At Women Speak Tasmania, we never stop speaking up for the safety and dignity of women—especially those in vulnerable situations like female prisons. Protecting women’s spaces means making sure policy and law are grounded in reality, not ideology. Recently, we wrote to Deputy Premier, Attorney General and Minister for Justice Guy Barnett with a simple but important question: How is rape crime data recorded in Tasmania?
Why does this matter? Because if we can’t see the truth in the numbers, we can’t address the real problem. When crimes like rape are recorded by “gender” instead of sex, the statistics become blurred, and women’s experiences are hidden. That’s why we were encouraged by Mr Barnett’s reply confirming that in Tasmania,
“it is the sex of accused people and complainants that is recorded, not the gender.”
This is more than just good record-keeping—it’s common sense. Accurate sex-based data is essential for understanding sexual violence, protecting victims, and creating effective policy. As far as we know, Tasmania is the only state or territory in Australia taking this approach, and we believe it sets an important example.
We’ll keep meeting with both state and federal ministers to push for sex to be clearly recognised as a protected characteristic under anti-discrimination law, and for the correct definition of sex to be upheld in the federal Sex Discrimination Act. The ongoing confusion between sex and gender continues to erode human rights protections for women, children, and the wider community—and that’s something we won’t stop challenging.