In August of 2018, following a petition to parliament, amendments to Minister of Internal Affairs Tracey Martin’s Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill were recommended by parliament’s Governance and Administration Committee.
One of the recommended changes will mean a statutory declaration will be all that is required for a person to change the sex on their birth certificate to male, female, intersex or X (unspecified).
It is, by and large, a bureaucratic change. All it is doing is trying to align the birth certificate process to the process for drivers licenses and passports.
Earlier this week, Tracey Martin announced that they were indefinitely deferring the decision.
It seems the loud voices of a very small minority has successfully deferred what should have been a simple administrative change.
This is devastating.
Better people than me have written on this already. If you want to know more, you can read:
- A primer on the BDMRR Bill and arguments against it by Nat Dudley
- This great roundup on the Gender Minorities site
- This amazing article on the Spinoff.
What you can do right now, though, is to write a letter to your MP. You can let them know that you want this bill to happen. This handy website will give you letter templates and how-to.
Do it.
I often hear people say “it doesn’t affect me, so I don’t really care what happens”. Well, I believe that if you live in this world, you should try to make it better when you leave it. By making it ok for everyone to live their lives, by helping, in whatever small way, to make it safer for people to live… well that makes the world just a tiny bit better.
Oh, and by the way, if your comments are transphobic in any way, I will not engage, I will just delete your comment. Similarly, if you decide to engage with me in a transphobic way on any social media platform.
Vivian Chandra 