It all started with a screenshot and a little curiosity.
A follower sent Women Speak Tasmania a screenshot of the successful applicants for the Tasmanian Government’s LGBTIQA+ Grants Program 2025. One entry immediately stood out: Women’s Health Tasmania received $30,000 for a project titled “Re-defining Change: Menopause support for TGD People”.
Our curiosity was instantly piqued. What exactly did “TGD” and “re-defining change” mean when applied to menopause?
We dug into the facts. What we uncovered reveals a much bigger and more concerning picture — one of the most blatant misuses of women’s health funding by the Tasmanian Government.
The Biology They’re Trying to Redefine
Women’s Health Tasmania’s own article “5 Things to Know About Trans Menopause” explains their approach:
“Trans women don’t undergo menopause in the same way as people with ovaries, but they can still experience menopausal symptoms — especially if their estrogen therapy is paused, reduced, or stopped. This sudden hormonal drop can cause hot flushes, fatigue, emotional changes, and sleep disturbances.”
Let’s be clear on the biology: Menopause is the permanent cessation of ovarian function in biological females. Biological males (trans-identified males) do not have ovaries. Any symptoms they experience come from drug-induced endocrine disruption caused by cross-sex hormones — not menopause. Yet the Tasmanian Government is funding women’s organisations that are increasingly redefining women’s services around gender identity rather than biological sex.
The puns write themselves
Then the 2024 Grant Came to Light
A screenshot shared by One Nation Tasmania (posted on X) sent us into overdrive. It revealed that Women’s Health Tasmania had already received another $30,000 in 2024 — again the largest single grant that year — for “Shaping Women’s Services in a non-binary world”.
This raised the obvious question: When they talk about “trans and non-binary”, does that include trans-identified males?
The answer is yes.
The Real Project: The TGD Inclusion Audit Tool
The 2024 grant funded a formal partnership between Women’s Health Tasmania, Women’s Legal Service Tasmania, Engender Equality, and Hobart Women’s Shelter. Together they developed the “Shaping Women’s Services Trans and Gender Diverse (TGD) Inclusion Audit Tool” — described as a “sector-shifting framework”.
From Women’s Health Tasmania’s 2024-25 Annual Report (page 7), here is the exact wording:
“The Shaping Women’s Services project considered the question of how traditionally binary services support everyone who needs them and aimed to create a shared benchmark for trans and gender affirming practice in women’s services.”
Trans and gender diverse people (including biological males) were actively involved. The partner organisations have already used a draft of the audit tool to evaluate their own services and are committed to “lead cultural change in the women’s sector.”
This tool is not a simple language seminar. It is a comprehensive self-assessment framework covering policies, intake forms, physical environments (bathrooms, sleeping areas), staff training, risk assessments, and client participation. Its purpose is to systematically move women’s services away from sex-based (biological female-only) delivery toward full gender-identity-based inclusion of TGD people — which includes trans-identified males.
Two years. $60,000 in taxpayer grants. Four major women’s organisations. One clear direction.
What This Means for Tasmanian Women
Women’s health services, domestic violence shelters, legal support, and rape crisis centres were created to meet the specific needs and safety concerns of biological females. When these services are audited and redesigned to prioritise self-identified gender over biological sex, the original purpose is eroded.
Single-sex spaces and services exist because of well-documented patterns of male violence. Replacing sex-based boundaries with gender-identity policies creates real risks.
Similar “inclusion” policies elsewhere have led to documented cases of women being assaulted:
- In Canada, convicted sex offender Christopher Hambrook (identifying as “Jessica”) was housed in two women’s shelters and sexually assaulted female residents.
- In Toronto, a female survivor of sexual abuse was forced to share a small room in a women’s shelter with a male-bodied person identifying as a woman.
- In the UK, multiple reports from prisons and shelters document male-pattern offending by some trans-identified males placed in female facilities.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable result when sex-based safeguarding is removed.
Time for Real Protections
Tasmanian women now have the evidence in black and white — public grant lists, the annual report, and the organisations’ own words.
Now more than ever, we need proper protections for women. We need sex (biological reality) explicitly defended in Tasmania’s anti-discrimination laws and in all funding guidelines for women’s services. Single-sex spaces, services, and programs are not discrimination — they are essential safeguarding rooted in biology and the reality of sex-based violence.
Women’s Health Tasmania continues to do valuable work for biological women in many areas. However, these repeated targeted grants show a clear ideological shift: taxpayer money is being used to systematically dismantle sex-based women’s services.
The conversation has only just begun.