BA (Hons) (MQ) 1981
Roberta Sally Perkins, born 30 April 1940, was a sociologist, writer and activist who was a trailblazer in the fight for transgender rights and sex work decriminalisation in New South Wales. She established the first assistance center for transgender people in Australia, which later became the Gender Centre and was a founding member of a sex work advocate group that evolved into the Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP) NSW. Roberta completed an honours thesis at Macquarie University in 1981 which surveyed experiences of drag queens and trans people and was one of the first theses by an openly transgender woman in Australia. Roberta worked at UNSW in the School of Sociology in the 1990s and 2000s. A staunch activist for the communities of which she was a part, she published several books and multiple papers on the experiences of transgender sex workers.
