50 Victoria Street
Private Bag 6995
Wellington 6141
New Zealand
T 64 4 894 5400
F 64 4 894 6100
www.nzta.govt.nz
9 July 2019
Brodie Fraser
[FYI request #10547 email]
REF: OIA-5315
Dear Brodie,
Request made under the Official Information Act 1982
Thank you for your email of 17 June 2019 requesting the following information under the Official
Information Act 1982 (the Act):
How many, if any, people have filed a statutory declaration for change of gender on their
driver's licence in the past five years, broken down by year?
We contacted you on 19 June 2019 to seek clarification of your request. We offered two options of how
the information can be provided to you and your request was subsequently changed to:
… could I please get both lots of data (so the data where the gender marker has been changed
and the number of statutory declarations)?
In accordance with option one of your refined request, the data you requested is detailed in Table 1
below:
Total number of people who
Year
have changed gender type
2014
361
2015
398
2016
468
2017
491
2018
475
*2019
182
Table 1. Total number of people who have changed gender type based on DLR
*2019 data is for the year to date 25 June 2019
The Transport Agency records changed of gender in the Driver Licence Register (DLR). The above data
was obtained from the DLR and current as at 25 June 2019. We only count people with a current licence
record when the gender was changed. There is a small number of people have had their gender
changed more than once in the DLR, where the change occurred in the same year they have been
counted only once. Where the change occurred in different years they have been counted once per
year.
With regards to the data in Table 1, we are unable to identify the causes of a gender change in the DLR.
The gender change could be as a result of a formal request to change gender supported by original
evidence of identity, by statutory declarations, or due to an administrative error. Therefore, the
numbers provided are indicative of requests for gender change but are not the actual number of
statutory requests received.
In accordance with option two of your refined request, Table 2 shows the number of Statutory
Declarations received directly by the Transport Agency’s Assessments team where the applicant has
not been able to provide evidence of identity documents showing their gender preference. All Statutory
Declaration’s received result in a change of gender.
Year
Number of applications
2014
2
2015
7
2016
10
2017
13
2018
17
*2019
3
Table 2 – Statutory Declarations received by Transport Agency’s Assessments team
*2019 data is for the year to date 1 July 2019
If you would like to discuss this reply with the NZ Transport Agency, please contact Kerry Greig,
Manager, Data Services, by email to
[email address]. Yours sincerely,
Galina Mitchelhill
Senior Manager, Research & Analytics
