Media Release 14 March 2021
The Government has confirmed it will push through a law change which will deem birth certificates meaningless. Birth certificates will be based on the choice of the person, including the fact that no medical evidence is required for the change.
“By choosing your own gender in your birth certificate, the certificates will become an object of unscientific gender ideology and effectively tell medical professionals that they got it wrong at time of birth. Circumstances may change but a historical document should not be able to be changed,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.
“And just how many genders will be listed. Facebook have more than 70, and counting.”
“It is disturbing that politicians want to ignore biological reality and, in the process, bring about confusion and ambiguity. A birth certificate is a historical record based on fact – not a political tool to further an ideology.”
Family First is also concerned that the law change will allow the birth certificate of an ‘eligible child’ to be changed to the ‘nominated’ sex simply through an application of ‘the guardian’. It is well-established today that the overwhelming majority of such children – from 75% to 98% – who experience gender dysphoria grow out of it by the time they reach puberty. It is not inborn. Thus, the leading clinics seeing such children – such as those in Canada and the Netherlands – do not recommend parents and schools facilitate gender changes in such children. The push in culture today to embrace and affirm such children’s wishes is founded more upon a political and parental ideology than it is in careful science and experience. This will lock children into transgenderism.
This latest decision follows on from the Department of Internal Affairs in 2018 removing the need for fathers to be recorded on birth certificates, also ignoring biological reality, and rendering birth certificates as manipulated and misleading.
“Removing the biological father – or the biological mother – from a document that records biological history is wrong. Biology tells a story – but the state seems dead-set to distort that story, and we should be concerned at that direction being taken.”
“For politicians and the state to be manipulating birth certificates in these ways is deeply concerning,” says Mr McCoskrie.
The Department of Internal Affairs website says – “A New Zealand Birth Certificate is an official document containing registered information about a person’s birth as at the date of issue. A birth certificate can only be used as evidence that an identity exists. The birth certificate should not be used as the sole form of evidence for asserting an individual’s identity, as it does not provide any link to the person presenting it.” (our emphasis added)
