Major Newspaper Cuts Ties With Columnist Over Gender Identity Issue

Pro-women protesters (left) and transgender rights protesters (right) gather outside Parliament House in Melbourne on March 18, 2023. James Ross/AAP Image

The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, has ended its relationship with columnist Julie Szego over a feature story about youth gender identity disorders.

According to Szego, she had been commissioned to write a 5,000-word feature article on the issue, but the current editor, Patrick Elligett, refused to run it.

Szego revealed that Elligett had described her piece as “good,” but it could not be published under her name because she had taken a position on gender issues in her opinion writing.

“To say that sex is real and it matters, makes you ‘biased’ apparently. Or, according to [Victorian Labor Premier] Daniel Andrews, a bigot,” she wrote on Twitter on June 11.

The writer has published the piece on her substack account while also complaining about tensions in the editorial room over transgender reporting.

In this photo illustration, The Age newspaper is seen on October 21, 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

“I’ll be writing about gender identity politics more broadly—without the copy being rendered unreadable by a committee of woke journalists redacting words they deem incendiary, such as ’male,'” she wrote on Twitter on June 6.

Szego later revealed it was this comment that spurred The Age to end their relationship, according to The Australian newspaper, a News Corp-owned competitor.

She also said that she was compelled to speak publicly because of the “fallout” from a women’s rights rally in Melbourne, which Szego attended as a reporter.

“Being effectively branded a Nazi by no less than the premier. And no journo on the left calls him out or asks him to justify his government’s policies,” she wrote.

Szego is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to The Age and its sister media outlets, which are now owned by the Nine Entertainment Group.

The Epoch Times has contacted The Age’s editor, Elligett, who declined to comment for this story.

In the meantime, Elligett has said he provided an explanation to Szergo over why her article was not published and said The Age would continue reporting on the transgender issue with “balance, nuance, and accuracy.”

“It is an issue many of our competitors will not touch,” he told The Australian.

Szergo’s Feature on Youth Gender Transition

Szergo’s feature covered the individual stories of young people seeking gender transition and the drag queen storytime controversy. It also revealed that Australian gender clinics had seen a spike in patients during the pandemic.

“It is the same story throughout the West; gender services struggling to keep pace with surging demand,” she wrote. “Amid the turbulence, Australia emerged as a world leader in youth gender medicine.”

Szergo found that in 2021, the gender clinic at Victoria’s Royal Children’s Hospital received 800 referrals, and in 2022 that number was 1,000.

While the gender service at the Queensland Children’s Hospital received 241 referrals in 2019, and by 2021 that number had jumped to 635 referrals.

This comes after an in-depth article by The Epoch Times revealed a 100 percent increase in the number of young Americans (13-17) identifying as transgender between 2017 to 2022.

“A rise this dramatic is most certainly due to indoctrination,” said Dr. Michelle Cretella in an interview with The Epoch Times.

“American society has been increasingly indoctrinating our youth into transgender beliefs since 2013 through all forms of media, including books for children and young adults, music, radio, TV, movies, internet, social media, and apps like TikTok,” Cretella said.

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• IN-DEPTH: Researchers Find Explosion of Youth Gender Dysphoria Over the Last Decade

Women’s Rally Raises Awareness of Transgender Controversy

In March, UK women’s rights advocate Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (Posie Parker) headlined a rally in Melbourne over self-identifying transgender biological men entering women’s spaces—like bathrooms and professional sports.

However, the event was met by LGBTIA+ counter-protestors and gatecrashed by a small group of supposed neo-Nazis.

Police remove a protester during a transgender rights rally, involving opposing neo-Nazi protesters, outside Parliament House in Melbourne, Australia, on March 18, 2023. James Ross/AAP Image

The fallout saw the Victorian Premier Andrews and media commentators smear the women’s rights advocates with neo-Nazism and the premier expressing solidarity with the LGBT+ movement.

“Because we‘ll always respect you. And we’ll always have your back,” he wrote on Twitter while ordering the transgender flag be raised in front of a government building.

At the same time, the Victorian Liberal Party is still dealing with the fallout from state opposition leader John Pesutto’s decision to suspend fellow MP Moira Deeming over her attendance at the rally.

Deeming has lodged a defamation action against Pesutto, saying he accused her of being a Nazi sympathiser.