Transgender reform — so little change for so much good

Parliament now has the chance to make amends to Tasmanians, writes Martine Delaney

IN the next few days, Tasmania’s Upper House will debate long-overdue transgender law reform.

My plea to Legislative Council members is this: Put aside the fearmongering and the politicking. Make life for young transgender Tasmanians a little less difficult than it was for older trans folk like me.

For most of my life, being transgender was not just stigmatised, it was criminalised. Alone among the states, Tasmania made it a criminal offence for men to wear women’s clothes.

This archaic law was used to harass and prosecute transgender Tasmanians.

It also gave refuge to a host of horrible myths about transgender people being freaks, whose true motives were malicious, and who posed a threat to society.

Out of these myths arose countless acts of hate and discrimination which drove too many of us to suicide.

Now Parliament has a chance to make amends and provide young transgender people with a brighter future.

The legislation passed by the Lower House last year does four key things:

It abolishes the cruel requirement that transgender married partners must divorce, before they can have their true gender identity officially recognised on their birth certificate. It abolishes the even harsher requirement forcing transgender people to have invasive, expensive and sometimes damaging surgery before they can amend their birth certificate.

It gives transgender and gender-diverse people the choice to retain or remove the reference to gender on their birth certificate (in the case of children, parents will have the choice). And it will reinstate hate-speech protections for transgender people that were accidentally removed from the Anti-Discrimination Act a few years ago.

These reforms will only affect a tiny proportion of people, but for them the impact will be profound.

A key impact is transgender and gender-diverse people will no longer have to explain why their appearance and their identity documents tell different stories.

As the parents of trans teenagers have said, this is especially important for their children, who just want to enrol for school and apply for jobs without uncomfortable questions or downright discrimination.

The positive impact of these reforms is why the same or similar provisions have been adopted by many other western countries, were passed in the Northern Territory last year, and have been recommended by the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia and the Tasmanian AntiDiscrimination Commission.

The positive impact is why it is now possible for transgender Australians to change gender on their passports without the need for surgery, and why Tasmanian driver’s licences don’t indicate gender at all.

It bewilders me why the State Government only supports removing the divorce requirement and not the other, related provisions.

They all go together, because they remove unnecessary hurdles and foster greater tolerance.

They are all classic liberal reforms, because government shouldn’t be meddling in the lives of transgender people and arbitrarily setting the conditions under which we can be ourselves.

The Government says the legislation is badly drafted and the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute needs to conduct more consultation. Unlike most bills, the transgender legislation has been through several review processes involving both houses of Parliament, legislative experts, parliamentary draftspeople and independent statutory officers.

My fear is that when the Government says “further consultation”, it actually means “further delay”, given its refusal to commit to acting on any of the Law Reform Institute’s recommendations.

The Government also says the reforms are unpopular, but I have found most Tasmanians agree with them when they are explained properly.

This is consistent with Tasmania’s Yes vote in the 2017 postal survey, which was above the national average despite all the antitransgender fearmongering by the No campaign.

Tasmanians are not bigots and want the best for their fellow citizens, including their fellow transgender citizens.

If the Upper House doesn’t seize the opportunity before it, it may be many years before the opportunity comes again.

In the meantime, people who just want to get on with their lives will be subject to more unnecessary discrimination, hatred – or worse. It’s time for MPs to look beyond the politics of this issue, to the people who stand before them asking only to be treated with dignity and respect. It’s time for us to shed our dark past, in the name of a brighter future for all Tasmanians.

Martine Delaney is a long-time transgender rights advocate and is spokesperson for Transforming Tasmania. Lifeline has 24-hour support 13 11 14.