The Equality Bill puts women and girls at risk

 
Key points to tell your MP

• The Equality Bill will make it easier for any male to legally ‘change’ his sex to ‘female’ simply by lodging a statutory declaration.
• This means fully intact males will be able to access female changing rooms, toilets, sports teams, gyms and shelters – and it will be illegal for women and girls to say no.
• We’ve already seen self-ID in other states and countries put women and girls at risk – don’t let this happen in NSW!

Your MP needs to know

• With the stroke of a pen, ‘Paul’ can become ‘Paula’ and can access spaces meant for women – and we won’t have the right to say no.

The bill will allow anyone over 16 to legally ‘change’ their sex through a simple administrative process. The only thing they will need to do is apply to the Births, Deaths and Marriages registrar and provide a statutory declaration from someone who has known them for 12 months, stating that they “live or intend to live” as the opposite sex.

Tell your MP

• Women and girls have the right to single sex spaces, services and sport!

Why this matters

• Self-ID is having a disastrous impact on women and girls nationally and internationally.

In sport, females are losing prize money and places in teams to males and are at risk of being injured:

• A male soccer player reportedly injured a female player in a Sydney
  competition
• Male Lia Thomas robbed women of their winning places in US college
  swimming
• Weightlifter Laurel Hubbard deprived an indigenous woman of her spot on the New Zealand Olympic team

With self-ID, all toilets and change rooms are in reality mixed sex spaces.

• An investigation in the UK found 90% of reported assaults and harassment in changes rooms were in mixed sex facilities.
• Children have been exposed to male penises in female changing rooms such as in the Wi Spa facility in the USA

Women are losing places and prizes to men

• Male actor Dylan Mulvaney was named woman of the year by Attitude Magazine
• A UK endometriosis charity appointed a male trans rights activist as CEO
• A male, Lily Madigan, was chosen as the Women’s Officer of the UK Labour Party.
• The ARIA awards replaced best male and female awards with a single ‘Best Artist’ award in 2022. So far two men have won.
• Awards meant for women, such as the Stella Prize for writing, are now open to men who identity as women.

Vulnerable female prisoners have to share facilities with violent male criminals.

• In NSW, Evie Amati, a male who attacked 3 people with an axe, was housed in a female prison
• In Victoria, a male sex offender is currently housed with women in the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. (Because of prison policies, we do not know the actual numbers of males housed with women prisoners).
• In the UK, male prisoner Karen White was placed in a female prison where he sexually assaulted two women.

Women-only services are losing funding for excluding men.

• The Feminist Legal Clinic in Sydney lost it’s council-funded office for posting ‘gender critical’ content on its website.
• The Vancouver Rape Relief Centre lost funding for not allowing trans-identified males to use a service for vulnerable and traumatised women who have been raped by men.

The Bill will make it illegal for NSW women to gather together without the presence of men claiming to be female. We have seen this play out already in states that have introduced self-ID:

• The Lesbian Action Group has been denied the right to hold a female-only lesbian event at the Melbourne Pride centre.
• A lesbian group in Tasmania was barred from holding an event that excluded ‘people with penises’ by the state’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner.

This is in breach of Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.”