Dear Tracey Martin,

in an announcement on 1st August 2019 where you stated that your government would no longer charge fees (including subsidising courier fees of the applicants) for those who wanted to change their sex on official documents. Leaving aside the consequences of such a move (that it could be seen as an incentive) as a part of this announcement you also stated that "a group has also been established to provide advice on how to further reduce barriers to changing registered sex via the current process".

https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/gove...

I note that this group has no 'gender critical' voices among its members. So I have a few requests of you;

1. Did you advise any 'gender critical' groups or persons of your intention to set up such a group?
2. Did you invite any 'gender critical' participation in such a group?
3. How will you be making sure that you receive input and advice from 'gender critical' voices on this very charged topic?

Yours faithfully,

Rich Seager

Dear T Martin (MIN),

Hi Tracy/Annika (thanks for your response).

please append to my request the following;

Please provide all correspondence in all forms (email, telephone, text, voice etc) on this issue from January 1st 2019 to the current date.

Yours sincerely,

Rich Seager

Thanks Annika.

Dear Erica Mangin,

everyone is impacted by any changes that are made to these laws. In some cases it may be necessary for a Minister to reject changes that supposedly 'improve' someones 'rights' if in fact that 'improvement' comes at a very large cost to the majority of people in the country, women especially.

And I definitely feel that this is the case here so I am very disappointed that Tracey Martin did not see fit to make sure that the board was representative of everyone affected by these proposed law changes and not just the very small minority (less than 1%?) that trans activists make up of the total population of New Zealand.

Also I deliberately restricted the 4th part of my request to a timeframe so as not to trigger the out clause used frequently of 'substantial collection and research'. I will definitely be reframing this request and resubmitting it.

So even though I have marked this 'partially successful' I am disappointed with this response.

Yours sincerely,

Rich Seager