Legislation facilitates same-sex marriages

LIJ: Volume 79: No.5 (May 2005)
Unsolicited (Letters to the editor)
Cite as: (2005) 79(5) LIJ, p. 8

Karen Gurney
Deakin University Law School researcher

The Victorian government recently joined with most of the rest of the civilised world by
legislating to allow people with transsexualism who are adults, are “unmarried” and have
undergone sex affirmation surgery to obtain a replacement birth certificate reflecting the
contemporaneous circumstances of their sexual identity.
Without criticising the highly discriminatory nature of the qualifications attached to this belated
grant of human rights, I would like to suggest that the decision to include a “divorce first”
condition in the legislation was fundamentally flawed and that, rather than preventing the
occurrence of same-sex marriages as it claimed, the Victorian government has actually
facilitated it.

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