Following in the footsteps of innumerable waves of anti-trans legislature in the US and the UK’s Supreme Court decision last year, the coalition government ensured that, on 20 May, “Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill” passed its first reading. It is now with the Select Committee and submissions on this Bill will be accepted until 2 July. Ahead of the National Day of Action for Trans Rights 13 June, ISO is making the following submission against this Bill – you can read it below – but it is crucial that, as well as submitting against this Bill, we join in solidarity with our LGBTQI+ communities to fight against it:
To the select committee considering the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill,
We, the International Socialist Organisation, stand with our Takatāpui, Trans, and Intersex comrades, friends, and whānau in strong opposition to the proposed “Definitions of Woman and Man” Amendment Bill. No amount of astroturfed, imported culture war nonsense can tear us away from what is real: Trans people exist, they have existed forever. Mandating their adherence to outdated and unscientific interpretations of “biology” is irrelevant to how they genuinely feel in themselves and how they wish to express themselves. We reject any attempt to do so. This Bill seeks to erase transgender and Non-binary communities and pit sections of the working class against each other. To that extent, it will fail. We will meet this division with collective solidarity; we will remain united: an injury to one is an injury to all!
The Bill’s “definitions,” such as “adult human biological female,” and “adult human biological male,” are false and dangerous; threaten to restrict access to abortion; and, in the name of “biology,” they attempt to enforce a gender binary that doesn’t exist. According to actual biologists Rehmann-Sutter et al. (2023), “This binary model is based on presumptions that cannot accommodate the dynamics and complexity of the phenomena of sex development and expression, or the diversity of experiences of sex, gender and their meanings.” New Zealand’s Nurses Organisation also affirms this understanding of sex (Longmore, 2026). If trained biologists and our most trusted healthcare professionals oppose this Bill’s invocation of biology, why do we trust corrupt politicians to know better? This Bill is ideology in drag.
The Bill claims to be justified on the basis that such clarity will ensure the safety of women and children but, this is utterly meaningless coming from a government that has stolen $12 billion worth of Pay Equity claims from women to fund military spending at the behest of the US amid theirs, and Israel’s, bombing of children in Gaza. In fact, the clarity that the Bill supposedly proffers actually threatens to limit access to reproductive healthcare for cisgender women under the age of 20.
If the Bill doesn’t even deliver the supposed clarity which it is claimed is intended; if it fails at high-school biology; and if it threatens to harm our Trans, Non-binary, and Intersex whānau, we recommend that this Bill be rejected in its entirety and not be allowed to progress in any form. It doesn’t define us.
Regards,
The International Socialist Organisation of Aotearoa (New Zealand)
We have no illusions about convincing this government to change its approach to policy-making. They have consistently avoided public consultation and ignored submission feedback. What we understand is that anti-trans rhetoric is a successful rallying cry for the far Right, and this government is willing to utilise such rhetoric as a campaign tactic. It is crucial that our communities remain united despite it.
We understand attacks against Trans people as something particular to capitalism, linked to the way capitalism seeks to control women. Some pre-capitalist, and non-Western societies around the world included third-gender or Non-binary roles such as Fa’afafine in Samoa and Two-Spirit people among Native Americans and these egalitarian societies included women as producers and decision-makers. However, as a system built around the accumulation of profit, capitalism needs a steady supply of workers to continue generating its massive surpluses. It, therefore, channels women into the role of reproducer by undermining their role in production, limiting their involvement in politics and decision-making, and enforcing restrictive measures over their bodies and reproductive rights. These measures are normalised through the nuclear family which has the effect of establishing specific expectations around sexuality and gender roles, favouring heterosexuality and certain brands of masculinity and femininity: the ideal family under capitalism consists of two parents, preferably married, a man and a woman; the man works and provides a living, the woman is expected to do all the domestic labour, unpaid, and carry, and raise at least 2.1 children – the “replacement” rate of children per women. As Queer, Trans, and Non-binary people naturally obfuscate these boundaries around sex and gender, the ruling class makes a concerted effort to oppress those with nonconforming identities.
In times of crisis, we often see attacks against LGBTQI+ people coinciding with rhetoric around fertility rates and the family. In the last few years we’ve seen the “Manosphere” become mainstream, which attempts to galvanise the gender hierarchy and entitles men to be violent against women and gender minorities. The “trad-wife” label has served the same reactionary purpose for women by casting them as subservient domestic baby factories. These are not just trends but a concerted attack by the ruling class. And, as the crisis in capitalism deepens, these attacks will continue. We will beat this Bill, but that won’t be the end of it. We need to ensure that our communities are united to protect our Queer, Trans, and Intersex whānau. We need to build a revolutionary working class movement to fight back against this onslaught of capitalist barbarism.
A new world is waiting. One in which, as Engels wrote in 1883, there will be:
a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual – and that will be the end of it.
Submission references:
Rehmann-Sutter C, Hiort O, Krämer UM, Malich L, Spielmann M. Is sex still binary? Med Genet. 2023 Aug 16;35(3):173-180. doi: 10.1515/medgen-2023-2039. PMID: 38840819; PMCID: PMC10842549.
Longmore, M., (2026). Call for nurses, kaiāwhina to stand up against Government efforts to ‘erase’ trans communities. New Zealand Nurses Organisation – Kaitiaki Nursing New Zealand. https://kaitiaki.org.nz/article/call-for-nurses-kaiawhina-to-stand-up-against-government-efforts-to-erase-trans-communities/
Banner Image: A National Trans Visibility March: one of many around the world demonstrating support for transgender peoples’ existence, this one in Washington DC, USA, in 2019. Photo credit: Ted Eytan on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
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