Eurovision, Non-Binary Representation and a Controversial Conference in Dublin
By Paddy O'Gorman
For this letter from Ireland, I shall tell you about two things that have gone on in the gender-ideology struggle in the last month. There was a conference in Dublin on resisting gender ideology, at which I spoke. And we had a person who describes herself as “non-binary” represent Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest.
The conference was organised by the lobby group known as the Countess. I spoke at the conference on a subject on which I’ve been podcasting for some time, that is, women’s prisons and homeless hostels and the way in which the presence of trans-ID men has impacted women in those places. You can hear some of what I had to say here. I’m pleased to tell you I got a standing ovation when I finished speaking.
The conference heard from speakers on a wide range of areas in which we are now having to fight transgender ideology: the use of medication and even surgery in the treatment of vulnerable, confused teenagers; the presence of men in women’s sports; trans ideology in schools and the defence of separate school toilets for boys and girls; the corruption of the media in the service of trans ideology; and the impact of gender self-id law in Ireland. The British campaigner Kelly Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, was a keynote speaker who gave a morale-boosting talk to us in our struggle.
I also have to tell you the conference was marred by controversy. Many people who had been scheduled to speak decided to drop out. The problem was the inclusion, at a late stage, of a speaker who is known to have supported militant action against politicians whom she disagrees with; she had recently publicly supported the picketing of the home of a government minister over some policy of his that was nothing to do with gender ideology.
I deplore the tactic of picketing a politician’s home. It’s a repulsive thing to do. And it’s also, in my opinion, counter-productive. Our enemy is good at shouting abuse and intimidation. The trans-rights brigade were out in force outside the Countess conference venue, dressed in their fake-woman garb, harassing and abusing members of the public who were on their way into the venue. It was like the last time Kelly Jay Keen spoke in Dublin, which was last September. Then we were surrounded by a mob, held at bay by the police, who tried to shut our public meeting down. That mob, which included at least two TDs (members of the Irish legislature), was carrying placards urging us to, disgusting to relate, “suck my trans balls” and the like. When it comes to shouting matches and hurling sexualised abuse, that’s something our enemy is good at. I think it’s foolish for us to fight our enemy in their chosen battleground. What our enemy fears is debate, because they know they’re hopeless at it and we can trounce them every time.
I chose to speak at the conference, regardless of the inclusion of this speaker. When I first accepted the invitation to speak, I didn’t seek a veto on who else might be speaking. I didn’t ask who else might be there. I speak for myself; nobody else. I respect the decision of those who decided to drop out, many of whom are people I greatly admire, but I think the conference was weakened by their absence and their decision not to attend was the wrong one.
Now on to the Eurovision Song Contest and Ireland’s entry sung by a woman known as Bambi Thug. Bambi, we are told, is “non-binary”, whatever that means (she makes no attempt to disguise her obvious feminine appearance). In her media interviews, she calls herself “queer”, whatever that means (she seems to have a boyfriend). I don’t care much about any of that. Bambi expects people to refer to her in the third person as “they”. I don’t care about that either. But our media and our politicians have all gone along with calling her “they”. That’s something I care about very much.
One of the main reasons, in my opinion, that trans ideology has made such destructive inroads so quickly and in so many areas is that we, and the media in particular, have been willing to surrender the meaning of words to trans activists. We are told of girls in school not wanting to let a trans girl into their toilets. Aren’t they mean! And they don’t want to let a trans girl play sports with them. What an unkind way to treat a girl just because she is trans! Just because she may be somewhat masculine in appearance and perhaps has unusually hairy legs or something like that. Because that, in my experience, is how people are deceived when they hear the expression “trans girl” or “trans woman”.
The term “trans woman” is designed to deceive. The deception works by taking an adjective, “trans”, and a noun, “woman”, which, in the usual understanding of the English language, means that the noun is the substantive word and the adjective is merely a modifier of that noun, that is, a word that tells us something more about the noun, as in “tall woman”, “young woman”, “black woman” and so on. If we use the term “trans woman”, we are conceding from the start that the person we are talking about is a woman. This has allowed trans activists to frame the preservation of single-sex spaces for women as “banning trans women” and to freely compare this to the banning of black people from what were whites-only spaces in apartheid South Africa and the like.
So that’s why trans activists distort the use of language. Less easy to explain is why the media and politicians are also willing to go along with this deception.
After Bambi’s Eurovision performance, Irish politicians were out in force to say publicly that “they sang very well” making lots of people, I suspect, scratch their heads and wonder why they hadn’t noticed that more than one singer was involved. I suppose the politicians are calculating that they will win favour with voters who buy into the nonsense that some people are neither one sex nor the other and at the same time they won’t lose any votes from people who are simply bewildered by this misleading use of language.
Which leaves the media. A guiding principle for any journalist (certainly for this one, anyway) is that your first responsibility is to the public. You tell the public what is going on. You use language so as to be understood, not so as to mislead people in service of some higher goal. So it was with dismay that I heard my old broadcasting company, RTE, along with the rest of the mainstream media, refer to Bambi as “they” and talk about “their” performance, and so on. (There were a few amusing slips across the Irish media when broadcasters said “she” then immediately corrected themselves and said “they”. How embarrassing!) I almost wish I was still working in RTE, so I could make a stance against this use of language. They would have had to me off the air because there is no way I would say “they” to tell the public about a single person. And just as a BBC broadcaster did recently, if required to say “trans woman” I would add “in other words, a man”.
I hope, and expect, that the media will one day, not too far away, extricate itself from the gender madness in which it is currently engulfed. I hope the media will regain its self-respect and do its job, and no longer allow itself to be dictated to by gender ideologues.
The public deserves nothing less.
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.