On Simon Harris, Ireland’s New Taoiseach

The Republic of Ireland has a new Taoiseach (Prime Minister). This follows the resignation of Leo Varadkar following the crushing defeat of his government in the two referenda it put to the people to change our country’s constitution (which I wrote about here in my last Letter from Ireland). Simon Harris, 37, replaced Varadkar as leader of the Fine Gael party which forms part of the three-party coalition which has governed Ireland since 2019. Now that coalition has chosen Harris for Taoiseach. He can expect to hold this post for about one year, after which his government will face a general election in the year 2025.

Harris is the youngest-ever Taoiseach in the history of the Irish state. He is also the first to put pronouns in his social media biography; he is a “he/him” on LinkedIn. Most concerning for those of us who oppose the advance of gender ideology in Ireland, Harris has, to date, been an enthusiastic supporter of the demands of the trans lobby. When Harris was Minister for Health between the years 2016 and 2020 we saw our health services succumb to that lobby’s stupid and often dangerous demands.

I’ll tell you first about what happened to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service on Health Minister Harris’s watch. I’m starting there because I personally managed to reverse some of the damage done to the IBTS under Harris. You can read press coverage about that here, but I’ll also tell you about it myself. It makes me happy to tell you about a victory I have had in my struggle with trans ideology and I think it’s a highly informative story that shows the influence the trans lobby has achieved within the Irish health services.

It was in April of 2022 that I went to give blood, which is something I have been doing since the year 1978 when I was 21 years old. But this time something weird and disturbing happened. When I logged on to the IBTS website, I was faced with a donor questionnaire the like of which I had never seen before. It was overwhelmed with confusing, trans-inclusive language. This question was the one I found the most incomprehensible of all: “For females (cis and transgender) and transgender males; are you pregnant or have you have you (sic) been pregnant in the past 12 months?” (The typographical error therein is, I think, significant in its own right and I’ll return to that shortly).

What was this supposed to mean? Bear in mind that the use of clear and understandable language is crucial in the doctor-patient relationship. Biology matters in medicine. Sex matters when giving blood. There are different criteria regarding the quantity of blood and permitted haemoglobin range depending if a donor is male or female. And it matters an awful lot for the safety of a recipient of blood if a potential donor has recently been pregnant. All of this is understood by the IBTS as they explain in their transgender donor guidance. But, when I wrote to them, the IBTS would not answer my query: what is a pregnant transgender male, what is a pregnant transgender female and what is the difference between them? 

As a reply, IBTS referred me to the lobby group TENI (Transgender Equality Network Ireland). When I said no to that, they then, bizarrely, disputed that any such question was on their questionnaire for donors.

So I cut and pasted the question and sent it to them. With that, the IBTS finally acknowledged their mistake and gave me an unreserved apology: 

Dear Paddy, I have reviewed the Regular Donor Blood Eligibility Quiz and can confirm this is an error in Question 10 re. pregnancy. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I have notified the relevant department and this error has been corrected on the website… Please accept my apologies for the confusion caused.

And what confusion! We in the gender-critical lobby have long argued to the medical profession that so-called “inclusive” language can be confusing to the public and dangerous. But what the IBTS showed was that there are times that the health care professionals themselves don’t understand what they are saying. This brings me back to that typographical error in which they asked “have you have you been pregnant?”. That such a gross typo could remain unnoticed in a questionnaire aimed at the public shows us that the doctors didn’t carefully consider what they were saying here, while striving to be inclusive and so on. That typo, I think, shows that the doctors simply handed over communication with the public to a trans lobby group as they were too scared to do anything else.

Even after the changes they made at my behest, the language used by IBTS is still full of confusing expressions, such as “sex assigned at birth”. And the use of that kind of language can be seen throughout our health service. In 2019, the National Screening Service for checking for cervical cancer announced that “Anyone with a cervix between the age of 25 and 65 should go for regular cervical screening”. This drew enough public odium, and ridicule, that the wording was later changed to “women and anyone with a cervix”. An improvement, but it still, I think, shows the principle at work that trans demands take precedence over the dissemination of clear and concise health information to the public.

HIV information has likewise been damaged by surrender to the trans lobby. In recent years, the Health Protection Surveillance Centre has been telling us that the number of women infected with HIV is rising, and this alleged fact has been dutifully reported by our media. But look again. The HPSC tells us, about its HIV data, that “gender is based on gender identity”. So, thanks to the biology-denying trans ideology that has captured our health service, we cannot now know how many of the people recorded as heterosexual women infected with HIV might, in truth, be gender-dysphoric men.

But it’s in the area of transgender health care that our government, and Simon Harris in particular, shows itself most in thrall to the trans lobby. The Fine Gael programme for government looks like it was written by trans activists. It pledges to “Create and implement a general health policy for Trans people, based on a best-practice model for care, in line with the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH)”. I expect regular readers of this Genspect website are well aware of the horrifying nature of WPATH practices, now being exposed by Michael Schellenberger/Mia Hughes, as described here by Stella O’Malley. 

The Fine Gael programme for government further commits to “legislate to ban conversion therapy” which might sound like a good idea, if you don’t understand what is actually meant here. I used to think, like most people, I expect, that conversion therapy meant doctors applying quack “cures” for homosexuality. Now, I realise, for trans activists and their political allies, conversion therapy is a catch-all phrase that includes the practice of any physician who doesn’t adhere to affirmative trans treatment. If a concerned medical practitioner should suggest to a young person that their life might not actually improve if they start having healthy body parts cut off, then that medical practitioner, according to the trans lobby, is guilty of practising conversion therapy.

Simon Harris, as Health Minister, actively supported the affirmative approach of WPATH. He appointed a TENI activist, Noah Halpin (a trans-identified woman), to the Health Service Executive steering committee on the development of transgender “health services” in Ireland. Harris then wrote to that committee to express his “expectation” that the committee would “ensure (that) compliance with Wpath is happening in practice”. This has led concerned physicians in Ireland to go public with their concerns about the direction transgender medicine is going. 

Simon Harris has even publicly endorsed, and been photographed with, Dr Sidhbh Gallagher, the Irish doctor based in Florida, USA who promotes her practice on TikTok where she calls herself “Dr Teetus Deletus”. Dr Gallagher talks, flippantly, of how she “yeets the teets” off of women and teenage girls who choose to have this done. In one of her many videos, Dr Gallagher tells her potential clients “gender affirmation surgery is medically necessary so it’s rare we give a hard ‘no.’”

So now that Simon Harris has become Taoiseach what can we expect to happen? On the plus side, Harris appears not to have strong convictions of his own. Many commentators have noted how Harris was once strongly opposed to the legalisation of abortion. Subsequently, as Health Minister, he was at the forefront of his government’s ultimately successful campaign to have the Irish constitutional ban on abortion removed, clearing the way for legalised abortion in Ireland. So perhaps he changed his mind. That’s allowed. But Harris appears to be a politician who, on his way to attaining the top job in Irish politics, has been mainly guided by which way he thinks the wind of public opinion is blowing.

And the wind is changing. Now that the Cass Review has been released and the UK is rowing back on the litany of harms that have happened as a result of the gender-affirmative approach, perhaps Simon Harris will change his tune and stop cheering on irreversible medical interventions that are carried out without appropriate care or caution? Just recently, Italy became the first country where criminal sanctions are being considered for clinicians who prescribed puberty blockers to kids as young as 9, in full violation of Italy’s policies.

Gender self-ID, the surrender to trans demands in the health service, the intrusion of men into women’s prisons, shelters and safe spaces, men in women’s sports and the debasement of language, and journalism, in the service of trans ideology, have all happened in recent years in Ireland while the public hasn’t been looking. Now we are becoming aware of what has been going on. If Taoiseach Simon Harris continues to champion trans demands he will have a fight on his hands.