Gender Identity/expression
New Zealand does not have specific transgender anti-discrimination laws, although New Zealand's anti-discrimination laws are now thought to cover members of the transgender communities. The Human Rights Commission in New Zealand said in 2005 that it considered transgender people to fall within the definition of sex discrimination, and would accept complaints from transgender people. Transsexual Member of Parliament Georgina Beyer had the Human Rights (Gender Identity) Amendment Bill ready for debate in Parliament as a member's bill in 2004. However, on 16 August 2006, New Zealand's Solicitor-General issued an opinion (reference below) to the effect that transgender people were covered under the 'sex discrimination' provision of the Human Rights Act 1993. Georgina Beyer said when withdrawing her Bill "that's good enough for me".
In 2007/2008 the Human Rights Commission published "To Be Who I Am", a report that came from the Human Rights Transgender Inquiry. In this publication, the Human Rights Commission recommended the clarification of the Human Rights Act in terms of gender identity, by specifically including "gender identity" under the Sex category of the Human Rights Act.
In 1994, the New Zealand High Court ruled that post-operative transsexuals could marry as their new sex.
Read more about this topic: LGBT Rights In New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the words gender, identity and/or expression:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value.... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)