The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), Southern Tasmania, has provided a detailed response to Equal Opportunity Tasmania’s (EOT) “Options Paper” proposing changes to the Births, Deaths & Marriages Registration Act 1999 (BDMR Act).
Their message is simple: sex matters, and erasing it from law will undermine women’s rights, safeguarding, and service delivery across Tasmania.
What’s at Stake?
1. Sex vs Gender Identity
The Options Paper treats sex and gender identity as interchangeable, with self-declared identity determining legal sex. WoLF argues this conflation will create confusion across Tasmanian laws, many of which rely on sex as a material, biological fact—for example, in sport, prisons, refuges, scholarships, and quotas.
2. Single-Sex Services and Safeguarding
Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act 1998 (ADA) currently allows for women-only services. These exemptions recognise the reality that women and girls sometimes need female-only spaces for safety, privacy, or fairness.
If self-identification overrides sex, these services would become meaningless. As WoLF notes:
“Legally removing reference to female bodies and biology from the definition of female will have social ramifications for women and girls, making it impossible for the material and biological existence of women to be identified as a source of unjust discrimination and social and economic inequality.”
3. Intersex Protections
WoLF draws a clear line between gender identity politics and the real medical needs of intersex people. They recommend that “normalising” surgeries on intersex children should only proceed with independent tribunal consent, ensuring protection for children who cannot consent for themselves.
4. Data and Policy Integrity
Civil registration records are not just symbolic—they are the foundation of public policy, statistics, and service planning. Replacing sex with gender identity undermines reliable data on health, crime, and education, making it harder for the State to understand and address sex-based inequalities.
Why It Matters
The Options Paper claims the proposed changes will reduce discrimination. But WoLF argues the opposite: removing sex as a category makes discrimination against women harder to prove, let alone remedy. In practice, it would:
- Strip women and girls of fair sport and equal opportunity;
- Compromise safety and privacy in refuges, prisons, and facilities;
- Undermine sex-based policy making and data collection;
- Fail to protect intersex children from harmful interventions.
Recommendations
WoLF makes practical recommendations, including:
- Keep sex as a biological category in the BDMR Act.
- If gender identity is recognised, it should be recorded separately without replacing sex.
- Protect single-sex spaces and services by ensuring ADA exemptions remain meaningful.
- Treat intersex interventions on children as special medical procedures, requiring independent oversight.
- Ensure birth certificates and other records remain reliable and useful for law, policy, and safeguarding.
Conclusion
Tasmania stands at a crossroads. Redefining sex as gender identity may seem progressive, but it risks dismantling the very protections women and girls have fought to secure. True equality means acknowledging biological sex and ensuring it remains a legally recognised category.
Safeguarding, fairness, and women’s rights depend on it.