John Howard’s government legislated that marriage must be ‘the union of a man and a woman’, but excluded any reference to birth gender
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John Howard was given the option of adding extra words to his 2004 Marriage Act amendment that would have limited transgender people’s ability to marry by making eligibility based on gender at birth, but chose not to pursue it.
Cabinet papers from 2004, released by the National Archives, show the Howard government was advised it could go beyond the formal definition of marriage it ultimately enshrined in law, and stipulate that a couple must have been born male and female respectively to be allowed to marry.
