Liberals and ACL slam Victoria’s third gender option for high school students

SENIOR high school students in Victoria will now be able to identify as having an ‘undefined gender’ in their official documents under changes introduced this year.

Personal details forms will allow VCE and VCAL students to select whether they are male, female, or ‘gender x’.

In a notice to schools last month, VCAA said it introduced the change in response to the queries it had been receiving around how gender diverse students should fill in their forms.

“This is entirely a student choice and recognises that individuals may identify and be recognised within the community as a gender other than the sex they were assigned at birth or during infancy, or as a gender that is not exclusively male or female,” it said.

Victoria is the second state to introduce a third gender option. In Western Australia students can nominate their gender as male, female, or ‘not specified’.

In a report from the Herald Sun, the Australian Christian Lobby’s Victorian director Dan Flynn said the move was a ‘threat’ to change rooms and bathrooms.

“Giving boys the right to self-identify as a girl creates all those safety problems,” he said.

“Boys and boys and girls are girls and there would be a fractional category of people who are truly intersex.”

Shadow Minister for Education Nick Wakeling also slammed the move.

“[Premier] Daniel Andrews need to stop pushing his radical gender and sexuality theories onto other people’s children,” he said.

In a report from The Guardian, Minus18 Chief Executive Micah Scott said misgendering a young LGBTI person or referring to them by the incorrect pronoun could have a profound psychological impact.

“Receiving that sort of correspondence from the department – and you receive quite a bit of it through year 12 – there is an impact, there is a day to day impact of what that pronoun or what that gender identifier has on a young person,” he said.

“The inclusion of a gender neutral option is really bringing the department in line with the expectations of students and schools.

“This is something that schools have been asking for for a while now.”