Gender Ideology Under Fire in Ireland
By Paddy O'Gorman
As an Irish person with sex realist (often called “gender critical”) views, I am feeling safer, and more optimistic, than I have felt for some years. I feel safer from the threat of prosecution and perhaps even prison for expressing the view that sex is real. And I’m feeling optimistic that what had seemed the unstoppable advance of gender ideology has at last run into trouble.
In Ireland, since gender self-ID became legal in 2015, we have seen gender ideology infect our health services and schools, we have seen it adopted by all our main political parties, we have seen trans-identified men put into women’s prisons and women’s homeless hostels and, what I find the most disturbing of all, we have seen our media pretend to the public that self-ID has caused “no problems”. Journalists such as I (and we are few), who have shared the stories of women who have had to endure trans-ID men in what was once their spaces, have been accused of “spreading hate” and our enemies make no secret of their wish to use forthcoming hate speech legislation to silence us.
I’ll tell you first about my particular struggle with the trans lobby. I’ve been fighting them on two main fronts: prisons and homeless hostels.
There are currently two trans-identified men in Limerick women’s prison. Last year there were three such men there, all of them in for violent crimes and two of them sex offenders. All three of them had been men when they were arrested and charged but, when it came to their conviction and sentencing, they told the court that they had since turned into women and they were, accordingly, sent to a women’s prison to serve their time. I expect this shocks you because it still shocks me how easy it is to legally change sex in Ireland. A person need only pay a nominal fee and make a solemn declaration to “live as” a person of their new sex (whatever that means) and a gender recognition certificate will be granted.
I have stood outside Limerick Prison for days so that I might be able to tell the story of what is going on inside there. That’s a tactic I have used at many prisons over the years. If you wait outside long enough, you will meet visitors, some of whom will have been former prisoners. And you will meet prisoners on temporary release who turn up once a week to “sign on” which is a condition of their release. And you will meet people who have just been released, elated as they emerge from the prison gates, carrying their bag of belongings with them.
I met many such ex-prisoners in Limerick and recorded audio interviews with them which I have published on my podcast. All the ex-prisoners tell us that the women and the fake women are kept separate from each other and are let out of their cells to the “rec”, that is, the recreation room, at different times. So it seems that the prison authorities do know that “trans women” are different to real women, even if the law pretends that no such difference exists. But the physical separation of the two groups doesn’t prevent all unwelcome contact, as the women who have been prisoners explain to me.
One ex-prisoner, Leeann Casey, spoke of the “filthy talk” and threats of sexualised violence that she and other women could hear from the cells where the men were being kept. Another woman who had been there for just a week on remand for “tapping”, that is, begging on the streets, told me of the whispered obscenities she had heard coming from a cell when she was on cleaning duties on the corridor outside. Two sisters who had been in there explained how, from their cells, they could observe the trans-ID men going to the rec and they therefore knew that they, the women, were being similarly observed by the men when it was their turn to come out of their cells. All of the women expressed their obvious fear because these violent men are stronger than women are and that the consequences of any security lapse in the prison could be serious for the women therein.
But it’s what happened when one of these trans-ID men was let out of prison that I find even more disturbing. I was podcasting from outside a homeless persons’ welfare office in Dublin when women started telling me about the presence of trans-ID men in women’s hostels. The women told me they were forced to share 6-woman dormitories with a man who wore G-strings, displaying his obvious manhood, while saying he was entitled to dress in this way as he was a woman. And then, one day, he committed a serious assault on one of the women.
That man had first been sent to prison in March of 2021 when he was aged 33. He was convicted of assaulting three men. He got a two-year prison sentence with one year suspended. Upon sentencing, the court was told he was now a woman. Accordingly, he was sent to a women’s prison, first in Dublin and then later he was transferred to the women’s prison in Limerick.
He was out of prison by some time early in 2022 and the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive chose to refer him to a hostel known as the Novas women’s hostel in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines. That was a hostel that, for decades, was widely known as the “battered wives” home and had always been a place where women who had suffered domestic violence could go where no men would be allowed in. Not any more.
That assault in the hostel happened in April of 2022 and came to court in September of 2023, by which time the defendant was back in the women’s prison in Dublin for a different crime. The court heard that the accused had repeatedly punched the homeless woman and ripped clumps of hair from her scalp. A three-month suspended sentence was imposed.
Our courts and our media pretended the assailant was a woman.
The women I interviewed had no illusion about the true sex of this violent man. “He dresses like a woman, he punches like a man”, one of them said on my podcast. I’m sure, too, that the victim knew it was a man’s fists that had rained down upon her.
When I asked the Novas hostel about their policy of letting in trans-ID men they told me “we are committed to providing temporary accommodation for women experiencing homelessness in Dublin and sometimes these women are part of the LGBTQI+ community. They are one of many vulnerable groups that we work with”. So we can expect more such men in women’s hostels in the future.
Novas further told me: “From time to time, due to the congregated nature of homeless services, issues can arise between clients”. Novas is right. Fights are inevitable. And not just due to the crowded conditions in hostels but also because many people in hostels have addiction and mental health problems. Many have a history of criminal, sometimes violent, behaviour. Men in hostels will often tell you they became homeless through being barred from their homes for beating their wives. So there will be fights among women and fights among men. But fights in which men beat up women in hostels are not inevitable. That gendered man-on-woman violence is a result of the policy of putting men in what used to be women’s refuges.
The occasional vulnerable woman getting beaten up is a price that the trans rights movement is willing to pay in their campaign to abolish women’s safe spaces. But the price they won’t pay is that women should be able to speak out about this and that the public should hear about it. Hence their support for the planned Hate Speech legislation.
And now I’ll tell you why I’ve started feeling optimistic. We have just had two referenda in Ireland on proposals to change our constitution. Briefly, I’ll explain, in one we were asked to take out the word “mother” and replace it with “carer” and, in the other, we were asked to put the legally-undefined concept of “durable relationship” on a par with marriage. I won’t rehearse, here, all the arguments for and against these proposed changes and what they might have meant but let me tell you the most significant thing that happened was that both proposals were resoundingly rejected by the electorate by a margin of more than two-to-one. This was an astounding result given that all three of the government political parties and all three main opposition parties had supported a Yes vote.
Equally significant, in my opinion, was that Ireland’s numerous government-funded Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) had also supported a Yes vote. One of those NGOs was the National Women’s Council of Ireland which claims to be, and is recognised by Government as, the voice of women in Ireland. Just three years ago the NWCI urged that gender-critical voices should not be heard in public debate: “We call on media and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation to those who share bigoted beliefs”. The NWCI has, of course, been an enthusiastic supporter of the Hate Speech legislation which would have been used against journalists such as me to silence or at least intimidate us. The defeat of the referenda, and the undermining of the moral authority of the NGOs, has made our politicians visibly less confident in pressing ahead with their hate speech plans.
We’re now seeing the extraordinary spectacle of Government politicians who had publicly urged us to vote Yes in the referenda telling us that they had actually voted No in the privacy of the polling booth. These politicians are desperately trying to put themselves back in favour with their electorate. Let me tell them that real courage is when you take a stance before you know which way the wind is blowing.
So what are we going to see next? Who else is going to tell us that they didn’t really believe what they were saying in public? How long before we see our medical professionals telling us that they never really believed that “gender-affirming health care” was the best option for confused teenagers? How long before those who claim to have always cared about women’s safety tell us that they never really wanted trans-ID men intruding in women’s sports, changing rooms, refuges, prisons etc? And, dear to my own heart, how long before journalists start saying that they never really felt happy in lying to us about female offenders, including sex offenders, being sent to women’s prisons because those offenders were, in fact, men?
I don’t know. But, as I said, at the outset, I’m at last beginning to feel optimistic.
Paddy O’Gorman is a multi-award-winning television and radio broadcaster, formerly with Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE. Since 2022 he has hosted paddyspodcast.ie which regularly features the voices of women who have been forced to endure the presence of trans-identified men in prisons and homeless hostels.