The Tasmanian Greens are aiming to ban practices that seek to change or suppress sexual orientation or gender identity. In a move to follow other states, the draft bill raises deeper questions about how Australia has conflated sexual orientation with gender identity, and how our collective cultural shame about past gay conversion therapy is being leveraged to reshape the sex and gender debate. WAAT has made a submission to the Greens’ consultation. Submissions close 14 August, and we encourage others to draw on our analysis and recommendations in preparing and lodging their own submissions.
Australia has good reason to be ashamed of how lesbian and gay people were treated in the past. Reports on conversion practices document aversion therapy, psychiatric abuse, religious coercion and other degrading attempts to force same-sex attracted people into conformity. Banning practices aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation is a necessary and overdue reform.
But that moral consensus has been used for a second purpose, as legislators across Australia have folded ‘gender identity’ into conversion-practices laws as though gender identity were simply another version of sexual orientation, even though the two describe very different things and raise very different questions. That is the trade at the heart of these laws: the real horror of gay conversion therapy supplies the emotional force, and gender-identity provisions are carried through on the back of it.
The guilt trade
The pattern is now national, with Queensland, the ACT, Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia all having adopted laws or frameworks that define conversion practices as conduct intended to change or suppress a person’s ‘sexual orientation or gender identity.’ And now the Tasmanian Greens’ draft bill follows the same model.
This drafting choice is presented as obvious and humane, but it is neither. Attempts to make a lesbian straight and questions about whether a distressed teenage girl believes she is transgender are not the same phenomenon, and they should not be treated as though they are morally or clinically interchangeable. Yet once the phrase ‘conversion therapy’ is invoked, many politicians and commentators stop making distinctions, because nobody wants to look like they are defending historic abuse.
That is why the guilt trade works so well. A justified public revulsion toward the persecution of homosexuals is turned into a shield against scrutiny. If a bill is framed as protecting vulnerable minorities from ‘conversion practices,’ then any attempt to separate sexual orientation from gender identity can be portrayed as cruel, retrograde or discriminatory, even where the request is simply for conceptual precision and clinically safe lawmaking.
Forced teaming
And this is where forced teaming comes in. Lesbians, gay men and bisexuals are defined by sex-based attraction; gender identity, by contrast, is a claim about an inner sense of self. Those are not the same category, and they do not produce the same political interests.
LGB Alliance UK argues that lesbians, gay men and bisexuals have been bundled together with TQI+ groups under an umbrella that blurs those differences and can work against LGB interests. LGB Alliance Australia was founded on a similar premise, stating that many mainstream LGBT organisations had shifted their focus away from same-sex attraction and toward gender identity as the organising principle. Whether or not every reader agrees with those organisations on every point, the underlying argument is no longer obscure: the coalition itself is contested under an umbrella alphabet.
Once LGB and TQI+ are treated as a single political constituency, the public is encouraged to assume that what protects one must protect all. In practice, that often means the hard-won moral authority attached to lesbian and gay struggles is used to advance claims about gender identity that are newer, less stable, and often in tension with sex-based rights.
When gender identity replaces sex as the legal category
Feminist scholarship has long distinguished sex from gender, pointing out that sex refers to biological classification, gender to the roles, norms and stereotypes societies attach to sex. That distinction helped make clear that women are not naturally inferior to men, and that sex stereotypes could be resisted rather than internalised so that women are not co-opted by men into our own subordination.
But current gender-identity politics often reverses that logic: instead of challenging stereotypes, it treats strong identification with them as evidence of an inner gendered essence. This move shifts law and policy away from sex as a material reality and toward self-declared identity as the decisive category. Once that move is written into conversion-practices law, it becomes risky to ask whether a child’s distress may relate to sexuality, trauma, autism, homophobia or discomfort with sex stereotypes rather than to an innate transgender identity.
This has real consequences for same‑sex attracted young people, as seen in data from the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service that show high rates of same‑sex or bisexual attraction among referred children and adolescents. Available clinical studies report currently small proportions of patients re‑identifying with their birth sex, but major reviews stress that long‑term detransition and regret rates remain unknown because follow‑up has been poor and definitions inconsistent. A legal framework that treats exploratory discussion as potential ‘suppression’ risks narrowing the space in which vulnerable young people can understand their sexuality without being hurried toward identity‑based conclusions.
Different harms need different laws
None of this requires minimising the past abuse of homosexual people; instead, it requires taking that history seriously enough not to misuse it. Australia can ban coercive practices aimed at changing sexual orientation without pretending that sexual orientation and gender identity are the same phenomenon, or that the same legal test is fit for both.
A sounder model would separate the two: it would ban coercive attempts to make homosexual and bisexual people heterosexual, while allowing careful, open-ended exploration for children and adults in gender distress. It would also stop using the suffering of lesbians and gays as a moral cudgel in debates about sex, gender and the protection of children.
Read our submission, below.