I provide this submission to critique and oppose the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill. I dedicate this submission to my nephew, Alex. This is for you, kiddo. 

By analysing the content of the suggested definitions provided, I illustrate their clear inadequacy in accurately capturing the usage and social meaning inherent within the terms “man” and woman”. I conclude by suggesting that the function of this bill, therefore, must be to provide some sort of virtue signalling in an election year. 

To begin, I wish to state that I am much influenced by the 15th edition of the text “Introduction to Logic” by Copi, Cohen, and Rodych, who provide a useful means of interpreting and critiquing definitions. I will refer to their work as appropriate. I also springboard considerably off my past writing on the distinction between gender and biological sex, available online.

Firstly, I must emphasise that there is some categorical confusion inherent in the curiously brief definitions provided. Biological sex and gender are two very different categories that exist for different purposes. I note that the definition of man and woman, gender categories, have been collapsed onto biological sex categories. By doing so, considerable specificity in the concept of “man” and “woman” is lost. Biological sex is a classification system of organisms based on specific physical traits and reproductive biology. Gender is a system of social meanings, norms, identities, a way of recognising other human bodies and engaging with them as people. 

By collapsing the definition of gender onto biological sex, this bill has failed to accurately and specifically refer to the definitive characteristics of gender. This violates several rules of the Copi text’s framework for evaluating definitions: Rule 1 (“A definition should state the essential attributes of the species”), 3 (“A definition must be neither too broad nor too narrow”, and 4 (“Ambiguous, obscure, or figurative language must not be used in a definition”). The violation of rule 1 has already been highlighted. Rule 3 is violated as collapsing gender onto biological sex renders the posited definition as too broad. It could be argued that it fails to exclude the groups it is designed to – transgender individuals – by failing to define what is meant by “biological” in the two definitions. By including such a term without a clear definition, one is left to rely on the common usage of the word to understand what is meant here, where the clear conclusion is that one must be comprised of biological matter. As such, the inclusion of such a word excludes robots and similar machinery, but not any person composed of biological matter. Similarly, rule 4 is violated by an absence of a clear definition of “male” and “female”. This leaves the definition of both groups of labels (e.g., “male” and “man”), extremely vague. 

My second point is to highlight that a label is not the same thing as the object being referred to by that label. As gender is a means of social organisation and understanding, “man” and “woman” are not biological organisms, but labels used within our social world. This prompts several reflective questions: is this label useful, with its provided definition? Is the provided definition a biological or a social one? And, most importantly, does the definition for either “man” or “woman” successfully capture all the functions that word serves in everyday discourse? The suggested definitions struggle, because the words “man” and “woman” have historically done multiple jobs, so too have the terms “male” and “female”. Collapsing one onto the other, fails to provide a specific or useful definition of anything. 

My third point is that this definition violates rule 3, mentioned earlier; by failing to provide a clear demarcation between the groups the authors intend to include within the category “man” and “woman”, and those they wish to exclude. Simply stating “biological male” does not provide a clear boundary. I refer to my past writing on the topic, but there is not a single biological characteristic that provides a neat, binary distinction, between one group or another. Again, I find myself emphasising that simply including the word “biological” without further elaboration suggests, prima facie, that only those who claim to be human but are not composed of biological matter, cannot refer to themselves as a man or woman. Provided that a transgender person is organic in composition, this definition permits their self-identification with whatever gender they choose. This illustrates the failure of the definition to provide any sort of clear boundary. 

This is because, as is becoming increasingly obvious by now, gender is not biology. As humans living in a civilised society, we understand the world through concepts or ideas, and labels that refer to those ideas. Some of these concepts are about physical, observable characteristics, and others are about what something means within our social reality – why is this important? What does this mean in terms of how I engage with it? While gender is undoubtedly informed by biological facts, gender transcends mere facticity by acting as a system of meaning that itself is composed of interpretations of these facts. By collapsing a definition of gender categories onto those of biological sex, the very function and purpose of gender is omitted and ignored. Such omission undermines the very fabric of our society by dehumanising men and women and reducing them to some unspecified biological features. 

This, then, prompts the question about why such definitions, indeed why this bill exists at all – given it fails to perform the task it is supposed to do. Why does such a bill exist, if the definitions provided are clearly, and inhumanely, inadequate? What could motivate such disrespect for human society? 

It is suggested that this bill exists to protect the rights of women and girls (Although I note that the definitions provided only refer to women and men, not girls or boys). As one of the few academic scholars with published research on sexual assault in New Zealand, I admit that I find it difficult to understand how this protects anybody. If the goal is to exclude self-identifying women from spaces that are assumed to exist only for those with certain biological features, the failure to identify those features shows that this bill doesn’t do this. Nor am I aware of any research illustrating that transgender women pose any sort of serious sexual assault threat to either girls or women. 

Given this bill is woefully inadequate in the task it is reported to perform, I find myself concluding that this bill serves another purpose altogether. In the current era, there is much moral panic around transgender individuals, not dissimilar to panic regarding homosexual men as recently as 30 years ago. This bill signals some clarity for those who cannot allow themselves to live in a society where people self-identify as a gender of their choosing. This is for those who believe that our biology wholly determines our gender, and humans are powerless to decide otherwise. One might say such a bill signals a more virtuous path, by denying innocent human beings of their fundamental rights. It is no surprise then, that such blatant and unintelligent virtue signalling has occurred during an election year. This bill is inhumane – it disrespects the very existence of our decent society. And it deserves to be called out accordingly.