Email to the Tasmanian Minister for Health, Bridget Archer, dated 16 August 2026
Dear Minister Archer,
I am writing on behalf of Women Speak Tasmania to ask you to reconsider the clinical governance and guidelines underpinning the Tasmanian Gender Service (TGS), following new developments concerning the evidentiary basis of guidance issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
On 6 May 2026, Women Speak Tasmania wrote to you raising concerns about clinical governance, the quality of evidence, informed consent, data transparency and the Tasmanian Government’s duty of care to children and adolescents receiving puberty suppression and gender-affirming hormones.
In your response of 11 June 2026, you advised that the Tasmanian Gender Service is consistent with current Australian standards and that the Tasmanian Government would closely monitor the NHMRC’s national review.
Since then, significant questions have emerged concerning the evidentiary basis of WPATH’s Standards of Care.
According to The Australian on 15 August 2026, lawyers representing WPATH told a United States court that statements in its Standards of Care are “opinions about what conclusions existing scientific research supports” and described transgender healthcare as an area of “significant medical debate”.
This raises an important question for Tasmania.
If the Tasmanian Gender Service is considered consistent with current Australian standards, and those standards have been substantially influenced by WPATH-derived guidance, what assessment has the Tasmanian Government made of the evidentiary foundations of those standards in light of this development?
The NHMRC review is welcome. However, the Australian Government has stated that interim advice on puberty suppression is expected in 2026, while the development of the final national guidelines will take considerably longer.
Children currently receiving treatment cannot wait for the completion of a future review. The Government therefore has a responsibility to consider whether appropriate safeguards are in place now.
Women Speak Tasmania respectfully asks you to:
- Commission an independent clinical governance review of the Tasmanian Gender Service, including referral pathways, assessment processes, informed consent, treatment criteria, multidisciplinary arrangements and follow-up;
- Implement transparent and centralised data collection on referrals, treatments, adverse events and longer-term outcomes;
- Publish clear informed-consent requirements setting out both the potential benefits and the limitations and uncertainties in the available evidence;
- Strengthen safeguarding for vulnerable children and adolescents, including consideration of psychological health, developmental history and significant co-existing mental-health difficulties; and
- Consider interim safeguards while the NHMRC review proceeds, including whether Tasmania should adopt a more cautious approach to new Stage 1 and Stage 2 treatment for minors.
Other Australian jurisdictions have already taken more precautionary approaches. Queensland currently restricts new patients under 18 from commencing Stage 1 or Stage 2 treatment for gender dysphoria in its public hospital services. The Northern Territory has stated that hormone treatments, including puberty blockers, are not available in its public health system.
We therefore ask the Tasmanian Government to explain why Tasmania should continue with its current approach while the national evidence review remains underway.
As we stated in our May correspondence, we are not asking the Government to resolve every aspect of a complex and contested medical debate. We are asking whether the safeguards applied to vulnerable children are sufficiently robust when the evidence remains contested and interventions may have significant and potentially lifelong consequences.
Children should not have to wait until 2028 for governments to investigate whether the clinical model being applied to them is adequately supported by evidence.
We would appreciate your response to the matters raised above and would welcome the opportunity to meet with you or your department to discuss them further.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Elizabeth Caballero
Retired General Practitioner
President | Women Speak Tasmania
Response from the Tasmanian Minister for Health, Bridget Archer, dated 19 August 2026
