Tasmania makes the gender marker optional
A casting vote against her own party made Tasmania a pioneer on gender markers in 2019.
On 10 April 2019, Tasmania made Australian legal history. The island state's parliament passed a law that made the gender marker on birth certificates optional. No other Australian state or territory had gone that far before.
The reform went beyond the birth certificate. Trans people no longer had to undergo surgery to change their legal gender. Anyone aged sixteen or over could in future have the entry changed without parental consent.
The road there was rocky. The bill was actually a revision of marriage law. Labor and the Greens built improvements for trans people into it, and the upper house then substantially reworked the text. The conservative government of Premier Will Hodgman remained opposed to the end. It considered the law badly drafted and warned of unintended consequences. Prime Minister Scott Morrison had already dismissed the idea the year before as "ridiculous".
The deciding vote came, of all people, from a Liberal. Speaker Sue Hickey went against her own government and cleared the way with her vote in the lower house. It was not a victory for a party, she said, but a gain in dignity for the trans community.
Activist Martine Delaney, a defining voice of the movement for years, spoke of a historic day. She had never been prouder to be Tasmanian. Parents' groups were pleased that their children could in future grow up without legal disadvantage. The Christian lobby, by contrast, immediately demanded that the law be withdrawn.
It did not succeed. A few months later, the law came into force. Since then, for many young trans people in Tasmania, life begins with a document that does not contradict them.