Helen Joyce in Wellington - Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women's Rights

Sex matters in life and law. It shouldn’t take courage to say so.

Keynote speaker Helen Joyce with:|

• Genspect spokeswoman Jan Rivers
• LAVA litigants Hilary Oxley and Margaret Curnow
• Suzanne Levy

5:30pm tea/coffee before 6.30pm formal presentations

The Women’s Rights Party and other organisations defending sex-based rights are bringing Helen Joyce to New Zealand on 24th October through to 1st November when she will be connecting with the Free Speech Union.

In the first part of her tour, Helen will be talking about “Gender Identity: The new battle for women’s rights”, the sub-title of the second edition of her book “Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality”. She will be speaking at meetings in Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Wellington, as well as running media workshops in Auckland and Wellington.

Helen is a director of Sex Matters UK, an organisation based on human rights that believes “sex matters in law and life and it shouldn’t take courage to say so”. She arrives in New Zealand around the time the New Zealand Law Commission will be releasing its report as to whether “gender identity and expression” needs to be included as a protected ground against discrimination in the Human Rights Act 1993.

When it comes to women’s rights, sex matters. That is because, in addition to “sex” being a prohibited ground in terms of discrimination in the Human Rights Act 1993, there are a number of exceptions in the Act that allow positive discrimination to protect women and girls on the basis of sex.

When the Human Rights Act was drawn up in 1993 to comply with the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), it was understood that sex meant women and men.

In fact, unless sex is defined in terms of biological sex, the sex-based exceptions that currently protect women’s single-sex spaces and women’s sports, among other sex-based rights are meaningless.

Sexual orientation, referring to same-sex attraction or opposite sex attraction, is also meaningless if it doesn’t refer to biological sex.

The Australian Labor Government under Julia Gillard removed the definition of sex in terms of men and women from the Australian Sex Discrimination Act, and replaced it with “gender”. As a result, lesbians in Australia are not allowed to have lesbian-only events or get-togethers, including social media groups.

It was on this basis that Roxanne Tickle, a man who identifies as a woman, was able to win his case against Sall Grover’s app for women and girls only, a case that was recently heard in the Australian Federal Court.

Helen will be talking about the UK Supreme Court decision clarifying that “sex” in the UK Equality Act 2010 (the equivalent of our Human Rights Act) means biological sex, male or female, not sex slef-ID or paperwork. This ruling should roll into policies that should now be using this definition.