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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4751 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (4.06): Mr Speaker, I want to indicate the Government's view about the amendment. What Mr Osborne suggests about the potential for someone to mislead with the documentation, particularly with a birth certificate, is true. It is possible that a person who may have had a change of sex recorded in an amended birth certificate could use that information to the point of creating a serious deception. Obviously, we would be reluctant to let that kind of thing happen. If there were a simple way of preventing it from being possible, then we would certainly consider doing so. But I think we need to balance the other side of the ledger here.

Clearly, with these matters, people concerned who have undertaken this process of altering the gender with which they were born are in a position of making a very serious decision about the direction of their lives. They are people who often feel that they have been, in a sense, ambiguously assigned a gender at birth. Sometimes they are people who, in fact, are not clearly of one gender or another anyway at birth. They are either wholly or partly hermaphrodite. Whatever the position of those people at the point when they are born, they make a decision later on either to clarify the issue of their gender or to completely reject the gender with which they were born and to adopt the other one.

Mr Speaker, that is a decision which is never taken lightly. It is a decision which, I understand, almost invariably entails considerable cosmetic and other surgery; it entails hormone therapy; it entails a very serious commitment by the person concerned to make themselves a person of a different gender from the one which is recorded on their birth certificate. To then say to those people in that position, "You have made that step. You have decided to live as a person of the other gender. You have identified yourself in that way. You have alerted all your friends, perhaps. You have changed every aspect of your life that touches on this question. But you still are not entitled to an indication to those who doubt this matter, in unambiguous terms, that you have made that transition and it has been completed, and that, in a sense, is an indication of its completion", I think, is probably unreasonable.

On balance, Mr Speaker - and this is a very difficult matter - I think that the provisions put forward in Part IV ought to stand and that we ought to have in the ACT provisions which reflect those of New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory. I understand that other jurisdictions are considering adopting provisions of this kind as well. It is a difficult matter. Certainly, we would have to say that our view about these provisions might be altered if we found cases of people perpetrating serious fraud on the basis of a birth certificate. But, as Mr Moore points out, there are already amendments made to documentation of this kind which arise out of a process of amendment in the registry, and those documents are also capable of being used to deceive people; but we do not draw back from engaging in amendment merely because of that.

So, that is the view the Government takes. I hope that this does lead to a system where people do not exploit it for nefarious purposes, but do use it to identify themselves in a way which is consistent with their wholehearted commitment to a new lifestyle.

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