Submission on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill

The Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill (hereinafter referred to as “the Bill”) attempts to answer the question “What is a woman”. The Women’s Rights Party supports the Bill in principle and we are pleased that it has passed its first reading and is being considered by the Social Services and Community Select Committee so we, the people, can have our say.

We very much appreciate the opportunity to make a written submission and we wish to engage in further discussion with the Select Committee by way of an oral submission.

The Women’s Rights Party of New Zealand Aotearoa is a registered political party focused on issues that directly impact women, girls, and children. Our main concern is protecting the rights of women and children. We advocate for women’s sex-based rights, so that these rights are respected and extended, and not eroded.

Thus we welcome the Bill, while we acknowledge it will not achieve the goals it sets to address in its current form. Hence, we are grateful for the opportunity to make our submission in which we will propose amendments that would strengthen the Bill in achieving its aims.

The Women’s Rights Party honours the women of New Zealand who won the right to vote in 1893, the first self-governing nation in the world to legislate women’s suffrage. We formed in April 2023, 130 years after the women’s suffrage legislation, out of a concern for the erosion of the rights of women and girls and concerns about the safeguarding of children.

Many Women’s Rights Party members have been active in advocating for women’s sex-based rights since the 1960s and 1970s within the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, and their unions. Many of us are from the generation who founded women’s refuges and rape crisis centres, fought for abortion rights and patient rights, and worked to achieve the goals of the Working Women’s Charter — for childcare and equal pay for work of equal value, for example.

Far from being a right wing “culture war” imported from the USA, as opponents accuse supporters of the Bill, the Women’s Rights Party contested the 2023 General Election as a uniquely New Zealand initiative with a List of 12 exceptional women from all walks of life across the country, including New Zealand’s first trades qualified joiner, international and provincial sportswomen, health professionals, a top Chief Executive and a business student.

Echoing Minister of Women’s Affairs Nicola Grigg’s speech on the First Reading of the Bill, former Minister and Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel says rather than the legal definitions of man and woman, the real challenges facing women include the “gender” (sic)¹pay gap, getting into leadership roles, and safety issues.²

Whilst we agree that these broader issues facing women are very important, we maintain that a clear legal definition of a woman and a man is also vitally important. Indeed, it is essential for the achievement these broader goals, and for their protection once achieved.

Women’s Rights Party policies include women’s healthcare and wellbeing, women’s income inequalities, our children’s education, and the irreversible harm being done to our young people experiencing gender distress through medical interventions.

In our submission we will show that the legal definition of a woman and a man are indeed real issues that protect women’s and girls’ sex-based rights, and that challenge the discrimination we are currently experiencing from the replacement of the category of “sex” with that of “gender”, an imprecise concept that refers to sex-based stereotypes and social expectations; e.g. what is considered feminine and masculine.

Our Policy Platform spells out our position in relation to women’s sex-based rights.³

• The sex-based rights for women guaranteed in the Human Rights Act 1993⁴ must be respected in law and policy, such as the right to single-sex spaces.
• The Women’s Rights Party is committed to the rights of lesbians to organise and socialise separately where they wish, recognising that lesbianism is same-sex attraction, not same-gender attraction.
• Biological males should not compete in women’s and girl’s sports, where there are issues of fairness and safety.
• The language in policy, law, health, and education needs to recognise that sexual orientation is about the attraction that a person can have either to their own sex, the other sex, or both sexes.

More than 800 women and men have joined the Women’s Rights Party, many of whom are active in other gender critical or sex realist groups which support the Bill including Mana Wāhine Kōrero, Speak Up for Women, Resist Gender Education, LAVA (Lesbian Action for Visibility Aotearoa), Save Women’s Sports, and FOWL (Feminists Older Women’s Lobbyists) and Women’s Declaration International.

Women’s Rights Party members also belong to organisations such as the National Council of Women, and unions such as the Public Service Association, both of which have called on their members to submit against the Bill.

Such organisations have said those who support defining a woman and a man focus only on this one issue; that we are concerned only with “what is in people’s pants”, as the massive billboard outside Auckland’s St Matthews in the City declares. Despite the assertion that these matters are not the business of government, in fact New Zealand’s Human Rights Act has for decades sought to protect women, and men, from discrimination, providing a number of sex-based exceptions (19 in all) where it is lawful to discriminate in favour of one sex only under certain circumstances.

The government has also legislated to decriminalise homosexuality, legalise gay marriage, and to include same-sex attraction as a protected ground in the Human Rights Act. If “sex” is not defined, it is impossible to define “same-sex orientation”.

There is something very attractive in asking our law makers the simple question: “What is a woman?”

We all remember how Labour Leader Chris Hipkins (our Prime Minister at the time) stuttered and stammered when he was asked the question at a press conference in April 2023. “Um to be honest, Sean, that question has come out of slightly left field,” Hipkins responded. “People define their own genders,” he said finally, having admitted it wasn’t something he had been briefed on, and hadn’t ‘preformulated’ an answer to.

NZ First is attempting to answer the “What is a woman” question with this Bill.

The Bill aims to ensure clarity and consistency in New Zealand law by defining “woman” as an adult human biological female and “man” as an adult human biological male, with corresponding definitions for “male” and “female”.

The amendment is simple. It states:

The Bill proposes using the mechanism of the Legislation Act 2019 to provide legal certainty to protect the integrity of sex-based rights, and to ensure that language in law reflects biological reality. This definition would apply in all contexts where the terms “woman” and “man” are used, unless explicitly stated otherwise in specific legislation. It would by extension also include those instances where the terms “female” and “male” are used, as in the crime of “male assaults female”.⁵

NZ First says the Bill aims to address issues such as the safety of women in schools, changing rooms, sports, and prisons. We agree with this aim, and would include issues of privacy, dignity and fairness, as well as safety. We would also include girls as well as women.

Lawyers who have reviewed the draft legislation say it will not achieve those goals, because rules around sex discrimination under the Human Rights Act do not use the words the Bill sets out to define.

And that is by and large true across all legislation. A search of the laws most relevant to women — the Human Rights Act 1993, the Bill of Rights Act 1990, the Employment Relations Act 2000, and the Crimes Act 1961 — reveal that most provisions using the word “women” have long since been repealed or the word has been replaced by a so-called “gender neutral” word. In the case of the Crimes Act, references to women were repealed during the Helen Clark Government between 2005 and 2007. Even the crime of rape doesn’t mention women or men.

The Equal Pay Act 1972⁶ is described in the Notes as “An Act to make provision for the removal and prevention of discrimination, based on the sex of the employees, in the rates of remuneration of males and females in paid employment, and for matters incidental thereto”.

The only mention of women is in Section 13F, which defines whether a pay equity claim has merit.

The only mention of women is in Section 13F, which defines whether a pay equityclaim has merit.

The Act more often uses the terms referring to female employees. Notably, despite references to the “gender pay gap”, the Equal Pay Act does not use the term “gender”. The Act sets out to address inequality in women’s pay vis a vis that of men erforming the same or similar work (i.e. equal pay), and inequality of remuneration in work typically performed by women that is undervalued because it is regarded as “women’s work” and because the setting of wages has been affected by historic, social and cultural factors (i.e. equal pay for work of equal value or pay equity).

The Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987⁷ refers to a “pregnant woman” in the context of the expected date of delivery and the notice required to be given to the employer of a pregnant woman, or the pregnant woman’s spouse or partner, which is to be accompanied by:

There are 19 sex-based rights in the Human Rights Act, but there is only one mention of women and men. This is in Section 47 Exception in relation to skill: “Where the nature of a skill varies according to whether it is exercised in relation to men or women, a person does not commit a breach of section 44 by exercising the skill in relation to one sex only, in accordance with that person’s normal practice.”

The Women’s Rights Party advocated for a more extensive definition of “sex” when we met with the Law Commission in August 2024, as part of its review for adding protections into the Human Rights Act for people who are transgender, people who are non-binary, and people with innate variations of sex characteristics (differences of sex development or DSDs).

It is our view that including “gender” or “gender identity” without defining “sex” would undermine the exceptions in the Human Rights Act that protect women’s rights to single-sex facilities and services, including intimate services.

It was not the first time there had been a push to include “gender identity” as a prohibited ground of discrimination in the Human Rights Act. In 2004, transsexual MP Georgina Beyer put forward a Private Member’s Bill that would have added ‘gender identity’ into the Human Rights Act, thus potentially undermining protections for women contained in the Act.⁸ The Bill was considered too hot to handle at the time, and the matter was sent to Crown Law for an opinion.

By then the concept of “gender identity” had already crept into legislation via an amendment to the Sentencing Act in 2002, which added gender identity as an aggravating factor in a conviction for a crime motivated by hostility towards a group such as a racial or religious group. Meanwhile “sex” was deliberately left out as the Hansard record shows.⁹

The Crown Law opinion that “gender identity” is included in the prohibited ground of “sex” has never been legally tested, but the Human Rights Commission, and thus the rest of government, has treated the opinion as if it were law – which it is not.

Independent researcher Jan Rivers says the Crown Law opinion ignored significant overseas cases that even back in 2006, when the opinion was released, ran counter to its indicated assessment of gender rights being equivalent to, and overlapping with (and thus negating), sex-based provisions for women.

Rivers says one overseas case in particular found that although “transgender” people might have their identity protected in some circumstances, such as access to superannuation, that would not apply to all aspects of their lives such as access to sporting teams.

The Crown Law opinion would have protected people as the sex they are — but not necessarily as the gender they have assumed – and Rivers says there was no indication at the time of the legal opinion that non-binary people were in its sights.

The U.K. Supreme Court ruled a year ago, on 16 April 2025¹⁰, that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, in a decision with implications for who can access single-sex services and spaces. It came about after the Scottish government included men identifying as women in quotas to ensure gender balance on public sector boards. The group For Women Scotland argued that sex-based protections for women should only apply to people born female.

The judges were tasked with deciding on the correct interpretation of “sex” and “woman” in the U.K. Equality Act 2010, which set out sex-based legal protections. Specifically, they ruled that the definition of sex as used in the Act is binary and decided by biology — i.e. a person who was not born as a biological female cannot obtain the legal protections the Act affords to women by changing their gender with the U.K.’s Gender Recognition Certificate.¹¹

Rivers says it is by no means certain that the NZ Crown Law opinion still remains valid, or that its premise would be upheld in a legal case. Moreover, following complaints by the Women’s Rights Party and others, the Human Rights Commission has had to correct information on its website based on its incorrect assessment that “gender” is covered in the Human Rights Act by virtue of the Crown Law opinion.

It is our opinion that the rights of people who do not conform to sex stereotypes are likely to be covered in the Human Rights Act as the sex they are. For example, a woman who wishes to present herself as a man and gets pregnant, is protected under the Act because she is a woman. It was clear that the Human Rights Act meant biological sex, when the first prohibited ground of discrimination was written as “sex, including pregnancy and childbirth“. Pregnancy and childbirth are functions of human females only, no matter how they identify.

Previously, there was no need to define the terms “woman” and “man”, because there was universally held centuries-long societal understanding of what these words meant.

However, with the push to include beliefs driven by “transgender ideology” in legislation and in policy as if they are reality, we submit that it is now necessary to define sex more clearly.

We are aware that the Bill is the subject of considerable controversy with heated emotion and wild assertions, for example that the passage of this legislation will deny the existence of those who identify as “transgender”.

The Public Service Association (PSA) sent out an action call to its 95,000 members to oppose what it says is the “Gender Definitions Bill“. This is a deliberate mis-framing of the Bill, which is correctly labelled the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill.

Labour women MPs spoke against the Bill at its first reading, even though the Bill is about protecting women’s sex-based rights, including exceptions in the Human Rights Act that permit single-sex services, facilities, and sporting categories where biological sex is relevant. For example: Section 43 Exceptions in relation to access by the public to places (1) Section 42 shall not prevent the maintenance of separate facilities for each sex on the ground of public decency or public safety.

Despite the hysteria, the Bill does not create new exclusions – i.e. of trans-identifying individuals. It clarifies the language within which existing exclusions already operate. As one of our Women’s Rights Party members says: “The real problem is not the absence of single-sex rights, but the erosion of the language needed to articulate them.”

The purpose of this amendment is to uphold legal certainty, protect the integrity of sex-based rights, and ensure that language in law reflects biological reality. The Women’s Rights Party agrees this is necessary.

The Bill is not perfect, but we all have the opportunity to submit to the Select Committee by 2 July. Indeed, in its email to its members, the PSA says by making a submission, “you can help ensure the voices of workers and our communities are heard loud and clear”.

However, far from “standing together for fairness, dignity, and respect in workplaces and communities“, the PSA is calling on its more than 50,000 women members “to stand in solidarity with our trans, intersex, and takatāpui whānau“, in preference to the women’s own interests in protecting their sex-based rights.

The PSA is encouraging members to make individual submissions, workplace submissions, and to share “the call to action across your networks — workmates, whānau, and communities” on the basis that “defining a woman and a man in law would undermine safe, inclusive workplaces and equitable public services for all“.

The union also claims that the Bill would “increase discrimination and exclusion for trans, intersex and takatāpui people and would roll back hard-won rights and protections“, while at the same time “creating confusion in employment systems and practices“. We dispute these assertions.

It is difficult to understand how simply defining woman and man would “roll back” hard-won protections and rights for women (i.e. human females). And we question which rights and protections currently provided for trans, intersex and takatāpui people would be undermined? For example, the rights of all New Zealanders are protected in the Bill of Rights Act.

The PSA reminds its members “that an injury to one is an injury to all“. But what about the injury to women workers who dare to question transgenderism in their workplace?

The Women’s Rights Party is supporting former Inland Revenue employee Christine Massof, who commented on an internal IR women’s network about the irony of period products suddenly being supplied in all IR employee toilets once men started identifying as women! The case is going all the way to the Employment Court where it will be heard in August.

The PSA claims the Bill conflicts with the union’s values by “imposing restrictive definitions that do not reflect the lived realities of our members or te ao Māori understandings of identity“.

This misrepresents Māori understandings of identity. As former Green MP Elizabeth Kerekere stated in her 2017 thesis, page 82, “There is not yet evidence that Māori had diverse gender identities or that takatapui played specific roles in pre-colonial times.”

Anyone who has been to a marae will have seen with their own eyes plenty of evidence in Māori traditional carvings that Māori had no trouble recognising the differences between women and men.

Further, has the PSA consulted its members about their “lived realities“? We suggest that if they did ask their members, they would find that despite the torrent of indoctrination throughout the public sector and NGOs where their members work, most PSA members do know what a woman is, and would want this to be clarified in law.

The Women’s Rights Party supports the Bill, because clear legal definitions of “woman”, “man”, “male”, and “female”‘ have become necessary in employment, in health and education provision, among other walks of life.

However, we would start by defining “sex”, the first prohibited ground of discrimination in the Human Rights Act and the basis of addressing sex-based discrimination in the Equal Pay Act.

1. A person’s ‘sex’ refers to a person’s biological sex (either male or female).
2. ‘Sex’ is a prohibited ground of discrimination in the Human Rights Act 1993, including in pregnancy and childbirth.
3. ‘Women’ and ‘girls’ refer to human females, and the words ‘men’ and ‘boys’ refer to human males.
4. ‘Human female’ denotes the sex with a reproductive system typically organised to bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilised by male gametes, and includes females whose reproductive system may be disordered in some way and those females who choose not to reproduce.
5. ‘Mother’ means female parent and ‘father’ means male parent.
6. ‘Sexual orientation’ is a person’s sexual attraction to the same sex, opposite sex, or both. (This is defined in the Human Rights Act as meaning a heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation.)

As noted earlier, without defining “sex”, sexual orientation cannot be protected.

Previously, there was no need to define the terms “woman” and “man”, because there was universally held centuries-long societal understanding of what these words meant. The thought was never entertained that a small group would seek to change the meanings of those words for their own purposes, which we now know was a deliberate strategy across Europe, the U.K., U.S.A., Canada and Australia.¹²

In a rebuttal to a letter signed by 350 academics and activists, evolutionary scientist Dr Colin Wright says “the signatories advance an anti-scientific ideology at odds with reality”.¹³

The letter expressed opposition to the U.K. Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland v. The Scottish Ministers, which affirmed that the words “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act refer to biological sex, not gender identity.

Following the ruling, the nation’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) updated its guidance to clarify that institutions should not admit trans-identifying males (so-called “transwomen”) into female-only spaces such as bathrooms, hospital wards, and prisons.

Wright says the signatories claim that the U.K. government and EHRC are promoting an “oversimplified” view of biology that harms people by substituting ideology for science.

“We can uphold people’s rights without pretending that sex is a socially constructed fiction. And we certainly don’t need to erode women’s protections, rewrite biology textbooks, or abandon evidence-based medicine to do it,” Wright says.

The Women’s Rights Party agrees that the U.K. Supreme Court was right to affirm the reality of sex, and the EHRC was right to align its guidance accordingly.

As Wright says: “Public policy must reflect truths about the world, not what’s politically fashionable. There are two sexes, male and female, and this truth remains intact no matter how many open letters are signed to the contrary.”

As one of our members said in his submission on the Bill: “Sex is real. Sex is not assigned at birth; it is observed. It is not altered by declaration, medication, or surgery. It is distinct from people’s personal beliefs about gender roles, stereotypes and identities. Everyone deserves schools, health services, and sporting bodies that honor and tell them the truth: you cannot change your sex.”

Some argue the Bill ignores innate variations of sex characteristics (which they call ‘intersex’ as if this is a third sex, which it is not). There are variations in the development of reproductive anatomy within one or other of the two sexes; they do not create additional sexes. Such variations or disorders of sex development (DSDs) may be observed in pregnancy scans, or at birth, or at puberty. They are rare medical conditions, occurring in 0.018% of births. You cannot identify as Intersex!

The National Council of Women (NCW) argues that because the Bill ignores innate variation of sex characteristics (that is DSDs), the Bill is therefore exclusionary and discriminatory, and breaches human rights. The organisation is not alone in trotting out this stalking horse.

The argument is that binary sex categorisation is too “simplistic” because some people are born with differences of sex development—congenital conditions that cause atypical chromosomal, gonadal, or genital development—and because medical interventions can alter sex-related traits. As Wright says, it is argued that: “Binary categorisations at birth are simplified rules and do not precisely capture biological variation . . . . Primary and secondary sex characteristics change during life and through medical interventions.”

It is true that sex-related traits can vary. But these variations do not define a person’s sex. As Wright says:

“A male with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, for instance, may have a female-typical appearance due to his body’s inability to respond to androgens like testosterone—but he is still male. Why? Because he has testes, which have the biological function to produce sperm, even if that function is disrupted. CAIS is a male-only condition.”

While DSDs are developmental variations within the two sexes, individuals may have specific medical and legal needs that should be protected.

NCW, which describes itself as New Zealand’s leading “gender equality” organisation, has said the Bill is a “waste of time”, taking up time and money which could be used by Parliament on “legislation to improve the wellbeing of women“. It also says the time and money “could be used by cash-strapped and time-poor community groups to work on initiatives that progress the status of women instead of preserving the status quo“

We are not privy as to how much time and money is to be spent on sending a Bill to the Select Committee so organisations and citizens can have a say. However, NCW was rightly critical of the Government in using urgency a year ago to pass controversial changes to pay equity legislation, thus bypassing the democratic Select Committee process.

Moreover, if the current “status quo” was working for women, there would be no need for a Bill to define what a woman is. However, as we have seen recently, the Australian Federal Court ruling in ‘Tickle v Giggle’ confirms the need for clear legal definitions of “woman”, “man”, “male”, and “female”. The removal of such definitions from the Australian Sex Discrimination Act in 2013 has created the preferential treatment of “trans” rights over the rights of women.

Far from a “time waster”, defining “sex” is needed to clarify as to whether those who claim a gender identity that differs from their biological sex, are covered by the exceptions in our Human Rights Act that permit single-sex services, facilities, and sporting categories where biological sex is relevant.

The confusion created by Crown Law two decades ago is undermining existing single-sex protections contained as exceptions in the Human Rights Act. However, if Parliament had meant to include “gender” in the definition of sex as a prohibited ground of discrimination, the legislation writers would not have modified “sex” as including pregnancy and childbirth. Men who identify as women cannot get pregnant and give birth.

On the other hand, women who identify as men can get pregnant, albeit with some difficulty if they have taken cross-sex hormones. They are covered by protections in legislation around pregnancy and childbirth because of the sex they are, rather than the sex they identify as. The Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act barely mentions women, but it does talk about female employees. So-called “transmen” are females. “Female” is a biological term; it refers to one’s sex and not one’s identity.

The Bill includes the words “regardless of gender identity”. This is not necessary and should therefore be deleted. We argue that “gender” (which refers to sex stereotypes about femininity and masculinity) and “gender identity” (which is a belief that is not real), should be removed from current legislation, such as the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022.

We also have a problem with Section 16 of the Legislation Act 2019 which states that “words denoting a gender include every other gender“. 

If sections 13A and 13B are inserted without addressing this provision, courts will face a direct conflict between a definition that fixes biological sex and an existing interpretive rule that mandates gender inclusivity.

Add a provision to the Bill explicitly stating that Sections 13A and 13B override Section 16 of the Legislation Act 2019 for the purposes of interpreting “woman,” “man,” “female,” and “male.”

NCW argues: “Old ideas about gender roles are limiting all of us.  They don’t allow us to express all of who we are. The unequal value attached to femininity and masculinity leads to unequal division of power, resources, and opportunities.“

‘Gender’, as NCW is using it in this context, refers to sex-based stereotypes and social expectations of feminity and masculinity. The Women’s Rights Party agrees that women and children should be able to reject such stereotypes without discrimination. We would add women and children should have the right to reject labelling, or medical intervention to ‘fix’ them. 

However, this is not the same as “sex” which refers to a person’s biological sex (either male or female). “Women” and “girls” are human females, and “men” and “boys” are human males.

The U.N. Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) makes it clear that the women’s rights it protects are sex-based and that women are subjected to discrimination from society on account of their sex.

“For the purposes of the present Convention, the term “discrimination against women” shall mean any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.“¹⁴

“States Parties shall take all appropriate measures: (a) To modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.“

The term “gender” is not in CEDAW. When it appears in U.N. documents, the term “gender” refers to these “social and cultural patterns” and sex-based stereotypes.

“Gender refers to socially constructed differences in attributes and opportunities associated with being female or male and to the social interactions and relations between women and men. Gender determines what is expected, allowed and valued in a woman or a man in a given context. In most societies, there are differences and inequalities between women and men in roles and responsibilities assigned, activities undertaken and access to and control over resources, as well as in decision-making opportunities. These differences and inequalities between the sexes are shaped by the history of social relations and change over time and across cultures.” ¹⁵

From this U.N. definition, it is clear that gender refers to socially constructed behaviours that society expects from one or other biological sex, which often perpetuate inequalities between the sexes, noting that these expectations are not enduring (they change over time) and they vary across cultures.

Article 5 of CEDAW says that socially constructed behaviours can perpetuate harmful stereotypes based upon the social inferiority of women. It states that these stereotypical roles should be eliminated. Gender is not described as “inherent” or as a “human right” that should be encouraged or built into law.

• biological sex and gender are two different things
• gender is a social construct which imposes a hierarchy of the male sex over the female sex
• CEDAW refers to sex-based discrimination only. CEDAW covers gender-based discrimination only in the sense that ‘gender’ is the social construct which creates the discrimination against the female sex.

The Attorney General, in reviewing the Bill before its First Reading, said that including “adult” in the Bill’s definition excludes young women, i.e. girls, who also need protections in school toilets and changing rooms as well as girls’ sports, and who are covered by legislation such as the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act 1977.

We recommend adding “girl” to the definition of “woman” (i.e. woman and girl) and “boy” to the definition of “man” (i.e. man and boy) as in the Women’s Rights Party definition of sex: ‘Women’ and ‘girls’ refer to human females, and the words ‘men’ and ‘boys’ refer to human males.

This would avoid unintended consequences and protect existing legislation. The current wording in the Bill would exclude non-adults from services and protections currently afforded to “women” in existing legislation. For example, the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act authorises procedures for a pregnant “woman,” which would no longer apply to a pregnant 16-year-old under this Bill as currently drafted. Simply removing “adult” would blur a useful legal distinction.

The better approach is to define the juvenile counterparts explicitly and protect existing statutes from being narrowed unintentionally.

The U.K. Supreme Court, in its ruling, accepted that the term “woman” included young women. However, it would be useful to include reference to young women without specifying an age as these vary in our legislation.

As Emeritus Professor Sue Middleton said in a Waikato Times opinion piece: ¹⁶

“The Bill’s use of “adult” is problematic. In Aotearoa, there is no longer a single “age of maturity” — it varies. The legal “age of consent” for sexual intercourse and/or marriage is 16; for leaving school or holding a driver’s licence it is 16; it is 18 for joining the military, betting, drinking in a bar and voting in elections.

In 2024, the UK Supreme Court ruled that in that country’s law, ‘woman’ refers to a female of any age. Despite this ambiguity, the Bill’s use of ‘male and female’ makes its intent clear: Aotearoa-New Zealand law requires a definition of sex as biological. In the mid-late twentieth century, when our Human Rights and related laws were drafted, the words ‘man and boy, women and girl’ were commonly understood as referring to biological males and females respectively. In other words, they referred to sex.”

st as there was no need to define “woman” and “man” when much of our rights-based legislation was drawn up, similarly there was no need to define “female” and “male”, terms that date back in the English language to the 14th Century when the terms were used in reference to humans only. A century later, the terms were used to describe non-human species.

Today these terms are used as both adjectives and nouns to categorise plants and animals — humans belonging to the mammalian species, a subset of animals. It is not necessary to modify female and male as biological as these are by definition biological terms.

“Female” means the sex characterised by reproductive anatomy and physiology oriented toward the production of ova. “Male” means the sex characterised by reproductive anatomy and physiology oriented toward the production of sperm.

These definitions do not require an individual to produce ova or sperm. A prepubescent girl, a post-menopausal woman, a woman after hysterectomy, or a woman who chooses not to bear children is still female because her reproductive system is organised around the production of ova, even if that function is not active or is no longer possible.

Human female denotes the sex with a reproductive system typically organised to bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilised by male gametes, and includes females whose reproductive system may be disordered in some way and those females who choose not to reproduce.

The sex categories of male and female are based on a well-organised body of science and accurately describe phenomenon in the real world. In males, the presence of a ‘Y’ chromosome SRY gene establishes the male sex category. If a functioning SRY gene is present and able to be activated, a complex set of gene cascades are deployed, resulting in male development and small gamete production. Conversely, the absence of a functioning SRY gene predicts female development.

We hear a lot about the clown fish, which can change sex during their lives. This is supposed to prove that sex is not binary. However, as Wright says:

Medical interventions like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries can change a person’s appearance, but they do not change his or her sex. Wright says: “You can remove a man’s testes and construct a “neovagina,” but he remains male. These interventions are cosmetic, not functional in a reproductive sense.”

Surgeons can also remove a woman’s breasts, including teenagers. She is still a woman; she can get pregnant and give birth, but she will not be able to breastfeed her baby — something young women may not realise or appreciate at the time they undergo a double mastectomy.

Humans can make cosmetic changes to present as the opposite sex, but although “trans-identifying” individuals certainly undergo significant physical changes with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery, they do not actually “transition” to the opposite sex. Unless this results in the production of the opposite type of gamete—and it doesn’t—their sex has not changed.

The Select Committee will be hearing from organisations that claim to represent the views of the majority of New Zealanders. But here is the objective evidence from a Curia poll released on 20 May that showed more New Zealand voters agree than disagree on the need to define woman and man in law across all political parties.

Speak Up For Women (SUFW) commissioned a question in an omnibus Curia Poll that asked:

“A Member of Parliament has proposed a law defining a woman as an adult human female and a man as an adult human male on the grounds of fairness and safety in single-sex spaces. Do you support or oppose this proposed law?“

A year ago Family First had commissioned Curia to conduct a poll on a similar question: ¹⁷

“A Member of Parliament has proposed a law that would define a woman as an adult human biological female and a man as an adult human biological male regardless of gender identity. Would you support or oppose this proposed law?”

The latest SUFW poll found 51% in favour of the question and 19% opposed. Men overwhelmingly supported such a law (58% compared with 16% opposed, a net +42% in favour). Women were less likely than men to support enshrining the definitions in law, though more women were supportive than opposing the Bill (44% with 22% opposed, a net +22% in favour).

Support was strongest among those aged 55 — 64 (55%, with just 13% opposed, a net 42%) and strongest in provincial cities 55%.

The Family First poll last year showed similar results with 52% in favour and 29% opposed. Support by women at the time was 39% and is now 44%.

To most New Zealanders, it is self-evident — a woman is an adult human female, and a man is an adult human male.

What is perhaps most surprising is that support from Left-leaning Party voters has shifted markedly from the poll conducted for Family First a year ago, and the poll conducted for Speak Up for Women in May this year.

This time last year, Labour, Greens and Te Pati Māori voters were more likely to oppose than to support defining women and men in biological terms.

May 2025	Labour	Greens	Te Pati Māori
Support	35%	33%	28%
Oppose	44%	48%	41%

In the latest poll these voters were more likely to support than oppose these definitions:

May 2025	Labour	Greens	Te Pati Māori
Support	42%	40%	53%
Oppose	21%	34%	25%

The biggest shift has been amongst Te Pati Māori voters — a majority now support defining women and men in sex-realist terms.

National and ACT supported the Bill through its First Reading with a National spokesperson saying the National Caucus wants to hear from the public through the Select Committee process.

The Coalition parties needn’t worry about offending their voters. Support for the Bill remains strong:

May 2025	National	NZ First	ACT
Support	64%	68%	72%
Oppose	21%	34%	6%

May 2026	National	NZ First	ACT
Support	65%	71%	72%
Oppose	14%	14%	6%

The redefinition of the word “sex” to allow males to “identify” themselves out of their biological sex and into the protected female sex category has undermined provisions in law that were originally intended to provide protection for women and girls from male predatory behaviour, violence, patriarchal subjugation and inequality.

As Sue Hoskins, Women’s Rights Party List Candidate, said:

Emeritus Professor Sue Middleton identified the threat to the protected category of sex in the Human Rights Act in her recent opinion piece in the Waikato Times.

Fern Hickson, Resist Gender Education, calls for tolerance, understanding and respect for the specific needs of women and girls.

A majority of New Zealanders support clear biological definitions of woman and man in law. They understand the need for explicit protection for female-only spaces, services, sport and associations. We need parliamentarians willing to urgently work together across party lines to ensure that women and girls have rights and protections on the basis of their sex. Not because they identify a certain way, but because they are female.

Anti-discrimination laws were designed to ensure people are not unfairly denied jobs, housing, education or services because of who they are. There is a meaningful distinction between protecting people who identify as transgender from genuine mistreatment and redefining the legal category of “woman” in ways that strip biological females of sex-based protections.

These laws were never meant to be used as a Trojan horse to hand women’s rights to men. Yet that is exactly what happens when protections created for women — including pregnancy protections, female-only spaces and sex-based services — are reinterpreted as entitlements for men who claim to be women.

Indeed, there are other important issues for women, but we cannot let the question of who and what we are as females and males slide as if it is a minor matter.

Sex IS binary. Sex IS biological. These are scientific facts, not opinions.