10:30AM: MP Georgina Beyer has rejected suggestions from a religious right think-tank that her Gender Identity Bill is a legal fiction, and that it is not possible to change one's sex. The Maxim Institute says in their newsletter this week that the Gender Identity Bill, which will make transgendered people a protected class of minority under the Human Rights Act, could be "the latest victory of political correctness over biology? Under this Bill a person's sex, indeed their identity, becomes a matter of personal preference reinforced by law, instead of being a matter of DNA and history." Ms Beyer has totally rejected the suggestions. "They have no idea," she told GayNZ.com. "That is the problem with their atittude. They are fixed and they don't look at the human nature of what we are." Other than MPs, the only other comment on Georgina's bill has been from New Zealand's answer to the rabidly antigay American Baptist Fred Phelps – Garnet Milne, who attacked Christian-tinged party United Future for supporting the bill, suggesting they're in league with Satan. “When Christians start getting fined or thrown into gaol for stating that there are only two genders and refusing to call male homosexuals like Beyer a transgender, we must hope for their own sakes that the former United Future politicians (because they are unlikely to be re-elected in the upcoming election) will realise that they have capitulated to the designs of Satan and helped strip any remaining threads of Christian influence from the decaying corpse of public virtue,” he wrote in a press release.
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Thursday, 24th February 2005 - 12:00pm