Book event

Sex, Gender & Identity: Trans Rights in Australia | Paula Gerber in Conversation

These days, barely a week goes by without pointed media stories about the trans community, usually targeting trans women. They are likely to have a sensationalist headline and a salacious tone, and the writing is often ill-informed and vilifying. Favoured topics include women in sports, bathrooms, where prisoners are housed, and health care for trans and gender-diverse children and young people.

What tends not to be reported is the abuse, assaults and online hate that have become a daily experience for trans women, and the bullying that trans kids experience at school. Some of this is due to the ripple effects of the animosity spewed out by the so-called ‘leader of the free world’. From the early days of his campaign for a second term as US president, Donald Trump has had the trans community in his sights, and he now appears intent on denying their very existence. But a broader dynamic seems to be a deep-seated intolerance, if not loathing, of trans people in our society.

Why are trans people so hated? Why have they become contemporary ‘villains’ and the target of so much prejudice and bigotry? And most importantly, how do we change this? Is it possible to move from blaming, shaming and excluding trans people to respecting, protecting and including them? These questions are at the heart of Sex, Gender & Identity: Trans Rights in Australia, alongside the goal of increasing community-wide understanding of this much maligned minority.

Paula Gerber combines a sharp legal intellect with passionate advocacy to fight for the dismantling of discriminatory systems around the globe. She is a law professor at Monash University, and an internationally renowned expert on human rights law and LGBTQIA+ people. Paula has written and edited numerous books and articles on human rights issues, and she is regularly featured in the Australian media, including on ABC television and radio, and on The Conversation. She has also developed the website https://antigaylaws.org, basically the Google Maps of global LGBTQIA+ legal landscapes. Paula is the Chair of Kaleidoscope Human Rights Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that advocates for better protection of the rights of LGBTQIA+ people in the Asia-Pacific region, where many countries continue to persecute trans and gender-diverse people and criminalise same-sex sexual conduct.

Rodney Croome has been a champion of LGBTQIA+ rights throughout Australia for more than two decades and was Tasmanian Australian of the Year 2015. Rodney has supported a number of high-profile transgender discrimination cases, campaigned against transgender forced divorce and for trans blood donation, and was instrumental in the passage of Tasmania’s world-class gender self-identification laws in 2019.

Martine Delaney has been many things. As an LGBTI advocate and lobbyist, she was a founding member of Australian Marriage Equality, and played a role in successfully lobbying for easier access to helpful passports for trans and gender-diverse Australians. For over fifteen years, she led a Tasmanian campaign which resulted in world-leading reforms on birth certificate legislation. Along the way, Martine’s also been the world’s first person to play both men’s and women’s first division football (the World game, not that silly AFL thing), a stand-up comic, briefly dead, a ghost tour guide, a book in the Hobart Human Library and a Greens candidate in a Federal election. She’s also the first trans woman to be added to the Tasmanian government’s Honour Roll of Women. All while, with her partner of  twenty-one years, raising a child who – eighteen years ago – was abandoned at their home as a six-week-old baby. Nowadays, she finds herself a successfully-emerging screenwriter – and, apparently, the only Tasmanian to have written on an Emmy-nominated series.

Join Paula, Rodney and Martine at the Afterword Cafe.