In an Irish pub, it’s not rude to speak to a stranger. If you stand around the bar, as I generally do, people you might never have met before will often engage you in conversation.
So it was, a few weeks back on a busy evening in my local pub in Dublin, I was at the bar to get served when I heard an elderly man who was sat there say to another who was sat next to him: “I think Graham Linehan is right”. The other man heartily agreed. I knew what they were talking about. Graham Linehan’s recent arrest at Heathrow Airport in London and his subsequent series of court appearances have propelled the Irish comedian and his views on transgender ideology into public attention in his native country in a way that nothing else has done before. I leaned into the conversation of the two men to say that I also agreed with Graham Linehan. Each of the two men shook hands with me. Alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions, certainly, but their friendliness towards me was genuine. The three of us agreed, as three elderly Irish gentlemen, that men who try to steal women’s prizes in sports are cheats and that men who try to get into women’s toilets are creeps.
But even as the Irish public is talking about Graham Linehan, the Irish media is not. As I spoke to those two men, I thought of my years as a radio producer in RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster). Live Line is a phone-in programme which I many times produced and on rare occasions presented. In those days, I might well have asked one of those elderly men in the pub: “Would you take a call on that to Joe tomorrow?” (Joe being Joe Duffy, the long-term Live Line presenter). That’s how many a topic on Live Line got started. Then, the next day, when you were in the studio control room, and you had got your first caller up on air, you would look to the phone bank in the control room to see if people were calling in to respond. If the phone bank lit up, you knew you had chosen a topic that people cared about. I’m confident that if I were producing Live Line today, and if I were to launch a programme with a call, either supportive of or hostile to Graham Linehan, that phone bank would light up.
But it’s not going to happen. Three years ago Live Line did feature gender critical voices, and it has never happened since. People phoned in who were concerned about boys in school going into girls’ sports teams and changing rooms. People called to say they were worried about drugs being given to teenagers who thought they could change sex. People phoned to say they supported the trans agenda. The programme hosted a variety of divergent views, which is what you might expect of a good phone-in programme. But that’s not the way the politicians, the media, and, above all, the transgender lobby saw it. All of these roundly condemned the programme. The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin said that the debate that took place on Live Line was “not needed in Ireland”. The trans activists staged a protest march and rally in Dublin City centre, which I attended. One speaker at that rally, to loud applause, likened what had been done by RTE to the transgender community to what had been done two months earlier to two gay men in Sligo who had been decapitated by a man who had arranged to meet them on a dating app. The politicians, urged on by journalists and commentators, called RTE in to a special hearing at government buildings to explain itself. Then the politicians made an excuse to postpone that hearing, but, as it turned out, RTE didn’t need to be spoken to again. The politicians and trans lobby said “no debate,” and RTE has complied ever since.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that no debate is happening in Ireland on the trans issue. It just isn’t happening in the media. Debate has migrated online, and wherever people can meet and talk about things they care about.
I haven’t been back in my local pub since Linehan’s most recent (25 November) court appearance, at which he was acquitted of harassing a transgender activist but was convicted of criminal damage to same person’s phone, but I’m confident that, should I once again meet my two friends, I would find that their support for Graham Linehan remains steadfast. And that’s despite the Irish media having reported on those recent court cases in a way that, in my opinion, has distorted the story in a way that is unfavourable to Linehan. RTE tells us that Linehan’s victim was a “transgender woman” and gives no further explanation as to what this actually means. For people who think that the word ‘woman’ means woman, this use of words gives a wrong impression of what passed between Linehan and the person who was holding a phone up to his face. An anger-filled, man-versus-woman confrontation is not an even contest; should anger turn to violence, everyone knows that the woman is the person who has the most to fear. Onlookers will see an angry man confronting a woman as a misogynist bully. So, for RTE not to explain unambiguously that Linehan’s antagonist was, in fact, another man, is misleading in a way that puts Linehan in a bad light.
A Woman’s Sperm and a Late-night Message from the RTE newsroom
And now we have a further court case, which is presenting the Irish media with a dilemma about how it can report the facts and yet still stay within the boundaries of language approved by trans activists. Media reporting to date on this recent case will likely make your head spin, so, before I bring you that, I’ll tell you first about the case using words in their commonly understood meaning, which is the least you should expect from any journalist.
The story is this. A man in Britain, who has Irish citizenship, legally changed his sex under British law a few years back. He then married a woman there in a same-sex marriage, and they had a baby together through having his wife impregnated with his frozen sperm. That man is now seeking to gain Irish citizenship for his child on the grounds that he, an Irish citizen, is the child’s mother (he says that applying on the basis of being the child’s father would be unacceptable to him). The Irish state is refusing to grant that citizenship because, for purposes of Irish law, “mother” means the person who gives birth to the baby. The case has been approved for hearing and will come before the Irish High Court in January.
Now to the media version. The Irish media, including RTE, gives us this account with the immortal opening sentence: “A UK trans woman, who used her frozen sperm to have a baby with her wife, has been granted permission to bring a High Court challenge against a refusal by the State to grant Irish citizenship to the child on the basis that she is not the biological mother”. Yes, you read that right. It really says “her sperm”. And, if you read on, you will find that this sperm-producer is referred to repeatedly with feminine pronouns. I took to social media on X to say that, as a broadcaster who was 41 years with RTE (I’m retired now), they could never have got me to say the words “her sperm” to the public.
That evening, coming up to midnight, a senior journalist in the RTE Newsroom, obviously stung by my comment earlier in the day, messaged me privately to say that, contrary to what I had said on X, the story as broadcast by RTE, distinct from what was published on the RTE News website, didn’t include the words “her sperm”. The journalist told me: “Sharon (Ní Bheoláin, the news anchor) actually said ‘the trans woman whose sperm was frozen’ and if you listen/look back to the TV report, at no point will you hear ‘her sperm’”.
So that was me told. Then, a while later, in a further private message, the journalist conceded: “I appreciate that ‘woman whose sperm’ is a very slight difference”. My thought exactly.
Then, later again, I got this message: “I’m OFF THE RECORD on all this, but I do think the RTE post on X re this story could have been worded slightly more carefully. And it’s something I think we have to be more hyper-aware of. I can assure you that neither I nor my experienced colleagues have been captured by any lobby – and it makes me sad when things are characterised in this kind of way. I’m not sure why bad intent is immediately suspected… If someone has a gender recognition certificate – LEGALLY recognising them as a man or woman then, as a reporter, I cannot take it upon myself to unilaterally go behind that and decide I’m not going to recognise what the law has recognised… I think the trans thing and society’s response to it in general has been a mess – however well intentioned it may have started. There’s a lot to say, but it’s all a bit too much to get into at this hour.”
I wrote back the next day to assure the journalist that their name would be off the record. And I further wrote that I don’t suspect bad intent on the part of RTE. I can plainly see bad intent on the part of RTE.
Let’s take a recent example. When, in late August, a man gunned down a group of small children attending mass at a Catholic Church in Minnesota, USA, killing two of them before killing himself, RTE was so keen to hide the fact that the killer was trans-identified that they decided not to tell the public the killer’s sex at all. This is unprecedented in news reporting. If a man is arrested for a crime, you report that fact. If a woman is killed in a car accident, you report that fact. To report the sex of a person in a news story is basic journalism. RTE initially called the Minnesota killer a “gunman” but later amended this to describe him using the gender-neutral term “shooter”, and all gendered pronouns were scrupulously removed from RTE’s references to this killer (I have written on this in more detail here. RTE did all of this to keep the public misinformed about a man who had murdered children. That’s bad intent.
On the use of preferred pronouns and chosen gender identity in news reporting, I don’t accept my former RTE colleague’s contention that journalists are legally compelled to do this. That has never been established in law. And even if a court of law should some day decide that we are so compelled, then as journalists we remain under a higher compulsion which is to tell the public what is really going on.
The use of a person’s preferred pronouns and a person’s preferred gender identity by journalists can seriously distort a story. When a man was making rape threats against female prisoners in Limerick Prison, it made those threats appear less plausible in the eyes of the public when the media (and the judiciary) said that those rape threats were being made by a woman rather than by a man. When a man was convicted for assault on a woman in a women’s domestic violence refuge in which he and his victim were both living, the media hid the real story by reporting that a woman had carried out the assault. When a man was convicted for having sexually abused his partner’s little boy over a period of years, the use of female pronouns for this man when he was in court created a false story about a female child-abuser. And that’s just to take the cases of the three trans-identified men who were, in recent years, housed in the women’s section of Limerick Prison. As noted already, the reporting on the most recent Graham Linehan trial was distorted by the use of female pronouns to describe Linehan’s antagonist, as if this had been a man-on-woman confrontation, rather than a row between two men. Journalists shouldn’t use preferred pronouns and gender identities, especially if to do so distorts the truth, as it does in all the cases I’ve just mentioned.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of that recent late-night message I got from within the RTE newsroom is the admission that there are journalists in there who feel that the story about the sperm-producing woman “could have been worded slightly more carefully”. Also, we have learned that at least one journalist in RTE thinks that the handling of transgenderism in Ireland has been “a mess”. So perhaps RTE could report on this mess. Isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do? Should I be feeling optimistic that RTE is about to start doing its job?
When the woman-sperm-producer case comes up for hearing in January, we’ll see what direction RTE and the rest of the media are heading. Will the media abide by the language rules set out for them by trans activists, or will they respect the public that overwhelmingly doesn’t believe that women produce sperm?
Even as I think about it now, my optimism is fading. On past record, I think RTE, and the media generally, will put the sensitivities of the transgender lobby ahead of their duty to communicate intelligibly with the public. But I would dearly love my old colleagues in RTE to prove me wrong.
Public Discourse is Shifting
Even as the media have sought to keep a cap on public debate on the advance of trans ideology, that same media can’t help but be coming to realise that said debate is happening anyway. And, despite the best efforts of journalists and trans activists to get people to think otherwise, the great majority of people still don’t believe that men should be going into women’s toilets or that women produce sperm. Worst of all for those activists, people are saying that they support Graham Linehan. That’s making our media and public figures nervous. They are thinking that perhaps they shouldn’t have left Linehan out there on his own all these years when he was standing up against the transgender agenda. So they are creating a cover story to the effect that they have never actually disagreed with what Graham Linehan has been saying. It’s just been the way that he’s been saying it that they disagree with.
Thus, we have Ardal O’Hanlon, actor made famous through his role in Linehan’s television comedy Father Ted, reacting to Linehan’s arrest: “I feel sorry for him; he’s entitled to his opinions, but the way he presented them made it confrontational.” So what is this alternative, non-confrontational way in which Linehan should have been making his case? Tell us, Ardal O’Hanlon, how you would argue non-confrontationally that a male sex offender shouldn’t have been put in prison with captive women where he was able to threaten to rape them with a mop handle? Tell us a non-confrontational way of saying that a man in a dress shouldn’t have been put into a women’s domestic violence shelter, where he was able to physically assault an elderly woman? And tell me how I could have suggested in a non-confrontational way to journalists that they should have been reporting these stories, instead of breaking their necks to look the other way? You’re a coward, Ardal O’Hanlon. Your former colleague Graham Linehan shames you because he was willing to stand up for vulnerable women and children when you were not.
Similar cowardice can be found in the Irish Times. Columnist Jennifer O’Connell, reacting to Linehan’s arrest, makes the standard litany of attacks on Linehan for his supposed hostility to trans people, but then late in her article she drops this bombshell: “Many of the concerns he (Linehan) raises – about puberty blockers and surgery for trans young people; women’s sports; and the risk of sex offenders in women’s prisons – are shared by reasonable people”. What? So, where have all these reasonable people been all these years? Not appearing in the Irish Times, certainly. If the Irish Times is now claiming to have long shared the concerns expressed by Linehan, then why didn’t they say so before now? Why is it only people such as Graham Linehan and a few more like him who have been willing to speak up?
If the Irish Times really wants to start debating trans and platforming people with dissenting, gender critical views, then I will be impressed. Ditto for RTE and the rest of the media. But for the moment, all we are seeing is people trying to cover up the fact that they didn’t take a stand against trans ideology when it would have made a difference. And when taking a brave stand, it would have come at a price.
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