Law Commission declares open season on girls' rights

Press statement 5 September 2025

“The Law Commission has declared open season on girls’ rights”, says Fern Hickson, spokesperson for Resist Gender Education.

In its Ia Tangata report, released yesterday, The Law Commission has proposed major changes to the Human Rights Act that will remove the right to exclude people of the opposite sex from single-sex schools, public facilities, and many sports.

Although the change would also apply to boys’ schools and facilities, it is indisputable that the impact of these proposed changes would be far more profound for girls.

“The very reason that separate facilities, sports, and schools were set up for girls and women was to provide them with opportunities that had previously been denied,” says Hickson. “Giving males with a ‘gender identity’ legal access to female spaces negates their purpose and deprives the next generation of girls of the freedom to safely use public facilities that their mothers and grandmothers were able to enjoy.”

If enacted, the Law Commission proposals will compel single-sex schools, including private, religious schools, to enrol a student of the opposite sex in accordance with their professed ‘gender identity’. A religious single-sex school will retain the right to deny enrolment to a student who does not hold the same religious views but will not be permitted to deny enrolment to a student of the opposite sex.

“Absurdly, the Law Commission wants to make it unlawful for schools to discriminate based on the innate characteristic of sex, whilst permitting discrimination on the non-innate grounds of religious belief,” says Hickson.

It is clear that the Law Commission was only concerned with enrolment policies and did not consider the flow-on effects in schools of its recommendations. Students who are enrolled in single-sex schools according to their nebulous ‘gender identity’ inevitably gain the power to demand that everyone else in the school must adhere to their personal beliefs via open access to private spaces, sports, and leadership opportunities and enforced use of opposite sex pronouns.

In its submission to the Law Commission, Resist Gender Education said:

For many girls and their parents, a single-sex school is deliberately chosen for reasons of trauma, anxiety, shyness or many other reasons. It is duplicitous to allow a male into an environment that is supposed to be a safe place for females.

Conversely, there are also a range of reasons for boys to attend a boys-only school and having a female fellow pupil is unsafe for both sexes.

“Rather than consider the needs of all students, the Law Commission has given preference to the wishes of the few who believe that a person’s sex is a matter of choice,” says Resist Gender Education.

The Law Commission has cloaked its proposals in human rights language but is undermining human rights principles by establishing a new class of student which has more rights than anyone else. Under its proposals, a student who has identified out of their sex would be able to attend any school – whether co-ed, same sex, or opposite sex – a choice that is not available to any other student.

The Law Commission report says, “We are not convinced that admitting what is likely to be, at most, a handful of transgender students to a single-sex school would interfere with its general character.” [12.57]

As Helen Joyce has said, “A man in women's spaces isn't like a single molecule in a vast body of water, too dilute to be observable – he's like a peanut in a product that's marketed as peanut-free.”

The Law Commission report quotes from RGE’s submission:

It is not possible to properly protect children and run a school safely if the sex of all the children and the staff is not known. This is a basic safeguarding principle.” It also said teachers need to know “the actual sex” of children under their care so they can safely provide medical assistance, plan for residential camps and offer sex-specific advice. It considered that a student’s “biological sex” must be declared to the school when enrolling. [12.23]

This paragraph is not followed in the report by any discussion of the safeguarding issues raised… they are simply ignored.

That the Ia Tangata report is full of ideological language (‘cisgender’, ‘assigned sex at birth’, ‘people who give birth’, etc) demonstrates that the Law Commission is yet another government agency that is incapable of objectively examining gender identity beliefs and noticing the negative impact those beliefs are having on everyone in society, but especially on the rights of women and girls.

There is nothing progressive about this report.

Fern Hickson