The Impact of a Man’s Fist on a Woman’s Head

Paddy O’Gorman on compassion and the language that obscures the truth

In a recent Irish Examiner opinion piece, journalist Mick Clifford criticised what he described as a lack of compassion at a Dublin conference on women’s sex-based rights. Here, Paddy O’Gorman responds, arguing that genuine compassion requires confronting difficult realities rather than softening them with language. His piece challenges what he sees as a wider tendency in mainstream journalism to obscure uncomfortable truths.

At Genspect, we hope this contribution adds to a more honest discussion of the Gender Recognition Act in Ireland. We also wish our readers a very happy St. Patrick’s Day.

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Journalist Mick Clifford of the Irish Examiner writes that those of us who gathered at a public meeting in Dublin recently to oppose the ongoing operation of the Gender Recognition Act in Ireland are “bereft of compassion” and that, furthermore, we give “precious little consideration… to those whom it (transgenderism) impacts directly”.

So let’s talk about how a man’s fist came to impact directly upon a woman’s head. That happened in a women’s domestic violence refuge in Dublin. The man has a certificate, issued to him under the terms of the GRA, that says he is a woman. That’s how he was able to be a resident in a women’s refuge. He is a fit, well-built man in his thirties. His victim, also a resident in the refuge, was a 60-year-old woman of slight stature. Prior to the passing of the GRA, that woman could have reasonably expected to be safe from male violence when she was living in a women’s refuge. Not anymore.

At the man’s subsequent trial and conviction for assault, the court heard how he had beaten his victim to the ground, sat upon her, punched her repeatedly to the head and ripped clumps of hair from her scalp. (He got a three month suspended sentence.)

Mick Clifford knows all this because I told this story as part of the talk I gave to that public meeting that he was attending as a journalist. He didn’t choose to report that part of my speech but then, that should come as no surprise as his newspaper, the Irish Examiner, chose not to report the truth about that assault in that women’s refuge when the case came to court back in 2023. The Irish Examiner lied that the victim had been assaulted by another woman. The most shocking and newsworthy part of the story, that a woman had been beaten up by a man she had been forced to live with in a women’s refuge, was hidden from the public by our cowardly Irish journalists.

For the Irish Examiner in its reporting on the case, the overriding consideration was that the man-in-the-dress should have his feelings respected. They pretended he was a woman, even as he rained blows down upon the head of his victim who would have been left in no doubt that she was being punched by a man. “Compassion” or “consideration” for the woman who was left lying beaten and bloodied on the ground was non-existent in that newspaper’s coverage.

Clifford misrepresents what I said to the meeting about men in women’s prisons: “Paddy O’Gorman spoke of transgender women in female prisons. By his count, there have been four such cases, but in all of them the authorities have been alive to the possibility of trouble”. What I actually said was that I had definite knowledge of three such men, two of whom are sex offenders, who have been incarcerated with women. And, I said, I know of a further two, both sex offenders, who our courts and our media have described as women but who have been imprisoned along with men because, at the time of being sentenced, they had not applied for a GRC which would have made them legally women.

So Clifford seems to have a problem with reporting simple figures but, more grievously, he dismisses women’s concerns about being locked up with violent men with the banal observation that the authorities have been “alive to the possibility of trouble”, whatever that is supposed to mean.

Was Clifford listening at the meeting at all? I spoke in detail on prisons in order to counteract a new lie, being promulgated by former Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar, among others, that trans-identified men in prison have been allowed no contact with women prisoners. That is some lie. I described, in my talk, how male and female prisoners have been locked in adjacent cells along the E-wing landing of the women’s prison in Limerick. Verbal communication between cells is possible, and captive women have been subjected to rape threats and gruesome, sexualised verbal abuse by at least one of those men, the one now called Barbie Kardashian, who has confirmed having made these threats in his own sworn testimony in court and in a podcast interview he did with me on his release from prison.

And Barbie wasn’t the only man in the women’s prison to abuse the women therein. Women ex-prisoners have told me that a child-abuser, also on E-wing, frequently made sexualised threats against them; his favoured form of disrespect was to grunt at women when he would see them. And the women knew they were often under observation from the male prisoners, who were able to look out of their cells, as the women would go by to use the shower which was located at the end of the E-wing landing.

Threats aside, the women were scared of the men in prison because they are men. One of the three men on E-wing, the one who wasn’t a sex offender but was in for a series of assaults, proved that the women had been right to fear him when, on his release from prison, he would go on to attack a homeless woman in a hostel, as I described earlier in this article.

But none of what these women have been put through seems to matter to Mick Clifford.

For more than three years now, I have been podcasting the voices of female ex-prisoners who have been locked up with trans-identified men. Starting in November of 2022, I brought those interviews to the attention of the prison authorities who treated me with rudeness but I was glad to be able to have let them know that what was going on in the prison they ran was being watched by one Irish journalist, at least. Barbie, the most egregious offender against the women, was eventually moved into solitary confinement in April on 2023, a full two years and eight months after he was first incarcerated. During Barbie’s time in prison, the mainstream media showed no interest in asking if it was right to put men into women’s prisons. If the prison authorities are, as Mick Clifford asserts, “alive to the possibility of trouble” coming from such men then that is no thanks to journalists such as he.

Now I’ll answer my rhetorical question from earlier, when I asked if Mick Clifford had listened to me at all. Of course he had. But because what I had to say didn’t suit his agenda, Clifford chose to misrepresent my words, making it seem that I had produced no evidence to support my contention that putting men in women’s prisons is a bad idea.

Mick Clifford dismisses the other contributions to the Dublin conference with the same glibness that he dismisses mine. He reports on Stella O’Malley’s talk on how kids might come to the heartbreaking and self-destructive belief that there is something wrong with the body they are born with and then he makes this astonishing observation: “Nowhere in the talks or panel discussions was any compassion expressed for the small number of young people caught up in gender issues.” Was Clifford at the same conference that I was at? Does he really believe that the tireless work that O’Malley and a small number of other brave people have done, in opposing and exposing the barbarity of what is called “transgender healthcare”, has been motivated by anything else but compassion for the kids who, as Clifford rightly puts it, have been “caught up in gender issues”? I don’t think Clifford believes that himself. Rather, he is just posing as someone who has more compassion than O’Malley has. The world is waking up now to the terrible things that have been done to the bodies of confused children by trans zealots and that is thanks to the bravery of people like Stella O’Malley. It is no thanks to sneering journalists like Mick Clifford.

In truth, I was initially both pleased and surprised when Clifford first contacted me, in advance of that public meeting in Dublin, to ask if it would be possible to attend as media with a view to reporting on it. It wasn’t my conference to invite him to but I had no hesitation in telling him that he would be welcome and I put him in touch with the organisers, the Wicklow Women 4 Women group. I knew he would be welcome because our side doesn’t fear publicity. ‘No debate’ is the tactic of our enemy because they know we will trounce them if they ever have to face us in the court of public opinion. And the media has generally obliged the trans lobby in suppressing debate. As Clifford rightly says in his article: “Politicians were scared stiff of it and the media, for the greater part, gave it a wide berth”.

Now I’m disappointed that Clifford didn’t report on our conference in good faith but instead used the opportunity to strike a pose about how much more compassionate and considerate he is than we are. But if media silence on trans is ending, that’s still a good thing for us.

So what to expect next? Author Helen Joyce, speaking at our conference, made the interesting observation that we shouldn’t be overly discouraged by mainstream media hostility towards us because the public is ceasing to regard that media as reliable and is choosing to consult social and online media instead. I think what Joyce says is true. Think of the recent series of murderous shooting sprees carried out by trans-identified men in North America (Minneapolis, Tumbler Ridge, Rhode Island). In all three of those cases our mainstream media initially told us that the murders had been committed by women. In the case of the Tumbler Ridge murders, in Ireland we woke up to RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, telling us about a “woman in a dress” killing children at that Canadian school. I know I wasn’t alone in immediately suspecting that I was being lied to, such have our antennae had to develop to be able to detect when journalists are using words to obscure the truth, rather than to tell the truth. It was some time the following evening that RTE told us, in obscure language, that the killer was a man, which is something I had learned from online media the previous day almost as soon as the news was breaking. And six months on from the Minneapolis murders of children in a church, RTE has still hasn’t managed to tell us the sex of the killer and continues to use non-gendered language to hide the truth . We need social media to fact-check legacy media such as RTE.

So, following on Helen Joyce’s point, perhaps we should not be too concerned about being trashed by the Irish Examiner. If the legacy media is not prepared to engage on transgenderism and other issues in good faith, then the public will continue to lose respect for the likes of the Irish Examiner and will turn to online media instead.

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