Data shows The Australian Newspaper ramping up transphobic campaign

It may feel like we're seeing more articles recently in The Australian targeting trans people's access to sport, healthcare and services; and the data shows that it is the case.

A review of over 1000 articles conducted by this publication of The Australian's publishing over the past decade shows a steep increase in transphobia in the publication, paired with a real decline in trans-positive articles. The driver of this sharp change appears to be a concerted effort to highlight anti-trans voices while refusing to publish trans-positive articles.

This year, more transphobic articles have been published on News Corp Australia's national masthead than ever, with 68% (100 articles) of coverage being explicitly negative, the remaining, except for two, being neutral. The only articles that were classified as positive were an AFP syndicated story on the EU court ruling for Hungary and an entertainment piece mentioning trans women at the Oscars – both meeting the incredibly low bar for positive coverage.*

The data for this research was collected by scraping The Australian for every article containing the word transgender or its tags from The Australian's public online archive.

Alongside the increase in transphobia came a sharp increase in the articles that frame trans people as a threat to others. With 60.8% of articles in 2025 so far framing transgender people as a threat, generally to either women or children, this is compared with 5% in 2015.

The Dual Spikes

A large majority of the 2020 spike in anti-trans articles in The Australian is due to the hiring of anti-trans Substack blogger and former journalist Bernard Lane.

Bernard Lane is a former journalist who runs the anti-trans substack blog Gender Clinic News, which describes itself as "an independent newsletter with global coverage of the debate about medicalised gender change among young people."

Bernard Lane has begun writing more articles for The Australian since a hiatus in 2022-23.

This Year

More recently, the increase this year is due to a concerted effort to increase Editorial and Commentary around transgender people, with 30% of articles not containing a byline. This is paired with a large increase in reporting from Stephen Rice, the head of The Australian’s NSW bureau – this reporting has often run on the frontpage of Digital and Print.

65% of articles by Stephen Rice maliciously misgender the individuals involved or trans people more broadly.

Pieceing the re-hiring of the anti-trans substack writer Bernard Lane, with the massive increase in anti-trans reporting from the head of the NSW Bureau, this all appears as a new concerted effort from The Australian to target trans people.

Other journalists at The Australian with a clear bias against transgender people include Natasha Robinson and Jacquelin Magnay.

It's beyond clear at this point that The Australians' owners have a current campaign to target transgender people, and it'd be only fair if they were targeted back.

*The standards for positivity in this review were trans people portrayed in a positive light and not two-siding the story. One of the two stories in 2025 was syndicated from AFP, and not written by The Australian.

An earlier version of this article misattributed an AFP story to No Byline.