Definitions of Woman and Man Bill
Bill submissions
More than twenty-two thousand people made submissions on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill. This page shows what those submissions say: how many opposed or supported the bill, and the reasons people gave.
What the submissions show
What people told the committee
We read every published submission and grouped each one by whether it supports or opposes the bill, and by the reasons people give. The numbers below cover all 22,739 submissions we were able to read.
The public's verdict
85.2%
of submissions oppose the Definitions of Woman and Man Amendment Bill.
19,245 opposed, 3,353 supported, 141 unclear.
Was your submission rejected?
QED wants to gather evidence about rejected submissions to help ensure all valid submissions are processed fairly and accepted by the Select Committee. We would greatly appreciate your support with this. If you have information about your rejected submission you’re comfortable sharing with QED, please message it to us on Instagram (@queer_endurance_defiance) or email us at queerendurancedefiance@gmail.com.
Data last checked
3 August 2026 at 10:46 am NZST · 22,743 submissions published, 22,739 analysed.
The other 4 are not included because their files were not available from Parliament’s website. Everything that was available, including submissions published as scanned images, has been read and counted.
The opposition held across every group we could identify, including the people the bill claims to speak for:
98%
of submitters with a personal connection to a trans or intersex person opposed it
94%
of submitters who identified as a cis woman or feminist opposed it
89%
of submitters writing as a health, science or legal professional opposed it
Why people opposed it
Share of opposing submissions that raised each reason. Many raised more than one.
- Harms and erases trans, takatāpui & intersex people70.1%
“This bill is a violation of trans rights.”
- Unnecessary — solves no real problem31.8%
“There is no need for this performative statement of a bill.”
- Not evidence-based; contradicts medical & scientific consensus28.5%
- Waste of time & money; distraction from real priorities25.7%
“This bill is a waste of time, energy and money, let alone actively harmful and controlling.”
- Breaches human rights / discriminatory23.7%
- Culture war / imported ideology / division21.2%
“This bill is a disingenuous and predatory attempt to distract from the current government's incompetence.”
- Individual autonomy & self-determination11%
“The inhumanity of debating someone's gender is not something I wish to see from my government.”
- Against Aotearoa's values / cultural erasure of takatāpui6.7%
“Legislation that aims to erase the existence of transgender people will only cause harm to everyone in Aotearoa.”
Why people supported it
Share of supporting submissions that raised each reason.
- Biological / scientific definition of sex78.1%
“There are only two sexes. This is a truth.”
- Protect women's sex-based rights & single-sex spaces56.1%
- Legal clarity / common sense44.5%
- Counter 'woke' / extreme-left ideology8.1%
“A sadly necessary bill to counter extreme left ideology.”
Real people, in their own words
These are not form letters. The submissions are overwhelmingly unique and considered.
97.8%
word-for-word unique
70.9%
of opposing submissions made two or more distinct arguments
24.1%
wrote from personal or professional experience
Median submission 97 words, the longest 38,382. 97.8% of submitters have distinct names, and the largest group of identical submissions is just 28. The uniform layout on the published PDFs is Parliament’s own template, not the content.
Voices from the submissions
A few of the things people said, in their own words. Names and personal details have been removed.
“This is a hateful bill that has no point beyond harming New Zealanders.”
“The passing of this legislation would be a huge breach of human rights.”
“This bill is a pointless attack on transgender and non-binary citizens.”
“Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans rights are human rights.”
“This bill is a gross and overwhelming waste of time and government resources.”
“This is bigotry disguised as 'protection for women'. As simple as that.”
“What do the terms 'biological man' and 'biological woman' even mean?”
“This bill is based on colonial and Victorian binary gender assumptions.”
“The New Zealand Parliament has no authority to define a woman and a man.”
“It's not up to politicians to decide whether a person is male or female.”
Who was speaking
Ways some submitters described themselves, each as a share of all submissions analysed. A person can fit more than one, and most did not mention any, so these do not add up to 100%.
- Personal connection to a trans/intersex person11.9%
- Self-identifies as a cis woman / feminist9.2%
- Healthcare, scientific or legal professional5.2%
- Māori / takatāpui voice2.9%
- Submitted by an organisation1.7%
- Anonymous submitter0.1%
Organisations opposed it too
Beyond individuals, at least 175 submissions came from organisations opposing the bill, spanning community, legal, health and faith groups. We do not name them here, to avoid any group being singled out.
How these numbers were produced
The submissions analysed here are the public submissions on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill, as published by the New Zealand Parliament. We downloaded each published submission and extracted its text. Submissions published as scanned images (which have no selectable text) were read directly by eye instead. This covers all 22,739 submissions; only 4 are not included, because their files were not available from Parliament’s website.
Each submission was then read by an artificial-intelligence language model, which carried out a sentiment and stance analysis: classifying the submission as opposing, supporting, or taking no clear position on the bill, tagging the reasons it raised, and noting any way the submitter described themselves. The model used was Anthropic’s Claude (Sonnet 5), working to a fixed, neutral instruction set. Every submission was classified, the totals were then independently recomputed from the labels as a cross-check, and the results were spot-checked by a person.
How to read the figures: the headline percentage is the share of submissions that took a clear position, opposing or supporting, and excludes those with no clear position. Because one submission can raise several reasons, the percentages shown under each heading are shares of that side and can add up to more than 100%. Quotes are anonymised and shown only after review, and organisations are counted but never named.
Disclaimer. These figures are a best-effort estimate produced by automated AI analysis, not an official or hand-counted tally. Automated classification can misread individual submissions, and the totals may differ from any official count. They are published in good faith to show the overall shape of public feedback and should be read as an estimate, not an exact record.
Updates
- 3 August 2026
Parliament published another large batch of submissions, taking the published total from 19,040 to 22,743. We downloaded and re-analysed the full set again with Claude Sonnet 5, reading the scanned image submissions by eye. 22,739 were analysed; a handful could not be read because their files return an error on Parliament's website. Opposition is now 85.2% of submissions that took a clear position (19,245 opposed, 3,353 supported). That is down from 87.7%, because the most recently published submissions were noticeably less one-sided than the earlier ones. To be sure of the figure, we then classified every single submission a second time, completely independently: the two passes agreed on 99.7% of submissions and gave the same result to within a rounding point. The overall picture is unchanged: a large majority of submitters oppose the bill.
- 24 July 2026
Parliament published a large backlog of submissions that had been received before the deadline but not yet posted. The published total rose from 12,052 to 19,040. We downloaded and re-analysed the full set with Claude Sonnet 5, reading the scanned image submissions by eye as before. 19,035 were analysed; 5 could not be read because their files return an error on Parliament's website. Opposition is now 87.7% of submissions that took a clear position (16,615 opposed, 2,330 supported), down slightly from 89.4% because the newly published submissions were a little less one-sided. We also ran an independent accuracy check: a second AI model re-read a blind sample and agreed with the oppose or support labels about 99% of the time, and we re-checked every submission that was previously marked unclear.
- 22 July 2026
Checked the submission total against Parliament's live published record again. Nothing has changed since the last check: the total is still 12,052 submissions and opposition stays at 89.4%. No new submissions have been published and none have been withdrawn.
- 21 July 2026
Checked the submission total against Parliament's live published record again. Nothing has changed since the last check: the total is still 12,052 submissions and opposition stays at 89.4%. No new submissions have been published and none have been withdrawn.
- 19 July 2026
Checked the submission total against Parliament's live published record again. Nothing has changed since the last check: the total is still 12,052 submissions and opposition stays at 89.4%. No new submissions have been published and none have been withdrawn.
- 17 July 2026
Ran another check against Parliament's live record. Eight new submissions had been published since the deadline: seven opposed the bill and one supported it. Separately, one submission that supported the bill was withdrawn. We added the eight new submissions, removed the withdrawn one, and re-ran the full analysis with Claude Sonnet 5. The total is now 12,052 submissions, and opposition stays at 89.4%.
- 14 July 2026
Checked the submission total against Parliament's live published record. Submissions closed on 2 July 2026 and no new ones have been added since. One submission that supported the bill has since been withdrawn from Parliament's website. We have not recalculated the figures for this single change, because removing one submission out of more than 12,000 does not affect the result: opposition remains at 89.4%.
- 13 July 2026
Re-analysed every submission with a more capable AI model, upgrading from Claude Haiku 4.5 to the stronger Claude Sonnet 5. A review had found the earlier model sometimes misread long, detailed submissions that opposed the bill as if they supported it (including several organisations). The re-analysis corrected these and resolved many previously unclear submissions. The overall result barely moved: opposition went from 89.3% to 89.4%.
- 12 July 2026
- Included the submissions that were published as scanned images. Automatic reading had missed these because they contain no selectable text, so they were read directly and added to the count. Only two submissions are now left out, because their files were not available from Parliament's website.
- Corrected how a small number of submissions were read. Some had their text accidentally cut short when read automatically, so they were re-read in full and re-counted. Also confirmed the total number of submissions against Parliament's published record.
- 11 July 2026
Published the first full analysis of the public submissions on the bill: how many opposed or supported it, and the main reasons people gave.