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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 143 ..

I also want to talk about transgender and intersex law reform. Throughout this debate, we have been talking about GLBTI people. However, most of the reforms we see in the bill before us are more about the GLB than the TI. The ACT government’s community consultations and legislative audit identified a huge number of issues related to intersex and transgender people that have mysteriously disappeared from the agenda. The ability to change a birth certificate to reflect one’s gender identification is an extremely difficult process. Transgender people are forced to undergo years of psychological assessment, and expensive and potentially life-threatening surgery involving compulsory infertility, in order to qualify. They also may not change their birth certificates if they are married. This situation is obviously discriminatory and extremely distressing.

Equally, there have been a number of approaches from intersex organisations who continue to be outraged at the unnecessary surgery performed on children to make them conform to one sex or another. When this surgery is incorrect, it can have horrific physical and psychological consequences for the person concerned.

While I commend and support the government for continuing to take up these issues, I would like to have been able to address many more of the problems that are still out there in the community, and to have avoided raising the needs of gay, lesbian and bisexual people over those of transgender and intersex people. I hope that, in future, when the government talks about the GLBTI community, it will be referring to all members of all of those communities.

Finally, my motion, which we debated in August 2002, called for the introduction of policies and programs to challenge discrimination in government and the community. This legislation needs to be backed up by on-the-ground resources. Changing the law will not, by itself, eliminate discrimination in the territory. Throughout this entire process I have called on the government to go beyond simply changing the statutes and actually implement new government programs that educate people about tolerance out there in the community.

I continue to suggest that the government should implement a central policy unit in the Chief Minister’s Department to oversee the coordination and implementation of new programs across the ACT public sector. However, government has not yet taken up the suggestion. Maybe it is a budget initiative we will see soon. I would note that the ACT Labor conference called on the ACT government to appoint a ministerial advisory council on GLBTI issues, but the government has not done this either.

If the ACT government is serious about promoting a tolerant community, it should put in place the resources to achieve that. The legislation is commendable but it will not fix the problem alone. As the Treasurer has said tonight, we legislate and then educate. We need the resources to help that education process happen.

It is important that we have had the debate here in the Assembly today. It is important that these issues have been debated in the media and in the community. When people really think about these issues and when people begin to meet and talk to members of the queer community, they begin to realise we are pretty much all the same. Being lesbian or gay does not mean having less desire to have children than other people; it has no effect on how strongly gay people love and support each other.

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