An Eventful Year in Ireland
By Paddy O'Gorman
The year 2024 has been a good one, I believe, for the gender critical movement in Ireland. During the year just passed, we have seen transgender ideology challenged on a lot of fronts.
When gender self-ID became law in the Republic of Ireland in 2015 there was virtually no public debate or critical analysis on what the effects of this new law might be (I, as a working journalist at the time, accept my share of blame for not having realised the significance of what was then happening). Since self-ID, the advance of the trans agenda in Ireland has seemed unstoppable: in politics, in government and administration, in the law, in our schools and universities, in our health services, in homeless services, in prisons, in sport, in the arts and entertainment industries, in the use of language and in journalism. And all of this was achieved by the trans lobby through the brilliantly successful strategy of “no debate” combined with denouncing anyone who dissented as a bigot and seeking to undermine their career and livelihood.
During 2024 we have at last seen the advance of transgenderism falter. I’ll describe some of the ways in which that has been happening.
Barbie Trial
The trial of the man who calls himself Barbie Kardashian took place in October. Barbie is a sex offender who was being kept in the women’s section of Limerick Prison because he says, and Irish law agrees, that he is a woman. Once in prison, he picked up further charges of making threats of rape and sexualised violence against two women therein: a prisoner and a prison officer. When he came to trial, Barbie was referred to throughout the proceedings as a woman, even as he freely admitted to having made these rape threats in a testimony that I, for one, found chilling to sit through. The jury, seemingly, wasn’t as chilled as I was and decided to acquit Barbie in a verdict that, to me, and many others, remains incomprehensible.
But good things came out of the Barbie trial, too. The trial had the effect of making the public aware, for the first time, of the cruel and unusual punishment that women have been enduring through being incarcerated with men, including sex offender men. We in the gender critical movement have been drawing attention to this outrage for years. Politicians and activists dismissed us as bigots and even liars and many people in the wider public refused to believe that the courts have been putting male sex offenders in with women which is not surprising given that the mainstream media refused to report on this. But the Barbie trial has changed all that. I have found that, since that trial, people now know what we are talking about. The politicians have taken note, even though they will never admit it, and they will no longer dare to glibly dismiss gender-critical concerns in the way that they used to do. And as a result of the Barbie experience, the prison authorities have also made changes and women in prison are now better protected from trans-ID men than had previously been the case.
Puberty Blockers Questioned
In 2024, the use of puberty blockers on teenagers was banned in Northern Ireland even as, in the Republic of Ireland, the “affirmative model” in what is called transgender healthcare, including the use of PBs, remains in place.
What happened was this. Following the Cass review in Britain last year with its damning findings on the use of PBs, the British Government, then formed by the Conservative Party, banned their use. The incoming Labour Government continued that ban. This forced the government of Northern Ireland to make a decision on whether or not it, too, should ban PBs (Northern Ireland is constitutionally part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). Northern Ireland is governed by a power-sharing executive consisting of the nationalist Sinn Fein party and the unionist Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP tends to be socially conservative and had no difficulty supporting the PB ban. Sinn Fein, by contrast, had always strongly supported PB use.
Sinn Fein, apart from sharing power in government in Northern Ireland, is also the main opposition party in the Republic of Ireland. Like all the main political parties in the Republic, Sinn Fein has been happy to support the use of PBs so long as that didn’t come at the price of having to defend that policy to the public. “No debate” has suited all the politicians. But now Sinn Fein, if it wanted to defy the British Government’s ban, would be forced to defend its policy and engage in debate. It wasn’t prepared to do that. To the dismay of the transgender activists who had always been assured that Sinn Fein was on their side, the party swiftly and ruthlessly changed its policy and backed the ban.
Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald is now saying a review of puberty blocker safety is needed due to concerns on “bone density, cognitive function, brain development (and) potentially fertility issues down the line” which is what we in the gender critical movement have been saying for a long time. The Sinn Fein party is now in the curious and indefensible position of supporting the use of puberty blockers in one state in Ireland while opposing their use in the other. If these drugs are unsafe for kids in Northern Ireland, surely they are unsafe for kids in the Republic of Ireland too? We have at last seen a crack in the monolithic cross-party political support that had previously existed for the use of puberty blockers on confused teenagers.
Hate Speech and New Genders
The year 2024 came with a sting in its tail. On the last day of the year, Ireland’s new definition of gender became law. The Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act states that “‘gender’ means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female”.
If you don’t understand what that circular definition means you’re not alone because nobody, not even its proponents, can explain it. But what is clear is that in Irish law there are now more than two genders. There are multiple genders. And all of these new genders have been granted what the Hate Offences Act calls “protected status”.
It’s when you combine this protected status with further planned legislation on so-called hate speech that the full danger of what our politicians are doing comes into view. Are we now to be liable to be prosecuted for hate speech if we refuse to pretend to believe that someone has changed sex and has acquired some exotic new gender other than male or female?
The hate speech elements that had been planned as part of the Hate Offences Act were passed by the Dail (the lower house of the Irish legislature) last year but were then stymied by a small number of libertarian-minded senators in the Seanad (the upper house). Critics of the new legislation pointed to the vagueness of the definition of hate. The government eventually bowed to pressure and withdrew the hate speech elements of the bill in order to get the rest of the bill passed, which they have now succeeded in doing.
But the government says that the hate speech reprieve is only temporary, so what’s coming next?
Trouble for us, that’s what. While the mainstream media has been happy to collude with trans demands, even to the point of calling male sex offenders women, we gender critical people in the online media take seriously our duty to tell the public what is really going on. As a result, trans activists have long sought to silence us under the guise of campaigning against hate. So, if our enemy gets new legal powers, we can expect to see those powers used against us. We have a fight on our hands.
A New(ish) Government
The general election in November saw the public give its verdict on the three-party coalition that has governed the Republic of Ireland for the last five years. The result was that the two centre-right parties of the coalition, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, did pretty well while the third party, the Greens, suffered an almost complete wipeout. Sinn Fein, the main opposition party, did less well than had once been expected and will remain the main opposition party. Independents, that is non-party candidates, did very well and there’s a lot of them in the new Dail. The overall result of the election is that we are likely to see, in the next few weeks, the formation of a new coalition government comprised once again of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but this time with independent deputies, instead of the Greens, making up the numbers to give that government a working majority with which to govern.
The demise of the Greens is welcome from our point of view. The party has built its core support on its environmental policies, but it is also hugely invested in trans ideology. The two conservative parties, especially Fine Gael, also endorse trans demands but you have to suspect that the commitment of these parties to the trans agenda is shallow and opportunistic, as Sinn Fein’s commitment to the use of puberty blockers turned out to be. If the wind of public opinion shifts these parties will shift too. But the Greens’ support for the trans agenda is in dead earnest and that’s why it’s good that their influence over government policy is gone.
The independent deputies who the coalition parties are now courting for government formation are mainly rural and often from a farming background. That’s good news for us. Rural Ireland, unlike young, urban, middle-class Ireland, isn’t taken in by trans ideology. Farmers know that you need a bull and a cow to make a calf. We can reasonably expect that these rural, independent deputies will put a brake on further advances of the trans agenda in government.
I’ll keep you posted.
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Photo: Lisa Jarvis / Rainbow over the Liffey / CC BY-SA 2.0