Logie JanGENERAL DEBATEDebate resumed.JAN LOGIE (Green): Firstly I need to acknowledge the passing of a kuia of the Wellington LGBTIQ community Dana de Milo in recent days. She was one of our torch holders who created space for so many of us to walk into and she will be sorely missed by many—moe mai rā Dana.But speaking of great queens it is pride season. Pride is a time of celebration and affirmation for people who identify as gay lesbian bisexual transgender intersex takatāpui whakawahine tangata ira tāne fa'afafine fakaleiti 'akava'ine mahu vaka sa lewa lewa rae rae fiafifine fakafifine hijra gender-fluid gender-queer pansexual asexual queer and questioning.While we have come a long way as a country from when homosexuality and trans people were criminalised we are still a long way from fully realising our human rights. For many of us our moments of peace and our moments of celebration have been hard fought for so celebrations in fact are often acts of defiance as well as an expression of joy and at times they are also all too often an act of mourning.My ability to stand here open and proud of my lesbian identity comes from the bravery and political advocacy of my elders like Dana so I am proud to stand as a Green Party MP to ensure that this House and our political platform enables all the members of my community to find a strong place to stand.It's all too often that I hear about the premature death of queer and trans people—sadly mostly trans people—within my community because they could not find that place to stand. We all grieve for them and ourselves that we still live in a world where some lives seem to matter more. So in the spirit of pride I would like to draw the House's attention today to some of the work that we need to do to help provide a strong place for my community to stand.I do want to acknowledge the Minister James Shaw the Minister of Statistics for the leadership and support he is offering Statistics New Zealand to make sure that the data is collected to enable us to make our case to the Government for funding. I also want to acknowledge Pharmac for its decision to fund pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as an HIV prevention tool in the tool kit to end HIV by 2025. And I also want to celebrate the opportunity in the select committee at the moment in the Governance and Administration Committee that gives us the opportunity to create a system that ensures that changes to gender markers on official documents are easy to use consistent across passports drivers' licences and birth certificates and are based on a principle of self-identification. So progress is being made but there are still outstanding issues that we need to turn our focus to.We need to ensure that access to gender affirmation surgery and services is available in all district health boards (DHBs). A survey in 2014 of DHBs showed that nine of them said that they provided no healthcare services at all to trans people in this country. Now that is unacceptable and when we know that trans people can be waiting between 40 and 70 years to access surgery we really do have to think that maybe this appalling failure and the gulf between need and supply could only be a result of an attitude that is prejudiced and trivialising and we need to take action on this.We also need to do more work to ensure that our schools are safe and inclusive for our young people. They are unsafe at the moment and lead and contribute to high rates of suicide. There is much that we need to do to unleash the fabulosity of my community and I hope this House will help.