Mana Wāhine Kōrero Submission on Definitions of Woman and Man Amendment Bill, 26 June, 2026

He wāhine, he whenua ka ora te tangata

In te ao Māori there is a synergy between women and land, and that without one or the other or both, man will not survive.  The representation of wāhine, therefore (sic), is a wider discussion about land and ‘the continuation of whakapapa’ 2018 M. Eria, ‘Te ao Māori : The synergy between women and the land’ 

“It is by women and by land, that the people are given life”

Wāhine Māori - they are (from left to right standing), Mrs W Waitai, Mrs F Morrison, Mrs Raukura Tamahau, Mrs W Ngahana, Lady Mildred Amelia Woodbine Pomare, Mrs Kahui Grace, Mrs Te Puni, Mrs H Love (Ripeka Wharawhara Love). (From left to right sitting), Mrs O Heketa (Raukura Heketa), Mrs W Uru, Miss Lily Love, Miss Ana Pomare. Photographed by Stanley Polkinghorne Andrew sometime between 1910 and 1920. (Reference PA-Group-00572. S P Andrew Ltd :Portrait negatives. 1908-1920s. [Collection]: Location Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, 1/1-014579-G).

FORMAL SUBMISSION

To: The Social Services and Community Committee

In the Matter of: The Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill (Member's Bill 296-1)

Date: 26 June 2026

1. SUBMITTER DETAILS & PURPOSE

• Name of Organisation: Mana Wāhine Kōrero

• Contacts: Michelle Uriarau and Dianne Landy, Co-Founders

• Email Address: manawahinekorero@email.com

• Hearing Preference: We wish to speak to this submission in support of our brief 

Introduction:

We are Mana Wāhine Kōrero and it is through our common bond as tribal women, Māori women, daughters, mothers, grandmothers and descendants of Papatūānuku (Mother) and Rangi-nui (Father), we put forward our written submission. Our mahi seeks to protect, preserve and uphold the mana of wāhine particularly from international lobby interests like gender identity ideology which, in our opinion, seeks to repeat coloniser behaviours already witnessed and narrowly survived by Māori. Today Mana Wāhine Kōrero refuses any and all demands that we surrender our identity, our whakapapa, or the understood reality of our sex.

2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY & STATEMENT OF INTENTION

Mana Wāhine Kōrero welcomes the opportunity to submit on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill.

Our intention from the outset is absolute and clear: we support this Bill because it presents a vital statutory mechanism to firmly enshrine material biological sex as the principal protected attribute for everyone in New Zealand law. We strongly endorse the insertion of clear, unclouded definitions of "woman", "man", "female", and "male" within the Legislation Act 2019 to uphold legal certainty, maintain historical integrity, and protect sex-based realities.

However, in its current draft, the Bill operates solely as a high-level interpretive baseline. Because specific, standalone statutes override a general interpretation statute under New Zealand drafting principles, this Bill contains critical legislative vulnerabilities. Without direct, unambiguous statutory directives identifying precisely where secondary legislation must be amended, the Bill will fail to neutralise conflicting statutes that rely on self-identification. This submission provides the Committee with precise, line-by-line statutory recommendations to close these gaps, secure administrative record-keeping, protect the contractual foundations of the family unit, and honour our founding constitutional documents.

3. RECOMMENDATIONS TO AMEND THE CORE BILL

3.1 Amending the "Adult" Age Boundary Loophole

Clause 4 of the Bill inserts new definitions into Section 5 of the Legislation Act 2019, defining a "woman" as an "adult human biological female" and a "man" as an "adult human biological male". Because the term "adult" is not defined by a specific age boundary within the text, it defaults to the age of majority. This structural choice leaves a dangerous legal gap regarding minors and youth under the age of 18. By omitting these age brackets from the primary definitions, the Bill leaves youth-centric protections—such as juvenile justice administration, school sports categories, and youth healthcare protections—entirely outside the scope of the Act's primary definitions. 

• Specific Statutory Recommendation: We recommend amending Clause 4 of the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill (which inserts definitions into Section 5 of the Legislation Act 2019) to comprehensively define the terms "girl" and "boy" to ensure clear, physiological boundaries apply to all minors and youth. The Bill must formally define a "girl" as a female minor or young human female from conception until she reaches the legal age of majority, and a "boy" as a male minor or young human male from conception until he reaches the legal age of majority, thereby fully protecting these targeted statutory frameworks from statutory ambiguity. 

  
  

3.2 Inserting an Explicit "Prevailing Definition" Clause

To prevent public entities or judicial bodies from bypassing the intent of this legislation via alternative policy guidelines or human rights infrastructure, the biological definitions must be accorded primary status across the wider state sector.

• Specific Statutory Recommendation: We recommend inserting a new subsection into Section 5 of the Legislation Act 2019 (via Clause 4 of the  Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill) stating that these biological definitions take absolute precedence over any social, internalised, or identity-based interpretations across all public sectors, Crown entities, local government jurisdictions, and judicial interpretations.

  
  

3.3 Harmonisation with the Human Rights Act 1993

The Human Rights Act 1993 utilises the term "sex" within its core anti-discrimination provisions but lacks an express nexus to objective material anatomy. To resolve ambiguity, the definitions established by this Bill must actively integrate with New Zealand's primary human rights framework.

• Specific Statutory Recommendation: We recommend adding a Consequential Amendments Schedule to the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill to consequentially amend Section 21(1)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1993, declaring that the protected attribute of "sex" is to be interpreted strictly according to the biological definitions inserted into Section 5 of the Legislation Act 2019.

  
  

3.4 Protection of Public Data Collection under the Privacy Act 2020

A major area of vulnerability is the precise documentation of public demographic data. Currently, government departments routinely conflate sex with gender identity when gathering public statistics, compromising public health registries, crime statistics, and funding allocations.

• Specific Statutory Recommendation: We recommend adding a Consequential Amendments Schedule to the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill to amend Section 22 of the Privacy Act 2020 (Information Privacy Principles 1 and 4), mandating that when any public sector agency collects data under the category of "sex", it must conform strictly to the biological reality defined in the Legislation Act 2019 to ensure public record accuracy.

4. ADMINISTRATIVE INTEGRITY & GENETIC RECORD-KEEPING

4.1 Reconciling the Conflict with the BDMRR Act 2021

The primary barrier to reliable data integrity in New Zealand is the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021 (BDMRR Act 2021), which allows individuals to alter the sex marker on their birth certificate via an administrative self-identification mechanism. If this Bill passes without directly overriding the BDMRR Act 2021, the self-identification process remains intact, creating an absurd administrative contradiction: the state will define a woman as a biological female in the Legislation Act 2019, while the Department of Internal Affairs will continue to issue female birth certificates to males. A birth certificate must be restored to its proper legal standing: a permanent, unalterable historical record of permanent genetic reality at the time of birth.

• Specific Statutory Recommendation: We recommend adding a Consequential Amendments Schedule to the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill to amend Part 2 (Sections 22 to 27) of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021 to completely repeal the administrative self-identification registry process. The sex marker on a birth certificate must only be altered to correct a verified clerical error at delivery, or to address rare, clinically diagnosed conditions of sexual development where sex was ambiguous at birth.

  
  

4.2 Separating Genetic Lineage from Legal Guardianship

Registry practices under the Status of Children Act 1969 (and its 2004 amendments) allow same-sex couples to be recorded simultaneously as parents on a child's birth certificate so that they have two mothers or two fathers listed. This codifies a genetic impossibility on a primary state document, degrading the statistical, medical, and genealogical integrity of public records and directly contradicts the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill.

• Specific Statutory Recommendation: We recommend adding a Consequential Amendments Schedule to the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill to amend Sections 7, 8 and 10 of the Status of Children Act 1969 and Part 2 of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021. The amendments must ensure that primary birth records and judicial declarations of parentage permanently and accurately list only the mother (female sex) who gave birth and the father (male sex) who provided the sperm. Legal parenting arrangements, adoption details, and guardianship rights for same-sex partners must be managed through separate, secondary legal documents, leaving the primary birth registry structurally aligned with unalterable genetic reality.

5. PROTECTION OF THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT & FAMILY STABILITY

5.1 The Principle of Mutual Contractual Consent

Marriage is a formal, legally binding bilateral contract entered into by two parties based on their specific sex and legal statuses at the time the contract is executed. Under fundamental contract law, one party cannot unilaterally alter a primary condition of a contract without the unconditional, informed, and formal consent of the other party.

When a spouse decides to unilaterally alter their social or legal presentation mid-marriage, it forces the non-consenting spouse into a fundamentally altered legal and domestic arrangement against their will. Because the Marriage Act 1955 recognises marriages regardless of sex, a spouse caught in this situation remains legally locked in the original marriage contract, leaving the non-consenting partner without immediate structural protections. 

5.2 Precedent: The United Kingdom Spousal Consent Framework

To protect families from the consequences of unilateral identity claims, New Zealand must adapt the established legislative precedent found in the United Kingdom’s Gender Recognition Act 2004 (Sections 4 and 4A) to complement the Bill. Under the United Kingdom framework, the state cannot finalise an administrative change to an individual's marital documentation or legal status without the formal, written consent of their spouse. If consent is denied, the state issues an interim certificate which acts as immediate, automatic grounds for the non-consenting party to annul or dissolve the marriage cleanly, before any permanent administrative changes are processed by the state.

While Mana Wāhine Kōrero maintains our core recommendation that birth certificates must remain unalterable records of biological sex, we also recognise that the law must provide an absolute shield for the family unit against any attempted administrative modifications. In the event that the state continues to process any application to alter an individual's legal sex descriptor, the original contractual partner must be granted absolute statutory veto power and an immediate, non-penalised legal exit to protect the integrity of the original marriage contract.

• Specific Statutory Recommendation: We recommend that a Consequential Amendments Schedule be inserted into the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill. This addition must mandate a consequential amendment to Part 2 of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021, creating a compulsory statutory prerequisite formulated as follows: 

  
  

"No married individual may apply for, or be granted, an administrative change to their legal sex marker under Part 2 of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021 without the formal, written, and uncoerced consent of their lawful spouse. 

In the absence of such spousal consent, the state registry must withhold any final alteration of the individual's legal sex status. Instead, the application shall serve as immediate, automatic grounds for the non-consenting spouse to seek a fast-tracked dissolution or annulment of the marriage under the Family Proceedings Act 1980, thereby protecting the integrity of the original marriage contract and ensuring that no spouse is subjected to a unilateral alteration of their legal marital status without consent."

6. CULTURAL ANALYSIS: HE WHAKAPUTANGA AND TE TIRITI O WAITANGI

6.1 Asserting Independent Sovereign Authority under He Whakaputanga

Article 1 of He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni 1835 establishes the independent sovereign authority and leadership of our rangatira. Article 2 directly reinforces this basis by asserting that foreign entities are not permitted to frame laws (wakarite ture) within our territories.

The current framework of administrative legal self-identification does not stem from our heritage; it represents a foreign lobby agenda engineered by global corporate law networks and systematically exported into local statutes. Imposing an artificial legal fiction that completely detaches the legal definition of "woman" from physical, material reality compromises our traditional lineage, confuses our customs, and breaches the sovereign independent criteria protected under He Whakaputanga.

6.2 Protecting Te Whare Tangata and Whakapapa under Article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi

Under Article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840, the Crown entered into a binding guarantee to protect rangatira and hapū in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages (whānau), and all their taonga. As life-givers and child-bearers, our tamariki and mokopuna are our defining taonga.

Our traditional culture has always considered wāhine to be the house of humanity—te whare tangata. Tracking our whakapapa unbroken by genetic lineage is a principal requirement in the unqualified exercise of our chieftainship over our lands and villages. If we cannot faithfully chronicle our immutable genealogy, we are structurally stripped of our capacity to defend our territories.

This argument is a concrete constitutional reality under New Zealand property law. The Māori Land Court (Te Kooti Whenua Māori), operating under Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993, mandates that succession to Māori freehold land requires formal, irrefutable proof of progeny and direct blood descent from deceased owners. When British common law structures and individualised land titles were historically imposed, they systematically erased our customary rights by forcing land into the names of male individuals (not always Māori), stripping wāhine of their distinct, autonomous authority to inherit, manage, and govern ancestral land. If primary state documentation like birth certificates is corrupted by administrative self-identification, our natural genealogy is obscured, fracturing our connection to the land and compromising ancestral land claims.

It is for this precise reason that the retention of the unqualified exercise of our chieftainship over our lands and villages relies unconditionally upon primary documentation—specifically birth certificates and marriage records—to permanently and consistently record objective sex. Because these instruments serve as the definitive legal links establishing whakapapa, any administrative alteration to them corrupts the integrity of the record. If we are unable to verifiably preserve our specific descent according to biological reality as observed in utero and at birth, we risk fracturing our natural lines of succession and losing our ancestral land rights to individuals who possess no blood relation to our iwi. Without a reliable, uncompromised baseline of natal data in our state registries, tracking ancestry according to descent becomes near impossible, fundamentally stripping our people of the evidence required to uphold and defend historical land rights before the courts. 

This material reality forms the bedrock of the Waitangi Tribunal’s Mana Wāhine Kaupapa Inquiry (Wai 2700), formally initiated to address claims that the Crown breached the Treaty by systematically undermining the inherent status, authority, and tapu (sacred power) of wāhine. This extensive Inquiry examines how historical colonial mechanisms actively dismantled the traditional, complementary balance between tāne and wāhine by imposing a foreign doctrine that marginalised the unique authority of te whare tangata (a woman’s womb).

The entire architecture of the Wai 2700 Inquiry relies unconditionally on the objective, material reality of the female sex. At no point in the extensive historical record, or within any tribal submission, has there ever been confusion as to who constitutes the wāhine of each hapū. The core anatomy of te ao Māori is inherently constructed upon this immutable foundation, as recorded in our creation traditions of Ranginui and Papatūānuku. The corresponding yet distinct roles of tāne and wāhine represent a deep cultural connection to, and acceptance of, the distinct, sacred physical functions specific to only wāhine, and essential to the continuation of our whakapapa, our whenua, and our living culture.

Tikanga and whakapapa flow directly from this binary balance, as reflected time and time again throughout the volume of statements and Tribunal submissions—such as those of Patricia Tauroa, Raiha Ruwhiu, Jessica Williams, and Dr Ngāhuia Murphy—who all speak openly of menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth as states of supreme, absolute tapu. This traditional tikanga mandated clear boundaries and physical separation from men, acknowledging that in these instances, wāhine required distinct privacy, protection, and self-care away from tāne to preserve the spiritual and physical safety of te whare tangata.

The vast weight of the Inquiry’s repository consists of multi-generational tribal testimonies, continuous whakapapa lineages, and ancient oral traditions deeply anchored in the lived reality of mana wāhine. Conversely, modern assertions of gender identity ideology possess no such ancestral or genealogical footprint. Any attempt to separate the status of wāhine from the physical reality of the female sex simply repeats the historical colonial pattern against mana wāhine and te whare tangata. By forcing imported concepts onto traditional tikanga, these ideologies seek to overwrite the permanent reality of the female sex, effectively committing a modern act of erasure and a violation of the Treaty against the very wāhine the Inquiry was launched to protect. By restoring biological definitions to the statutory groundwork, this Bill directly assists the Crown in fulfilling its defensive obligations under Article 2 to protect the integrity of our whakapapa, our taonga, and our ancestral land rights from external ideological erosion.

6.3 Demanding Identical Rights of Citizenship and Spousal Protection under Article 3

Article 3 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi binds the Crown to extend equivalent protection and the identical rights and duties of citizenship to Māori as those enjoyed by the people of England. To ensure our laws remain coherent and protective, New Zealand can look to recent, clarified developments within English jurisprudence.

On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom delivered its landmark judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers [2025] UKSC 16, unanimously ruling that the legal terms "sex", "man", and "woman" mean—and were always intended to mean—strictly biological sex. The court established that administrative or social classifications cannot overwrite physical reality when safeguarding sex-based rights.

Furthermore, the United Kingdom's Gender Recognition Act 2004 explicitly recognises that the foundational marriage contract cannot be altered unilaterally. Under Sections 4 and 4A of that Act, the state cannot finalise an administrative change to an individual's status without the formal, written consent of their spouse, providing an immediate statutory mechanism for the non-consenting spouse to exit or dissolve the marriage contract cleanly.

While we highlight the United Kingdom’s spousal framework as an essential threshold defense for the family unit, Mana Wāhine Kōrero notes that the English model contains a severe structural deficit regarding unmarried individuals. By permitting unmarried applicants to alter their primary records, the UK framework fails to protect the public integrity of genealogical data and historical registries.

For Māori, whose cultural structures rely unconditionally on uncompromised lines of descent, a partial framework is entirely insufficient. The Crown's defensive obligations under Article 2 (see 6.2) cannot be satisfied by merely protecting contracts; they require the absolute preservation of objective, biological reality across all state registries for every citizen, regardless of marital status. We support the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill precisely because its primary text is unambiguous in this intent, establishing an unyielding rule for all individuals to safeguard the historical and genealogical integrity of our country's records.

We call upon the Crown to fulfil its solemn declarations under Article 3 by ensuring that biological sex retains absolute primacy in New Zealand law. Rather than copying the structurally deficient registration statutes of the United Kingdom, the Select Committee must utilise the clear, foundational baseline of the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill to establish a world-leading standard of legal certainty. Doing so seamlessly bridges our country's distinct legal frameworks: it reinforces the independent sovereign authority protected under He Whakaputanga, satisfies the Crown's defensive obligations under Article 2 to shield our whakapapa and land succession from ideological erosion, and delivers the exact protection of single-sex spaces, record-keeping, and family stability that the rights of identical citizenship demand. 

7. CONCLUSION

Mana Wāhine Kōrero urges the Social Services and Community Committee to adopt these specific amendments. Enshrining biological definitions into the Legislation Act 2019 is an essential step, but it must be backed by binding consequential overrides across the Human Rights Act 1993, the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021, the Privacy Act 2020, the Status of Children Act 1969 and the Family Proceedings Act 1980. Only by securing these boundaries can New Zealand protect the integrity of its laws, the accuracy of its public records, and the fundamental rights of the family unit in full alignment with He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Mana Wāhine Kōrero thanks the Social Services and Community Committee for its time, consideration, and deliberate attention to the critical matters raised within this submission. We wish to appear before the Select Committee to speak to this submission in support of our written brief, and look forward to presenting these arguments further during the oral hearings.