LGBT rights in Tasmania
| LGBT rights in Tasmania | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Same-sex sexual activity legal? | Always legal for women; legal for men since 1997 |
| Gender identity/expression | Change of sex marker on birth certificate requires divorce if married and sexual reassignment surgery |
| Discrimination protections | Yes, since 1999 under state law and since 2013 under federal law |
| Family rights | |
| Recognition of relationships |
Registered relationships since 2003; same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions recognised since 2010 |
|
Restrictions:
|
Same-sex marriage prohibited under federal law since 2004; see History of same-sex marriage in Australia |
| Adoption | Full LGBT adoption rights since 2013 |
The Australian state of Tasmania has a transformative history with respect to the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Initially dubbed "Bigots Island" by international media due to intense social and political hostility to LGBT rights up until the late 1990s, the state has subsequently been recognised for LGBT law reforms that have been described by activists such as Rodney Croome as among the most extensive and noteworthy in the world. Tasmania imposed the harshest penalties in the Western world for homosexual activity until 1997, when it was the last Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise homosexuality after a United Nations Human Rights Committee ruling, the passage of federal sexual privacy legislation and a High Court challenge to the state's anti-homosexuality laws. Following decriminalisation, social and political attitudes in the state rapidly shifted in favour of LGBT rights ahead of national trends with strong anti-LGBT discrimination laws introduced in 1999 and Tasmania becoming the first Australian state to introduce a relationship registration scheme to include same-sex couples in 2003.
Sodomy was originally outlawed throughout the island from the time of British settlement. The law was retained post federation as in all other Australian jurisdictions. Tasmania was the last British Empire outpost to carry out the death penalty for sodomy in 1867. In the subsequent hundred years Tasmania had the highest rate of imprisonment for private consenting male sex anywhere in the world. In the late 1980s Premier Robin Gray stated that homosexuals were unwelcome in Tasmania and police recorded the vehicle registration plates of people attending gay community meetings. A gay rights stall set up in Salamanca Market in 1988 was repeatedly shut down by Hobart City Council with organisers arrested by police. By the early 1990s the state had the harshest penalty for gay sex in the Western world at 21 years imprisonment. During the 1980s and early 1990s six attempts at decriminalisation were emphatically rejected by the Tasmanian Legislative Council, with politician Robert Archer calling for homosexuals to be "tracked down and wiped out" by police. Social and political opinion remained sharply against LGBT rights until the late 1990s. Many LGBTI Tasmanians responded to the hostile sentiment by either relocating to the mainland Australian cities of Sydney or Melbourne, living in the closet or committing suicide.
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