. Currently over 200 men have filed for transfers.  The Chowchilla Women’s Facility has begun distributing condoms to female inmates in anticipation that they will be sexually assaulted. A 2009 study from the University of California, Irvine, found that male transgender inmates were more likely to be sex offenders than the general male population, and similar statistics have been recorded in the UK.

Karen White, a male who is a convicted pedophile, was housed in the female prison estate because of transgender status, and sexually assaulted two female inmates. A woman in the state of Illinois was raped in a women’s prison by a trans-identified male transfer, and she was initially forced by prison officials to recant her complaint. Women in hospital wards in the UK report being sexually assaulted by men placed in women’s wards, and those who speak up are called bigots.

There is also the case of Dana Rivers, a male formerly named David Warfield, who was a nationally recognized transgender activist from the state of California. Rivers is scheduled to go to trial this month, October, for the triple homicide of a lesbian couple and their son.

Rivers has been charged with murder and arson and is currently housed in a women’s prison ward awaiting trial. Previously, Rivers had been active in ‘Camp Trans,’ a campaign against the women-only annual festival called ‘Michfest’, of which the victims were regular attendees.

We have also recently seen the MMA fight between trans-identified male Alana McLaughlin, a former member of the US special forces, wherein he choked his female opponent, Celine Provost. Here, the state enforced inclusion of trans-identified males in women's sport has resulted in male violence against women portrayed as entertainment.

Policies which replace biological sex with a self-declared gender identity infringe on the rights of women and girls to privacy and safety and in effect, legalize the crime of public exposure and normalize voyeurism. One recent notable example of this was the viral incident at LA’s Wi Spa, where a man who was later revealed to be a serial sex offender, self-identified into the women’s section of the sauna to be fully nude in the presence of women and children whose objections were dismissed on the basis of his self-identified transgender status.

The situation of incarcerated women in New Zealand is not so different from that of women in the United States: in both countries, as in many countries around the world, marginalized, ethnic minority and / or low-income women make up the majority of the women’s prison population. In February, it was reported that women in Auckland’s Women’s Prison were treated in a ‘degrading,’ ‘cruel’ and ‘inhumane’ manner in a ‘concerted effort to break their spirit.’ Women were forced to strip in front of male guards, for instance; 68% of the inmates are Māori, making them the most incarcerated group of indigenous women on earth.

If New Zealand implements sex self-identification, there will be nothing to stop men from demanding transfers into women’s prisons, or to any other space where marginalized women require protection from male violence, including rape crisis shelters. Women inmates have already been raped and sexually abused by male transfers claiming a gender identity in the United States, Canada, and the UK.  Sex self-identification policies ultimately harm the most vulnerable and at-risk women in society.

Policies which allow men to self-identify as ‘female’ enable male violence against women, whether in prisons, in sports, or in facilities designated for women.

I have personally seen explicit adult materials uploaded to Pornhub recorded by trans-identifying males in women’s spaces, including changing rooms and restrooms. I have even seen explicit content recorded by a man in a dress in the girls’ restroom of a high school.

The fact of the matter is this: The belief that women and girls — half the human population — are not female humans is inherently dehumanizing. It dehumanises women and girls to redefine female as a belief category which can be performed, reduced to hormones, to the purchasing of makeup, high heels, breast implants and plastic surgery.

We ought to question why it is that male-bodied people, men, are seeking and being granted access women’s private spaces at the very same time that many have immediate access to a recording device — at the very same time that we are seeing a spike in spy cam pornography, where men can earn thousands of dollars each month streaming video of women in restrooms and changing rooms unaware.

We ought to question why it is that this ideology which attempts to define women according to objectifying constructs has taken hold in society alongside the tremendous rise in streaming pornography, which depicts women as objects for male possession and consumption.

We ought to question why it is that only women are being told to self-censor and acquiesce, why it is that only women are being referred to as ‘uterus-havers’, ‘birthing bodies’, and, as stated last month by The Lancet, ‘bodies with vaginas’.

Those who reject this demeaning redefinition of women are told to ‘be kind’, yet there is nothing kind about insisting that we are disembodied performances, that we ought to be reduced to male fantasies. 

This belief system is regressive. To enshrine it into public policy is to sanction tremendous harm.

I am asking you to reconsider the stipulation in the BDMRR bill which would streamline policies that place women at risk of male violence.”

Sex Self-Identification in New Zealand

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