Government Services Minister Bill Shorten has intervened to rule out a consent form for new parents who used the term “biological parents” after a mother complained about gender-neutral language.
The minister’s decision has fueled an ongoing, often damaging, debate on the adequacy of gender-neutral terms, especially around childbirth.
Government Services Minister Bill Shorten intervened to stop the use of a form that included the genderless “maternal father” instead of the “mother”. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
In response to a report in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday morning, Shorten said he had instructed government officials to “stop” using the forms, which were part of a trial initiated at three hospitals under the previous government.
“When I was informed of this situation yesterday, I instructed the responsible officials to stop using the forms of the previous government,” Shorten tweeted on Thursday.
“They will be replaced by new forms that use the word mother, not the birth father, which is consistent with other Medicare forms.”
Medicare forms ask parents to identify themselves as the child’s “biological mother” or “biological father” or “another” with space to put their preferred term.
Former Liberal federal candidate Katherine Deves, whose anti-transgender tweets haunted the Coalition during the election campaign, was one of those who applauded Shorten, thanking him on Twitter for “defending mothers,” while LGBTQ advocates went criticize the intervention.
The controversy erupted after Sall Grover, a self-described feminist, founder of a women-only app and a podcast criticizing “gender ideology,” alerted her social media followers about the form he said he was asked to fill out after giving birth at Gold Coast University Hospital.
“Care for women in Australia: In the form to put our baby on our Medicare card, we are known as‘ birth parents ’,” Grover tweeted on Tuesday.