A protest against drag story time in Launceston…a motion against trans-inclusive facilities at the Hobart Aquatic Centre…a discrimination case seeking to exclude trans women from a women’s only event in Launceston…a Hobart Town Hall meeting seeking to exclude trans women from women’s sport and services…a bill from a Tasmanian senator trying to exclude trans women from women’s sport…vandalism of the trans flag flying from Hobart Town Hall…a meeting in Parliament House condemning a ban on trans conversion practices…

That is a short, incomplete list of organised attacks on equality and inclusion for trans and gender diverse Tasmanians in the last three years.

There have been more attacks in Tasmania than in all the other states and territories combined. What’s more these attacks are becoming more frequent and arguably angrier.

Many of the activists and organisations pushing against trans inclusion in Tasmania are from interstate or overseas. Yes, the people whose name you see in the newspaper, like Isla MacGregor and Jessica Hoyle, live here. But the Town Hall meeting in February last year had more continental speakers than Tasmanians. Continental groups like Binary, the Coalition for Biological Reality and the Feminist Legal Clinic are actively involved in Tasmanian anti-trans campaigns. There is also significant interest in Tasmania from groups in the US, where the anti-trans movement sprung up as a backlash to marriage equality from the religious right, and in the UK where anti-trans activism by some feminists is well established.

Given all this, it’s natural to ask why is Tasmania the target? What in our laws and history attracts the attention of the global anti-trans movement? What has been done to challenge the attacks? And what more should we do to protect and uplift trans and gender diverse Tasmanians?

Tasmania’s progressive laws

One obvious reason for Tasmania’s trans attacks is that our state has the best anti-discrimination and gender recognition laws for trans and gender diverse people in Australia and arguably the world.

The Anti-Discrimination Act protects all Tasmanians from discrimination on the basis of gender identity. There are no exemptions as there are, or recently were, in other states.

Our gender recognition laws allow trans and gender diverse people to self-identify without any medical gate-keeping. They even allow individual Tasmanians the choice to remove gender from their birth certificate altogether.

Opponents of trans inclusion don’t hide their hate for this legal regime. They say it means biological men can access women’s spaces and services to prey on women and girls, and there’s nothing that can done to stop them.

But the major flaw in their argument is that this hasn’t happened. In the 25 years since the Anti-Discrimination Act was passed and the five years since our gender recognition laws were adopted, there are no examples of cisgender men or trans women using those laws to perpetrate crimes.

There are plenty of examples of trans and gender diverse people facing discrimination and assault, but the reverse is vanishingly rare.

This is probably why opponents of trans inclusion have begun to manufacture incidents that never happened.

An example is a recent letter to The Launceston Examiner about a ‘biological man’ who identified as a woman getting changed in front of young girls at the Launceston Aquatic Centre, and a father of one of the girls being banned from the Centre because he removed the man. The Launceston City Council publicly stated no such incident ever occurred and The Examiner retracted the letter.

There is so little hard evidence for the anti-trans fear campaign, proponents of that campaign have resorted to making it up.

The lack of hard evidence behind Tasmania’s anti-trans campaign casts light on why proponents of that campaign are attacking Tasmania’s progressive laws.

It’s not so much the existence of these laws that irritates anti-trans activists, it’s that these laws have not unleashed the dire consequences they predicted. Our laws expose the ideologically-driven anti-trans fear-campaign to be so much hot air.

To the High Court

Anti-trans campaigners aren’t just decrying Tasmania’s laws, they’re trying to overturn them.

One way they have done this is to push state and federal politicians to water the state’s laws down. Some of them see Tasmania as a soft touch because we have a Liberal government. Some are trying to stir up division within the Liberal Party, using trans issues as a platform for the party’s social conservatives to drag down liberal Liberals like Jeremy Rockliff and Bridget Archer.

But the only chance legislative change has is for there to be a government bill and Jeremy Rockliff shows no sign of allowing this to happen. He has been a strong defender of LGBTIQA+ equality and as long as he is Premier legislation is unlikely.

That is why some groups like the Feminist Legal Clinic are taking the judicial path. They are working with Jessica Hoyle to gain an exemption from the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act to allow trans women to be excluded from a lesbian event in Launceston.

Jessica Hoyle has been turned down twice, once by the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner and then by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

But that hasn’t stopped her. Indeed, from the start she has said she intends to go all the way to the High Court. The strategy is obviously to get a case before the High Court arguing that Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act ‘violates’ Australia’s international obligations to protect women’s human rights and that federal legislation is therefore required to override the Tasmanian Act.

It’s extremely disappointing that a feminist organisation together with a Tasmanian lesbian advocate would seek to weaken Tasmania’s gold-standard Anti-Discrimination Act.

That Act has already faced so many enemies, from the Morrison Government trying to weaken its anti-bullying protections for LGBTIQA+ people, women, ethnic minorities and people with disability, to bishops wanting to remove the Act’s discrimination protections for students and teachers in faith-based schools who are LGBTIQA+, in unmarried heterosexual relationships or pregnant.

Those enemies also spoke about international human rights obligations, in particular the obligation to protect ‘religious freedom’, even though repeated inquiries have found no threat to that freedom in Australia.

It is remarkable that feminists and same-sex attracted people take the same side as those who want to increase discrimination against LGBTIQA+ people and women by weakening the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act.

The Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act has helped make Tasmania a better place for women, for LGBTIQA+ people and for many other social groups burdened with discrimination.

We must all do what we can to defend it from those who would weaken it, including those who speak disingenuously about ‘human rights’.

Convictism, the gender binary and colonialism in Tasmania

History is never far away in Tasmania, not least when it comes to trans and gender diverse equality and inclusion.

Tasmania was the only state that criminalised cross-dressing. Until 2000 it was illegal for a man to dress in any item of women’s clothing between sunset and sunrise.

That law seems laughable now, but it was used to stigmatise, harass and arrest trans women.

The justifications for the old law were thus: dressed as women, men were more able to subvert the established order (think of the Molly Maguires in Ireland and Rebeccas in Wales), perpetrate crime, evade law enforcement (think of Ned Kelly’s father Red and brother Dan), pick up drunken sailors or assault women.

Sound familiar? They are much the same as the reasons given for excluding trans women today.

Like anti-trans campaigners today, the old law and its defenders sought to demonise and erase trans identity by associating it with crime, degeneracy and, above all, duplicity and deceit.

Tasmania’s former cross-dressing laws were a symptom of a bigger problem.

In the nineteenth century, the British state imposed a strict gender binary on the tens of thousands of convicts it incarcerated in Tasmania and used as a cheap, coerced labour force.

This binary was essential to turning convicts, many from rural, pre-modern backgrounds where gender and its relationship to labour was understood very differently to today, into an efficient, predictable, controlled, industrial-age work force where labour was strictly organised on the basis of biological sex.

To impose their gender ideology, the British authorities stirred up moral panics about male absconders or bushrangers who dressed as women to evade the law, and male convicts who dressed as women to maintain ‘unnatural relationships’ with other male convicts.

The anti-transportationists pointed to the same examples of gender transgression in their successful campaign against convictism.

The upshot was a Tasmanian psyche that associated gender non-conformity with the hated stain of convictism and clung to the gender binary as a sign as respectability.

Throwing off the strict, industrial-age gender binary is a part of decolonising Tasmania. It is essential to reaching our full potential as a free, just, confident society.

That is what we have begun to do with the decriminalisation of cross-dressing and our gold-standard anti-discrimination and gender recognition laws.

The last thing Tasmania needs are anti-trans advocates, from the UK, US or the Australian continent, reviving the flawed, gendered legacy of colonialism.

This is precisely what happened in Scotland earlier this year when a gender self-identity law was passed by the parliament in Edinburgh but vetoed by London without any warning.

A subsequent controversy about trans people in Scottish prisons was weaponised as a rationale for the override. In all the fuss opponents of trans equality lost sight of the fact the new law hadn’t passed and self-identification was not the problem.

Irish feminists are particularly alert to the coalescence of neo-colonialism and trans exclusion.

In an open letter to anti-trans campaigners in the UK who plan meetings in the Irish Republic, Irish feminists who support trans inclusion noted how little interest British feminists had taken in the long, hard struggle of Irish women for dignity and equality.

Then they declared,

“Stay away from Ireland. We have had enough of colonialism without needing more of it from you.”

Tasmanians who support trans inclusion should send the same message to people like UK anti-trans campaigner, Kelly Jay Keen, when she travels to Tasmania to speak outside Parliament later in March.

Challenging the anti-trans campaign in a way that will continue to make Tasmania better for trans people

The response to growing anti-trans activism from the Tasmanian trans, LGBTIQA+ and allied communities has been exemplary.

We have turned out for trans inclusion in far greater numbers than those against such inclusion. In February last year, 250 people rallied outside an anti-trans meeting in the Hobart Town Hall that only 80 people attended. In Launceston in February this year, 70 people turned out to welcome parents and children to trans story time compared to ten who were there to oppose it.

We have successfully demonstrated that cis and trans women stand shoulder-to-shoulder in defence of fundamental rights, not in opposition to each other. Women’s legal, health and family violence services have spoken out about how their services are inclusive of trans women and oppose the politics of exclusion. Cisgender women, queer and heterosexual, have done the same.

Amidst all this, trans and gender diverse Tasmanians have found ways to support each other and to continue to make progress.

Despite, and perhaps partly because of, the confected moral panic propagated by anti-trans advocates, Tasmania has appointed its first ever trans woman to the state’s Women’s Honour Role (Martine Delaney), elected its first ever trans woman to local government (Jade Darko) and has its first ever trans man as the top advocate for our community sector (Dr Charlie Burton).

But the attacks on trans and gender diverse rights are clearly not about to end, so we must do more to see them off.

We need more trans and gender diverse people and their families to speak out about the benefits of Tasmania’s anti-discrimination and gender recognition laws. This will be the foundation of a positive narrative with which to combat the negative.

We also need to hear more Tasmanian civic and religious leaders speak out in support of our trans and gender diverse community. It is not fair that so much of the advocacy for inclusion and equity is required of trans and gender diverse people themselves. It is time others helped shoulder that burden.

Just as important, supporters of trans inclusion and equality must maintain the calm composure and optimism that has seen us continue to win hearts and minds across Tasmania.

As anti-trans activists continue to lose the battle for public support some will grow angrier and more aggressive. Employing the kind of slurs that were thrown around at the Launceston drag story time event, they will try to provoke supporters of inclusion into ugly exchanges and worse.

A response in kind will drive away those Tasmanians yet to be convinced that inclusion matters. It will make life harder for young trans and gender diverse people yet to find their community.

I understand it is difficult for trans and gender diverse people to remain hopeful in the face of so much hostility. I remind my trans and gender diverse friends that Tasmania overcame intense hatred and cruelty towards LGBTIQA+ people in the 1980s and 90s to become a much more inclusive place. If we did it then we can do it again.

*     *     *     *     *

The struggle for trans inclusion and equality is a Tasmanian struggle, a struggle against those who think Tasmanians are weak and easily led, those who see us as a blank slate upon which to write their dark ideology, those who would set us against each other for their own tawdry political purposes, those who see us as colonial recalcitrants to be pulled into line, and those who want to dowse the beacon we have lit for the entire world.

If you feel proud of how far Tasmania has come then join me and others in standing against exclusion, for trans and gender diverse inclusion and for a better Tasmania.

Further reading

Vandalism of the transgender flag flying from Hobart Town Hall
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-23/transgender-flags-vandalised-at-hobart-town-hall/100643254

Pro-trans vigil outside Hobart Town Hall much larger that anti-trans meeting
https://www.themercury.com.au/news/politics/antitrans-feminists-outnumbered-by-protrans-counterrally/news-story/338e3b0c9ffe3a74a378f657827be901

Drag Story Time supporters outnumber opponents in Launceston
https://www.examiner.com.au/story/8086660/anti-lgbtqia-protesters-clash-with-drag-welcoming-party/

Scotland overridden by Westminster on transgender self-identification
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-64264063

Irish feminists issue warning to British anti-trans campaigners
https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-feminists-warn-away-british-terfs

Ten Days on the Island performers “Qwerin” inspired by traditional folk dancers, queer nightclub music, and the 18th century farmers who wore women’s clothing to foment rebellion.

https://www.abc.net.au/hobart/programs/your-afternoon/qwerin-interview/102065230

Tasmanian cis and trans women stand shoulder to shoulder
https://tasmaniantimes.com/2022/02/response-to-senator-chandlers-trans-exclusion-bill/