Noelena Tame

Noelena Tame was an Australian lawn bowler and human rights campaigner whose life links women's bowls with the early history of transgender rights in Australia. By the late 1970s she was a retiree living in Coogee, in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, and an active member of the Moore Park Women's Lawn Bowls Club. In the late 1970s or early 1980s she founded the Australian Transsexuals Association, an informal support group for trans women, and by 1981 she was running its weekly meetings at the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross. Working with the activist Roberta Perkins, she lobbied the New South Wales Attorney General for legal recognition of trans women and access to gender-affirming care, and the association staged Australia's first transgender rights rally in Manly in 1982. When her club learned that she was a trans woman, its governing body, New South Wales Bowling, ruled that her membership be revoked and banned her from state women's competitions. She stepped back from leading the association to bring a case to state and federal anti-discrimination boards, which was dismissed because the law of the time made no provision for transgender people. She appeared in the 1983 documentary Man into Woman.