Adding ‘transgender’ and ‘nonbinary’ to Human Rights Act not a priority, Government says.

Recommendations from the Law Commission to insert terminology around 'gender identity' into legislation have been shelved.

By: Jill Ovens - Women’s Rights Party NZ co-leader and national secretary.

25 February 2026

Well, well - the Government has responded to the Law Commission’s ‘Ia Tangata’ report, saying it is not a priority at this time.

This is the report that recommended adding “people who are transgender, people who are non-binary, and people with innate variations of sex characteristics” to the Human Rights Act and making wide ranging changes that would undermine the protections for women and girls.

This is good news – for now - but whether it’s actually a firm and final burying of the recommendations remains to be seen.

Hopefully, however, this will end the decades of campaigning by ‘trans’ lobbyists to add ‘gender identity’ as a protected ground in the Human Rights Act 1993 [HRA] without a thought for the impact on sex-based rights, particularly those of women and girls.

In its formal response to Parliament yesterday [Monday, 23 February] the Government said that as it “currently has significant commitments and priorities in the justice portfolio, progressing the Commission’s recommendations is not a priority at this time”.

This means that unless there is a change of government and a new government chooses to bring it to life again, the matter is closed.

Political parties would be unwise to campaign on reviving the issue. Polls have shown for several years that most New Zealanders do not support men competing in women’s sports, or accessing women’s toilets and changing facilities.

This is not the first time the issue has been put in the ‘too hard basket’. New Zealand’s first transsexual MP Georgina Beyer’s attempt to include ‘gender’ in the HRA, in a 2004 Private Member’s Bill, was considered ‘too hot to handle’ ahead of the 2005 General Election.

At the time, the NZ Herald reported that the Labour-led Government was embarrassed by the controversial issue.

Beyer withdrew the Bill after the then Labour-led Government referred the matter to Crown Law which, in 2006, issued an opinion that there was no need for additional protections on the grounds of ‘gender identity’ in the HRA, because these protections were already provided under the ‘sex’ category.

This has never been tested in the Courts, but the Human Rights Commission and other public bodies continue to promulgate the Crown Law Opinion as if it was fact. Policies have been widely implemented by Councils, employers, schools, gyms and others embedding rights based on ‘gender’ without consideration of women’s rights to privacy and safety.

The Crown Law did not clarify whether those who do not conform to sex stereotypes were covered in the HRA as the sex they ARE, or as the sex they want to be.

It is clear to us that when it refers to ‘sex’, the wording in the HRA means biological sex, because the first prohibited ground of discrimination is “sex, including pregnancy and childbirth”. Only human females can get pregnant and give birth, no matter how they identify.

Proof that ‘trans’ lobbyists doubted the Crown Law opinion that ‘gender identity’ was already covered, came in the form of ex-Green MP Elizabeth Kerekere’s Private Member’s Bill to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of “Gender Identity or Expression, and Variations of Sex Characteristics”, which sought to legislate ‘gender identity’ as a protected ground in its own right.

The 2021 Bill was drawn from the biscuit tin in August 2023, and passed its first reading in the dying days of the then Labour Government.

The Bill went no further under the incoming Coalition Government, because in 2022, prior to current Government taking office, the then Minister of Justice Kiritapu Allan went to the Law Commission and asked them to do a review for protections in the HRA for “people who are transgender or non-binary and people with innate variations of sex characteristics”.

The Women’s Rights Party was one of a number of organisations that submitted in the Commission’s process, resulting in the 450-page Ia Tangata Report issued in September 2025, which followed an earlier Issues Paper distributed the year before.

In our 42-page submission, we argued that demands for rights based on ‘gender identity’, would inevitably negate hard-won women’s rights.

This is because adding ‘gender identity’ to the grounds for unlawful discrimination would undermine the exceptions based on sex in Part 2 of the HRA, that allow for positive discrimination to protect women’s and girls’ rights with respect to intimate services and facilities and women’s sports, for example.

The question of whose rights would take precedence - i.e. women’s sex-based rights, or new rights protecting men claiming identities as women - would inevitably have to be decided in a Court of Law.

Further, any changes to the law which reduce or remove the protections on the grounds of sex, both the anti-discrimination provisions and the exceptions where discrimination is permitted on the grounds of safety, dignity and privacy, would be in breach of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women [CEDAW] to which New Zealand is a signatory.

In its Ia Tangata report, the Law Commission recommended wide-ranging changes to the 19 existing exceptions in the Human Rights Act that would affect single-sex schools, single-sex sports categories, single-sex changing facilities, and single-sex accommodation such as boarding hostels, prisons, aged care facilities and so on.

It also conflated protections required by those with differences of sex development (DSDs), which were referred to by the Commission as “innate variations of sex characteristics”. Such variations don’t actually change the sex a person is, so those with DSDs are covered under the ‘sex’ catgegory.

In addition, sexed language in the HRA was to be replaced, including language referring to pregnant women, because “most people giving birth are women, but not all”.

The Ia Tangata Report really was a worst-case scenario. We can breathe a sigh of relief, but we need to watch for evasive responses from Labour and the Greens, who can’t be trusted on this issue!

• Header photo by cottonbro studio:

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