Genspect Australia has made a submission to the Tasmanian Greens’ consultation on the draft Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill 2026 (Tas).
Our submission raises serious concerns about the Bill’s potential impact on clinical practice, families and people experiencing gender-related distress. In particular, we argue that the proposed legislation risks restricting careful, exploratory care while embedding a contested approach to gender-related healthcare into law.
Our Executive Summary is reproduced below, with the full submission available to download.
Executive Summary
This Bill will freeze into law a treatment model for gender dysphoria and incongruence that requires acceptance of a young person’s stated gender identity as settled, and will foreclose exploration of what else may be driving the distress.
Advocates present “gender-affirming care” as the compassionate response to gender dysphoria and incongruence, and treat clinical caution as itself a form of conversion practice. Acceptance of a stated identity overlooks the complex factors often bound up with a young person’s distress, including comorbidities such as depression, autism and trauma, difficulty accepting same-sex attraction, and strong social influences. The gender model can fix in place something that may still be evolving, propelling a young person onto medical pathways whose physical effects are irreversible, and leave the original distress unaddressed.
This Bill includes carve-outs that in theory allow some health practitioners to treat gender dysphoria in ways that mitigate these risks. But the Bill also sets out interpretive principles that require a person’s gender identity to be treated as settled and not open to clinical assessment, and that undermine each of the carve-outs.
New criminal offences and a civil complaint-and-investigation scheme reach into the ordinary clinical and family conversations the carve-outs no longer protect. The civil scheme rests on the unproven premise that cautious care is a form of identity harm rather than a treatment decision. The effect, whether or not any prosecution or investigation ever occurs, will be to drive the cautious, exploratory alternative treatment out of clinical practice in Tasmania, and expose to investigation parents who decline to affirm a stated identity or who seek exploratory therapy for a distressed child.
Genspect Australia urges the Tasmanian Parliament and Government to reject this Bill and the assumptions beneath it. The better course is no Bill of this kind at all; at a minimum, Tasmania should return to the more careful 2024 draft. Beyond that, the emerging evidence about the medicalisation of vulnerable young people should prompt serious attention to what is driving that distress, our responsibilities to those harmed by these interventions, and how professionals willing to offer careful exploratory care can be sustained.