One Nation senator calls parental support of trans children 'abuse'

In August 2025, Senator Tyron Whitten sat down for an interview at Parliament House with a YouTube channel called Billboard Battalion. The conversation turned to a moment the host claimed to have witnessed: a Parliament House attendant thanking a group of schoolchildren for their patience, then thanking them again for allowing her to call them "boys and girls." It was, the host suggested, a small victory in what he saw as a larger cultural battle. Whitten leaned into the sentiment. "There's male, there's female, and then there's mental illness," he said. When the host pressed further, Whitten went further still. Parents who support children identifying as transgender, he argued, are committing child abuse. "You're going to be a boy or you're going to be a girl," he said. "And parents that are promoting this, I think that's child abuse."

Whitten is not alone in his party. Guardian Australia has documented a pattern of inflammatory statements from One Nation senators about transgender Australians. Malcolm Roberts, Pauline Hanson's longtime political partner, told a podcast in June that the idea of gender transition represents a "complete distortion of science." In cruder terms on a YouTube interview, he said: "If you cut off your dick … you're not a woman." Hanson herself, speaking with former AFL identity Sam Newman in March 2024, called transgender issues "this transgender crap" and claimed children were undergoing "life-changing operations that destroy their lives, ending up like vegetables, just destroyed, locked away in their bedrooms."

The statements rest on a factual foundation that does not hold. Australian law prohibits most gender-affirming surgeries for people under 18 in the public health system. The only exception is breast reduction surgery for trans men, and only in extreme circumstances. Hormone treatment and puberty blockers—which are reversible—require parental consent and professional assessment, or a court order. The Australian Human Rights Commission notes that around 2 to 3 percent of young Australians aged 11 to 18 identify as transgender or gender diverse. Research from the youth advocacy group Minus18, cited by the AHRC, found that 9 in 10 LGBTQIA+ young people reported experiencing bullying or violence because of their identity, leaving many feeling isolated and unsupported.

When contacted for response, Whitten, Hanson, and One Nation's head office did not reply. The party has faced other recent controversies on the same terrain. Parminder Singh, who was third on One Nation's ticket for the Western Australian legislative council in 2025, told a YouTube interviewer that being gay is "a mental illness." Hanson distanced herself from Singh's comments, saying he was not standing for the party and that his views were not hers. Barnaby Joyce, speaking to the ABC, said he did not concur with Singh's views, and pointed to James Ashby, One Nation's party director, as evidence of the party's openness to LGBTQ+ people. "I think we're one of the gayest parties in Australia," Joyce said.

Anna Brown, CEO of Equality Australia, framed the statements as part of a deliberate political strategy. "Targeting one of Australia's smallest and most marginalised communities isn't just unfair, it fuels division, creates confusion and causes real harm," she said. Trans people make up less than 1 percent of the Australian population, yet they are being forced to carry the weight of what she called a divisive and cruel culture war. The community already experiences disproportionately high rates of discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Brown suggested that some politicians are manufacturing fear and division by exploiting unfamiliarity with trans people—turning minorities into political targets as a way to generate attention and relevance. The question now is whether these statements will shift the political conversation around transgender rights in Australia, or whether they will deepen the isolation already felt by young people navigating their identities in a country where the law has recognized trans rights for decades, but where those rights remain contested in the public sphere.