The definition of gender

Is gender biologically determined or is it a social construct? To put it in a slightly catchier way: is your identity as male or female a matter of ideology or biology? The question may never have occurred to many of us.

But change is coming whether we are ready or not. A bill that amends New Zealand’s Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act is making its way through Parliament. It will make it easier for people to change the gender on their birth certificate, allowing people to ‘‘have greater autonomy over their identity’’, as a recommendation from the governance and administration committee puts it.

Along with an easier process, there will be new definitions. As well as allowing for a change from male to female or vice versa, the amendment adds the categories ‘‘intersex’’ and

‘‘X (unspecified)’’, to recognise nonbinary sexual and gender identities.

Gender identity will no longer depend on what was once known as a sex change. References to ‘‘medical treatment’’, ‘‘medical evidence’’, ‘‘physical conformation’’, ‘‘sexual assignment’’ and ‘‘sexual reassignment’’ would disappear as part of the new self-identification process. It would also become easier for those under 18 to change identities on the official document with consent from guardians and health professionals.

On one hand, it is simply a word on a piece of paper and an expression of an individual point of view. But on the other, birth certificates are relied upon as proof of identity in some important contexts. They are every individual’s founding document. Should there be more discussion of this legislative change and its potential impact?

Trans issues have emerged quickly into political discourse and created unlikely battlefields and bedfellows. A section of the feminist community, both in New Zealand and overseas, opposes biological men identifying as women. These Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (Terfs) have a point: women’s rights were hardwon and women’s spaces are sacrosanct. Are we comfortable with the thought that biological men can claim spaces in women’s changing rooms, prisons and refuges because they identify as women? Of course, it is not entirely clear cut. Many feminists see trans women as allies.

There is a heightened combativeness around the issues at present, especially online. Georgina Beyer, famously the world’s first openly transsexual mayor and MP, has urged trans activists to be less adversarial in their campaigning. Beyer spoke in the context of a stoush between feminists and trans activists in the capital. Wellington feminist Renee Gerlich argued the Government’s ‘‘one-step’’ sexual identification process means we will lose ‘‘any robust, shared definition of sex’’, undermining the sex-based protections that women fought for.

There is no question that these are complicated issues. It is about more than rights or discrimination. Instead, it reflects a clash between contradictory views of humanity.

It is also possible to see the growing awareness of trans issues as part of a wider picture. Younger people are comfortable with the sense that identity is fluid and constructed in ways that would bewilder older people. It is part of the meaning and function of social media that we can reinvent ourselves according to any image we like.

That in turns opens other cans of worms about parental consent and the maturity of teenagers making life-changing decisions. Whether we are prepared for it or not, these are conversations we need to start having.

‘‘Trans issues have . . . created unlikely battlefields and bedfellows.’’