Huge win for the LGBTQ+ community! 👏🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 Thank you so much for your petition Esther and many thanks to Michael Berkman – Greens MP for Maiwar and his team, and all the wonderful advocates who have pushed so hard for this.
More from Michael Berkman – Greens MP for Maiwar:
Last year I proudly sponsored a petition by Toowong local Esther Vale calling for reforms to better recognise LGBTQ+ Queenslanders in our Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry laws. It was tabled with almost 11,000 signatures, and the Government promised to introduce a bill on the issue. More than a year later, we finally have that bill!!
The new laws:
🏳️⚧️ Remove the requirement for gender affirmation surgery to change sex on a birth certificate
💁 Remove the requirement for an ‘annotation’ marking a change in sex on birth certificates, to avoid unnecesasarily ‘outing’ trans people
✅ Include additional options for third & non-binary genders, and make it optional for parents to include a gender marker on birth certificates (similar to Tasmania)
👩👩👦 Remove the requirement for parents to be listed as one mother and one father, to be more inclusive of same sex and non-binary parents
LGBTQ+ people have fought hard for this basic change and they shouldn’t have had to wait this long – but this is a euphoric moment nonetheless.
I am disappointed the government ignored the calls in Esther’s petition and from the community to remove prohibitive fees and the ‘once per year’ restriction on name changes, but these laws go some way towards bringing Qld in line with other states.
We still have other fights ahead of us, though. The Government is yet to clarify whether they’ll update our Anti-Discrimination Act to remove the exemption that allows employers to discriminate against trans and gender diverse folks and sex workers, as recommended by the Queensland Human Rights Commission.
I’ll continue fighting for LGBTQ+ rights like this, and standing up to the escalating bigotry and hate from anti-trans lobbyists.
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