Written by Jade Willow Buck
Cahoots is an organisation dedicated to the empowerment of women and gender minorities. We explicitly work to support cis women, as well as transgender women, transgender men, nonbinary people, and gender diverse people. We oppose this legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) entirely.
Our opposition is based on three factors:
Factually the legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) is simply wrong. These gender terms cannot be defined simply based on a 'biological sex' binary, because no such binary exists. Similarly these gender terms cannot presume themselves to reflect a gender binary, as no such binary exists.
In 2020 the Office of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued background note establishing that treating sex strictly as a binary leads to medical pathologisation and human rights violations. The World Health Organisation (WHO) explicitly rejects a gender binary in its core technical and operational frameworks. Both the UN and the WHO agree that gender is a 'deeply felt internal sense of self', it is not defined externally. The UN has further 'affirmed the right of trans persons to legal recognition of their gender identity and a change of gender in official documents'.
The Yogyakarta Principles, frequently cited and utilised by UN bodies as the international standard on human rights obligations regarding gender, emphasise that legal systems must decouple a person's rights and recognition from both their assigned sex at birth and binary stereotypes.
Closer to home, The New Zealand Law Commission: Te Aka Matua o te Ture in 2025 released Ia Tangata, an extensive review of protections for transgender, non binary, gender drivers and intersex people in the 1993 Human Rights Act. Ia Tangata recommended adjusting legal frameworks to explicitly protect and accommodate those who fall outside binary categorisations.
The expert understanding of sex and gender clearly reflects a complex spectrum which cannot be divided into simple binaries.
The legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) states that its purpose is to uphold legal certainty, protect the integrity of sex-based rights, and ensure that language in law reflects biological reality.
The acceptance and understanding of the diversity of gender and sex characteristics by expert organisations locally and globally need to be considered when testing this claim. Expert authorities are agreed that there is no binary biological reality, and that trying to impose one does not protect but rather harms sex and gender based rights. The claim that the bill provides legal certainty assumes that certainty can be ascertained; the reality that there is no binary certainty means that law can never provide certainty.
In addition the bill claims it ‘provides a clear and biologically grounded meaning of “woman” and “man” across legislation.’ Again, this definition will never be clear without acknowledging the spectrum realities of gender and sex characteristics.
Te Kāhui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission, in interpreting the NZ Bill of Rights Act 1990 and the Human Rights Act 1993, has long determined that the prohibited ground of sex discrimination is inclusive of gender identity. In 2026 the commission stated that the legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) was unnecessary and risks “further harm to Rainbow people”.