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.

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.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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Let’s reclaim the truth

Many people in Ireland are unaware of quite how easy it is to legally change one’s sex for all intents and purposes, and of the implications of allowing a highly contested belief (that one can change sex) to be reified in law. Enacting legislation that allows men to legally identify as women has undermined all of the sex-based rights of all women and essentially made a mockery of our Equal Status Act. How was this allowed to happen? And is there anything we can do about it?

Irish women were largely kept out of the loop when gender recognition legislation was being developed; they were neither consulted nor considered. As time goes on though, and Irish people begin to see the effects of this legislation – men in women’s prisons and refuges, men playing in women’s sport, and the imposition of gender ideology in schools and other institutions – a growing number of citizens are asking questions and looking for a way to challenge it.

This coming March 7th a one-day conference in Dublin will provide an opportunity to listen, learn and engage with this issue. For more information, read on. Follow the links below for details and tickets.

What is The Gender Recognition Act?

Just over ten years ago, the introduction of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) quietly altered the legal landscape around sex and gender in Ireland. The Act, passed by the Oireachtas in 2015, enables anyone aged 18 and over to legally change their sex through a simple administrative process known as self-ID.

This process requires no clinical assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Applicants simply fill out an online form and submit a statutory declaration. They are then issued a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). Once issued, that certificate legally changes the person’s sex for all purposes from that date forward. For people aged 16–17, the process requires parental consent, written approval from medical professionals, and a court order exempting them from the adult age threshold. Activists and some politicians in Ireland continue to campaign for lowering or even abolition of the age limit and for legal recognition of other “gender identities”.

The Gender Recognition Act is the legal application of gender ideology – the idea that boy, girl, man, woman, both, or neither is determined by how you feel rather than by your actual, physical body, and that it is possible to change one’s sex. Gender ideology has no basis in fact or science. In fact, sex is binary and immutable. One is either male or female, and it is not possible to change.

Sneaky Strategy

The GRA came into effect the same year as the Marriage Act 2015 which amended the Constitution to legalise same-sex marriage. Amendment of the Constitution requires a referendum, so the introduction of same-sex marriage involved extensive public consultation, media coverage and grassroots activism. There were national campaigns and a high level of engagement by politicians and political parties. The public were informed and engaged, and overwhelmingly voted yes to legalise same-sex marriage.

The Gender Recognition Act did not change the Constitution and therefore moved through the Oireachtas like ordinary legislation with no referendum necessary. The public were focused on same-sex marriage, while behind the scenes activists were working on the GRA.

Gender recognition legislation impacts all sex-based rights and public policy and yet, there was negligible media coverage and no public scrutiny or debate.

It turns out that this under the radar approach to the introduction of gender recognition legislation is a deliberate strategy employed by transgender rights activists in order to avoid public scrutiny and uncomfortable questions. We know this because it’s documented in a report by Dentons, a multinational law firm which advises activists on how to advance legislation to allow children and young people under 18 to legally change their gender. Among other suggestions, the report advises activists to piggyback onto campaigns for more popular reforms (for example same sex marriage), and to avoid excessive press coverage and exposure. Ireland is specifically cited in the report as an exemplar of this under the radar strategy and is lauded by campaigners for gender recognition worldwide.

What About Women?

The development of the Gender Recognition Act involved consultation with certain specialist stakeholders – legal experts, medical professionals, government officials, and representatives of advocacy groups such as Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) but did not include broader consultation with women’s rights organisations, child welfare organisations, or groups focused on single-sex services or sex-based legal protections.

The advisory body established by Government to support drafting of the GRA leaned heavily toward advocates of broad self-ID and, again, did not include voices that might have raised concerns about women’s rights, data integrity in public policy, or other sex-based rights.

Issues that should have been considered include:

• Single-sex spaces: If access to women’s services and spaces – such as prisons, refuges, changing rooms, and toilets – is based on legal gender or gender identity rather than biological sex, these are no longer guaranteed to be female spaces. The need for women’s spaces is based on biological sex, and so provision must also be based on biological sex. Women need guaranteed safety, dignity, and privacy when they are vulnerable, such as when changing clothes, using bathrooms, sleeping, seeking refuge, or especially if they are sick, incapacitated, or imprisoned.
  
• Women’s sport: Admitting males who identify as girls or women into female sports is neither safe nor fair. Even with hormonal treatment and decreased testosterone levels, males retain the advantages of male puberty. They are generally bigger, faster, and stronger from a young age. Women and girls deserve safety and fairness in sport, as well as privacy and dignity when it comes to changing facilities, whether playing sport for recreation or at elite level.
  
• Equality law and protections: The introduction of Gender Recognition Certificates has created a conflict of rights. The Equal Status Act states that it is reasonable and legal to have women-only spaces, but the Gender Recognition Act says that a man who identifies as a woman and obtains a GRC is legally female and entitled to enter those spaces. This has resulted in violent men being placed in women’s prisons and shelters.
  
• Data collection and statistics: Official statistics on health, employment, crime, and other issues often rely on sex-disaggregated data. Legislation that allows individuals to choose their sex falsifies public health research, equal pay audits, and crime statistics. Future policies on health, education, employment, and social issues depend on accurate data.
  
• Medical care and research: Sex differences are critical in medical research, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. Males and females have different requirements and responses when it comes to to medical conditions, medications, and treatments. Biological sex is the only safe basis for planning healthcare in both personal and public spheres.

Captured

Gender ideology was enshrined in law under our noses in a move that justified the promotion of dangerous and nonsensical ideas to Irish people in all aspects of their lives. Now, a decade on, gender ideology is everywhere. Irish institutions and the national media are in thrall to the same lobby groups, including TENI, who pushed through the Gender Recognition Act in 2015.

Schools, both primary and secondary, have gender ideology embedded in curriculum and policy, and many advertise their allegiance to it by flying the progress pride flag during Pride month and beyond. Activist organisations – TENI, Shout Out and Belong To – are providing training and workshops to staff and students at schools around the country.

Irish Universities, in order to receive funding for research, are obliged to sign up to the Athena Swan Ireland Charter which requires them to foster “an environment that creates collective understanding that individuals can determine and affirm their gender” and requires active promotion of gender self-ID.

Across sectors, employers and institutions have introduced policies that embed gender ideology in workplaces. Adults working in offices, hospitals, schools, and in government are expected to attend workshops and training provided by TENI, to advertise pronouns in signatures and on badges, and to proactively express support for ideas that many don’t believe in.

Irish media have consistently promoted gender ideology and remained almost silent on developments at home and abroad that challenge the logic, wisdom, and safety of pretending that biological sex doesn’t matter.

Moving Forward

The law should reflect the reality of the world we live in. The Gender Recognition Act doesn’t do that.

What can we do about it?

Wicklow Women 4 Women – a grassroots collective of women based in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, and committed to upholding the sex-based rights of women and children – will host a one day conference in Dublin on Saturday 7th March to address the impact of Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act.

Please join us, and a brilliant line-up of guests who are informed, experienced, and active in fighting for reality-based legislation, women’s rights, and child-safeguarding. It promises to be a day of lively and informative discussion, debate, and strategising.

The focus will be on the Irish Gender Recognition Act – what it means for society in general and women and children in particular – and how we can move forward in campaigning for change.

Tickets are on sale here. The exact location will be announced via email to ticket holders in due course. Tea/coffee and refreshments will be provided morning and afternoon, lunch will be available to purchase at the venue and nearby.

We hope to see you there!

Contact Wicklow Women 4 Women: wicklowwomen4women@gmail.com or find us on X: @wicklowwomen4w1.

Catherine Monaghan is an Irish women’s rights activist and a founding member of Wicklow Women 4 Women.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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A proposed resolution on so-called conversion practices, due to be voted on by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) this Thursday, 29 January, should trouble anyone who cares about mental health, clinical ethics, or the inappropriate medicalisation of gender-nonconforming individuals. This is yet another attempt by trans activists to impose an ideological framework onto clinical practice, and it is likely to do considerable harm to same-sex attracted and autistic young people. Thanks to the extraordinary work of Athena Forum and founder Faika El-Nagashi, this resolution has been brought to public attention and Europeans are taking action.

At the heart of the resolution is a fundamental category error. The proposed ban bundles together abusive practices and ordinary psychotherapy, and treats them as if they are ethically indistinguishable. Standard therapeutic work is recast as inherently coercive unless it delivers a pre-approved outcome. This betrays a striking lack of understanding of psychotherapy as a discipline.

If you feel alienated from your sexed body, should you attempt to change your mind or change your body? It is an important question. Moving rapidly toward medicalisation of the body while asking few questions is the hallmark of the gender-affirming approach. It is not careful. It is fast and simplistic, and it presumes that medical transition is the best option for people who feel uncomfortable in their own bodies.

Psychotherapy is not an exercise in persuasion, nor is it a tool for steering people toward predetermined identities. It is, by design, slow, reflective, and tolerant of uncertainty. Ethical psychotherapy makes room for ambivalence, developmental change, and the possibility that initial self-understandings may evolve. Meanwhile, psychotherapy in the traditional sense is careful, exploratory, and rooted in respect for the unconscious. It focuses on how we can manage psychological distress and, perhaps, come to terms with our bodies rather than attempting to change them.

When this kind of work is misunderstood and then framed as dangerous or suspect, clinicians inevitably retreat. The cost of that retreat is borne by vulnerable people who lose access to established psychological care and are instead funnelled toward “gender-affirming care”, a new approach that is unsupported by long-term evidence and already shows signs of causing harm. “Gender-affirming care” is anti-psychological in that it disregards the unconscious in favour of promoting medical pathways that alter the body rather than addressing the mind.

This resolution was put forward by British Labour MP Kate Osborne while most people working in this field were focused on the ongoing debacle surrounding the forthcoming puberty blockers trial. From a clinical standpoint, the resolution’s definition of conversion practices is deeply flawed. It substitutes ideological certainty for therapeutic nuance. Any form of psychological exploration that does not immediately affirm a declared identity is implicitly treated as hostile or coercive. For young people experiencing gender dysphoria, this is particularly damaging. Ethical mental health care depends on careful assessment, attention to comorbidities, differential diagnosis, and, above all, therapeutic neutrality. A blanket ban erodes these foundations and replaces professional judgment with political orthodoxy.

The chilling effect of this approach is already visible. I know many experienced therapists who have quietly withdrawn from this area of work. One such clinician, a friend of mine whom I will call Bernadette, has decades of experience supporting vulnerable adolescents. She is thoughtful, conscientious, and deeply committed to ethical practice. Yet she will not work with gender dysphoria. Not because she lacks skill or compassion, but because the field has become so legally and professionally precarious that a single complaint could jeopardise her career. Vexatious complaints based on spurious concepts create an administrative nightmare and months, if not years, of stress and worry for clinicians. Faced with that risk, she refuses to work in this field. There are countless other therapists like Bernadette who also refuse to work with gender dysphoria, not because of any lack of understanding, but because of the damaging impact of trans activism on clinical practice.

If PACE were genuinely interested in protecting same-sex attracted young people, it would direct its attention to the roots of their distress. Why are so many experiencing shame about their sexual orientation, and how can this be addressed safely and ethically without imposing irreversible medical interventions on their bodies?

Likewise, if PACE were sincerely concerned with protecting therapeutic practice, it would focus on strengthening mental health care rather than restricting it. This would mean championing evidence-based, developmentally informed approaches, defending therapeutic neutrality and robust informed consent, and addressing the long-standing lack of regulation around professional titles. Clear distinctions between counselling and psychotherapy should be established, with reliable and transparent standards of training, competence, and accountability across Europe.

PACE could also draw principled distinctions between abusive practices and legitimate psychotherapy, while investing in long-term outcome research rather than moral panics. Safeguarding requires higher standards, not prohibitions that fundamentally misunderstand the nature of psychotherapy.

Should this resolution pass, it is likely to be seized upon by trans activists across Europe as a mandate for further action. We can expect national legislation, regulatory guidance, and professional rules that extend well beyond the resolution’s original intent. Complaints mechanisms will proliferate, clinicians will practise defensively, and the range of acceptable therapeutic approaches will narrow further. The result will not be better care for vulnerable people.

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“The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.” — A. E. Housman

On January 16th, The Irish Times published a front-page article under the headline: “Watchdog says schools must use students’ preferred pronouns”. The report outlined the contents of a “rights guide” for people who identify as trans and non-binary published by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL). The headline got two important things wrong. The ICCL is not a watchdog. It has no regulatory power to direct, discipline, or compel anyone to do anything. And more importantly, there is no legislation or case law in Ireland requiring anyone to use “preferred pronouns” in any setting.

The guide in question, Know Your Rights: A guide for trans and non-binary people, contains some information that is accurate and useful. It explains anti-discrimination principles, healthcare entitlements, privacy, and data protection law. What is striking, however, is what it fails to say about the most important legal framework governing anyone who works with children: the Children First Act 2015.

Children First is a proactive safeguarding regime. Its logic is intentionally conservative: reduce opportunities for harm, remove ambiguity, and prioritise the welfare and dignity of all children. To comply with the Act, schools and organisations must maintain a Child Safeguarding Statement, conduct risk assessments, design procedures to manage identified risks, train staff, maintain reporting pathways, and embed safeguarding into everyday governance and culture.

The ICCL guide refers to the Children First Act only once, in the context of a teacher’s obligation to report concerns to Tusla, the State agency with primary responsibility for child protection and welfare. It states: “A school should not disclose your trans identity to your parent(s) or guardian(s) if it would put you at risk of harm, and your welfare should be paramount.” But what, in this context, is supposed to constitute “harm”? A parent’s refusal to affirm a child’s claim that they were “born in the wrong body”?

In the Children First Act, harm is not a vague concept. It refers to serious abuse, neglect, or ill-treatment that significantly impairs a child’s welfare. Parental disagreement, caution, or a decision not to affirm a child’s beliefs about their identity does not come close to meeting that threshold. This framing also ignores the UK Cass Review, which concluded that the evidence base for medical interventions such as puberty blockers is weak and uncertain, and that “social transition” should not be treated as a neutral or consequence-free step.

By invoking Tusla and child-protection law in this way, the guide reframes ordinary tension within a family about how best to respond to a child’s distress as a potential child-protection issue. That is not what Irish safeguarding law provides for, and suggesting that it is risks badly misleading parents, children and schools about when the State should intervene in family life.

The ICCL is not obliged to reproduce the Children First Act in full, but a reasonable person might expect it to reflect its reality. The views of the ICCL and NGOs working in this area carry moral authority. Their guidance is taken as an indicator of “what is expected” by principals, teachers, boards, journalists and politicians. Their output influences policy and makes its way onto newspapers’ front pages. But if that guidance is wrong, the courts and Tusla will not ask whether a school followed an advocacy group’s guidance. They will ask whether it complied with Children First, identified foreseeable risks, and took proportionate steps to reduce them.

This is not an abstract concern. The highest-risk settings in any school are well known: toilets, changing rooms, sleeping accommodation, and any environment involving partial undress or unsupervised vulnerability. If a school treats the ICCL’s assertion that students who identify as trans or non-binary “should be able to” use facilities matching gender identity as if it were a legal right, without carefully weighing the rights of other pupils to privacy and dignity, the legal risk falls on the school, not on the ICCL. The ICCL is acutely aware of where the responsibility lies, and that is presumably why it added a disclaimer at the bottom of 146 of the guides’ 148 pages: “This guide is for your information only. It is not intended to be a substitute for legal advice.” That warning protects the authors, not those who act on it.

This guide wasn’t produced on the margins. It was written and researched by the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland( TENI) and ShoutOut, part-funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC), with input from bodies including Free Legal Aid Centres (FLAC) and the Irish Penal Reform Trust. It was reviewed by A&L Goodbody, one of the most prestigious law firms in the country. This is not the work of amateurs, and that is precisely what makes its failure to state the law accurately so serious.

The ICCL isn’t the first to produce such a guide. In 2022, the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) advised employers that staff who identify as the opposite sex “should” be permitted to use opposite-sex facilities. This kind of guidance exposes employers to serious legal risk under the Equal Status Acts if female employees believe their privacy, dignity or safety has been compromised. But how many women will challenge it? Advice of this sort creates a chilling effect, because institutions and individuals assume the law is already settled and that resistance is too professionally or financially dangerous.

The ICCL debacle has demonstrated that the pen is mightier than the sword, but not in the way the phrase is usually meant. A steady accumulation of “guides”, policies, academic papers, and newspaper articles has accomplished what legislation and litigation could not. In their book Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay describe this phenomenon as ‘discursive capture’. Change the manuals. Change the training. Change the guidance. Change the headlines. And reality will follow.

On January 22^nd, almost one week after the original article was published, The Irish Times reported that the Department of Education had rejected the ICCL’s claim, confirming that “no guidelines have been issued” to schools and that no such obligation to use “preferred pronouns” exists. When asked for comment, the ICCL did not correct the record. Instead, it said: “It is ICCL’s assessment, confirmed by legal advice received while drafting the guide, that schools must use students’ correct pronouns… This led ICCL to conclude that schools must use a student’s correct name and pronoun in day-to-day interactions.”

The ICCL’s rhetorical backpedaling is shameless. The guide insisted on “preferred” pronouns. When contradicted, the ICCL shifted to “correct” pronouns. In this context, “correct” does not mean true in any objective sense. It means “the words you are expected to use,” that is, the polite or compliant form. The demands remain the same. When asked by the Irish Times about the nature of their legal review of the ‘rights guide’ a spokeswoman for A&L Goodbody said it would not be commenting.

Doing the right thing by women and children does not mean denying dignity to people who identify as trans or non-binary. It is not a zero-sum game. But safeguarding depends on clarity, consistency and a steadfast focus on rules not preferences. The Children First Act reflects that reality. The ICCL guide does not.

As for consequences? There will likely be none. It will be business as usual. A.E. Housman, it seems, was right: “The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.”

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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Late in 2025, I noticed a small development that made me think that our key public services, and our health service in particular, are no longer deferring to trans demands quite as much as they used to. I’ll explain

Hope in Public Services

THE HEALTH SERVICE

The Irish health service has long been captured by transgender ideology. For our medical profession, biology takes second place to the demands of trans activists. Thus, Ireland’s Health Protection Surveillance Centre records sexually transmitted diseases among men and women not according to whether those infected are men or women but according to what the HPSC calls their gender. In its 2024 report on Mpox (formerly known as Monkeypox), the HPSC explains: “Gender is based on gender identity where it is provided; otherwise, sex at birth is used. Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of themselves (how they feel inside) as being male, female, transgender, non-binary, or something else. This may be different or the same as a person’s assigned sex at birth. Further information and resources can be found at the website of Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI).”

So sex in our health statistics is based not on biology but on how people “feel inside”. Thus, men infected with Mpox are being recorded as women infected with Mpox (Mpox in Ireland is overwhelmingly a disease of men). Likewise, men infected with HIV are being recorded as women infected with HIV. Health data is being falsified. And this data is presented using activist language like “sex assigned at birth” when everyone knows that your sex at birth is no more “assigned” to you than is your date of birth. Then, if you want more information, HPSC provides a link to TENI.

What is TENI doing in there? TENI is not a medical organisation. It’s a lobby group of transgender activists. The views of a lobby group should have no place in the recording and presentation of medical data. And yet our medical profession defers to TENI as if it were an authority of some sort. As I keep finding out.

THE BLOOD TRANSFUSION SERVICE

In 2022, I sought to donate blood, which I first did in 1978, when I was 21. But this time, something weird and disturbing happened. When I logged on to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) website, I was faced with a donor questionnaire the like of which I had never seen before. It was full of confusing, trans-inclusive language. This question was the one I found the most incomprehensible of all: “For females (cis and transgender) and transgender males: are you pregnant or have you have you (sic) been pregnant in the past 12 months? YES/NO.” (The typographical error therein is, I think, significant in its own right, on which more shortly.)

What was that supposed to mean? Biology matters in medicine. Sex matters when giving blood. There are different criteria regarding the quantity and permitted haemoglobin range of blood that may be donated, depending on whether the donor is male or female. And it matters very much for the safety of a potential recipient of blood that it be known whether a donor might recently have been pregnant. All of this is explained by IBTS on its own website, so does IBTS not understand the need to use clear language when asking vital questions of potential donors?

I wrote to the IBTS and asked: “What is a pregnant transgender male, what is a pregnant transgender female, and what is the difference between them?” In reply, IBTS referred me to various sources of information but didn’t answer my question.

So I wrote back again. This time, IBTS answered, bizarrely, that no such question as I quoted was in their donor quiz. “Could you please advise where you have seen it?” they asked, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was there on their website, being asked of everyone who might seek to give blood. And IBTS had this further advice for me: “I would suggest contacting some of Ireland’s transgender supports such as TENI”.

There’s TENI again. So I still had no answer to my query, and now I was being referred to a trans activist group for an answer. Why? It was the Irish Blood Transfusion Service, not TENI, to whom I sought to donate my blood.

So I asked my question for a third time, this time cut-and-pasting from the IBTS website: “For females (cis and transgender) and transgender males; are you pregnant or have you have you been pregnant in the past 12 months? YES/NO.”

That had the desired effect. I got the following response from a Clinical Nurse Manager: “Dear Paddy, I have reviewed the Regular Donor Blood Eligibility Quiz and can confirm this is an error in Question 10 re. pregnancy. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I have notified the relevant department, and this error has been corrected on the website… Please accept my apologies for the confusion caused.”

And what confusion! We gender critical people have long argued that what is called trans-inclusive language is confusing and misleading, and, especially, should not be used by doctors when talking to patients. But what IBTS showed is that there are times the doctors themselves don’t understand what they are saying. This brings me back to that typographical error in which they asked “have you have you been pregnant?”. That such a gross typo could remain unnoticed in a questionnaire aimed at the public shows that the doctors didn’t carefully consider what they were saying while striving to be inclusive and so on. That typo, I think, shows that the doctors simply handed over communication to a trans lobby group, and after that, they were too cowardly to challenge whatever nonsense that trans lobby group might have come up with.

I posted the apology I got from IBTS on social media, and this led to some welcome press coverage, and, of course, I was pleased to see IBTS change its donor quiz at my behest. But still, today, nearly four years later, much of the language used by IBTS remains ugly, confusing, and dangerous.

Here is the current question five for people who wish to give blood: “For females (including transgender females) and transgender males only: Are you a first-time donor, under 26, or have you not donated in 5 years?”

What sort of question is that? Decode it, and you will see that it makes no medical sense. Why should there be a category of donors that includes men who say they are women but excludes men who don’t say they are women? It would be nice if our Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, were to show some good authority here and get the IBTS to stop speaking to the public in riddles. But recent events make it seem unlikely that she will do that.

In September 2025, it was reported that potential blood donors are, in some cases, being deterred by being asked by the IBTS: “Is your current gender different from that assigned to you at birth?” Health Minister Carroll MacNeill defends the use of this question thus: “Certain blood components — such as blood for intrauterine transfusion — are only made from donations taken from cis-gender male donors, as female donors who have had a pregnancy may have antibodies in their blood that could cause potential harm to the foetus. A transgender male donor may have been pregnant prior to transitioning, therefore this must be established, so that the donation is not used for intrauterine transfusion.”

What the Minister is saying here is that men can’t get pregnant but women can, so it is necessary, for compelling medical reasons, to ask women, but not men, if they have ever been pregnant. No reasonable person, I believe, would object to necessary questions being asked of them in plain language. But a few unreasonable people, that is, transgender activists, do so object. So our Minister for Health responds by giving in to those unreasonable people. (Health Minister Carroll MacNeill is a keen advocate for the trans agenda, of which more later in this article.)

HOMELESS SERVICES

Trans ideology infects not only our health services but other parts of our public services, too.

In April of 2023, I was making a podcast from outside a social welfare office for homeless people in Dublin when women I met there shocked me when they told me that they were being forced to share accommodation with trans-identified men. “He dresses like a woman, he hits women like a man”, said one woman of one of those men. Many of the women I met there had suffered violence at the hands of men, and they understand that men punch harder than women do.

In one incident, they told me, a woman had been assaulted by a man in the domestic violence refuge known as the Novas Hostel, in Rathmines in Dublin, leading to the expulsion of that man from that hostel. After hearing that story, I wrote to Novas and to the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE), which is the section of Dublin City Council responsible for placing homeless people in accommodation. While neither Novas nor DRHE would comment on an individual case, their responses were revealing.

Novas 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. All referrals to our services are made by the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive, and a risk assessment is carried out when any new client comes to stay in our services… From time to time, due to the congregated nature of homeless services, issues can arise between clients.”

But “issues” in which women are assaulted by men would not arise in women’s homeless shelters if men were not in those shelters in the first place. Which is why women’s shelters used to be for women only.

DRHE would not comment on their having put a trans-identified man in a women’s hostel, but they were able to assure me that their “staff have undertaken training with the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI).”

There’s TENI again. So the decision to place a man in a women’s refuge was made by DRHE staff who had undergone training from TENI. No wonder a bad decision was made. But it was some months later that I came to realise just how stupid and callous that decision had been.

In September of 2023, the man who assaulted the woman in the hostel was up in court for what he did. I realised then that I knew who he was. He was a man who had a series of previous convictions for assault, for which he had just served a year in the women’s prison in Limerick. And yet, forewarned with this knowledge, DRHE still decided that the appropriate place to accommodate this man would be with women. At his trial, the court heard how he had beaten his victim to the ground, where he punched her repeatedly and ripped clumps from her hair (the victim was a 60-year-old woman of slight stature, I’m told). He pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence. DRHE has never been held to account for their appalling decision to place that man in a women’s shelter because our media pretended that that man was a woman.

I said at the outset of this article that I had noticed a development late last year that gave me some grounds for hope that transgenderism’s grip on our public services was at last beginning to loosen, so I’ll tell you now why I said that. Previously, when I went to give blood, I was referred to TENI; when I consulted recorded health data, I was referred to TENI; when I had a query on homeless services, I was referred to TENI. I keep encountering a lobby group which, although it has no relevant expertise, has been elevated to a position of authority in many and diverse areas of our public services. So what has made me optimistic now? It’s because the HPSC, in its most recent annual report on HIV, has dropped its citing of TENI as an authority to be consulted. I think that’s progress.

Politicians On Trans

In the rest of this article, I’ll tell you about current political developments in Ireland.

THE HEALTH MINISTER

Even though, in recent years, we have seen our government abandon much of its previous trans agenda, there are still those in government who want to abolish women-only spaces. This is what Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill had to say in the Dáil (the Irish parliament) in December 2025:

“We all know the sheer nonsense that a man would dress up as a woman and come into a changing room for the purposes of attacking me… Did you ever hear such nonsense? Did you ever have examples of it from any time since the Gender Recognition Act was passed?”

Actually, yes, Minister. We have had plenty of examples of men in dresses, since the Gender Recognition Act was passed, getting into women’s spaces and attacking women. We have had men in women’s hostels physically and sexually assault women therein. We have had Barbie Kardashian, who threatened to rape the women he was in prison with, using all kinds of implements in all sorts of inventive ways. Barbie boasted under oath about making those threats, and he has repeated them since he got out of prison.

And, anyway, why should women have to establish, to Jennifer Carroll MacNeill’s satisfaction, that men who want to come into places where women undress might be dangerous? Why can’t women just say “no” to any man, in any garb, who wants to come into women’s spaces? Why are women’s concerns “such nonsense” to our Health Minister?

Sadly, we know from her past form that Carroll MacNeill is unlikely to listen to the voices of women whose views don’t match her own. In 2023, she gave us this lofty solipsism: “Since the gender recognition change in 2015, neither I nor any woman with whom I am personally acquainted has raised the spectre or fact of men coming into women’s places in order to attack them”. I wrote then to Carroll MacNeill to suggest to her that she should widen the circle of women with whom she is personally acquainted and perhaps speak to women who have been in prison or homeless hostels. She ignored me.

THE JUNIOR HEALTH MINISTER

The Junior Minister for Health, with responsibility for mental health services, is Mary Butler TD. Butler appears to be even more committed to the trans agenda than is her boss. Recently, Butler visited Iceland, which the Department of Health stated was a “knowledge exchange” in which she met people from the Icelandic gender healthcare service and people who had “lived experience” of using that service. Iceland is widely regarded as having one of the world’s most unquestioning, affirmative models of trans healthcare. Any Icelander aged over 15 can change their name and legal gender without a medical diagnosis, while children of any age may do so with parental consent. Junior Minister Butler’s “learning” from the visit will, according to the Department of Health statement, “inform the development of a new model of care for gender healthcare in Ireland”.

Butler’s enthusiasm for transing teenagers puzzled me for a long time, as it seemed out of keeping with a previous cause she had championed. In 2018, as a backbench TD (member of the Irish parliament), Mary Butler brought forward a private member’s bill that would have made it illegal to give a tattoo to anyone under 18 (the bill failed for lack of support). Butler’s reasoning was that a person under a certain age is incapable of consenting to a permanent, body-altering procedure, even if that procedure is only skin-deep.

I think Butler is right about tattoos. I have done plenty of broadcast stories in my time with people who have come to regret, in later life, a tattoo they got when they were young and foolish. So how can Butler now support giving teenagers permanent body-altering procedures that go far beyond what is skin-deep?

It turns out that Butler has a trans-identified teenage daughter, or, as she puts it, a son. Butler has fully supported her child’s wish to change sex and says we “damage” such children when we don’t use the pronouns they want. And now Butler, as Junior Health Minister, seeks to extend the same approach she has taken with her own child to all other children in Ireland who might come to think that they are not the sex into which they were born.

Butler often talks about her own child when she speaks publicly on trans. In a tearful address to the Dáil in June 2025, Butler told us “there is no replacing lived and living experience in the crafting of good policy”. So the fact that Butler has such experience enables her, to her own satisfaction at least, to trump any argument put up against policy crafted by her.

Butler’s immediate boss, Health Minister Carroll MacNeill, has declared her approval of her junior minister’s trans healthcare plans, but getting approval for those plans at cabinet level will be harder. The present government is less amenable to trans demands than was its predecessor. The coalition in power now includes an alliance of a dozen or so rural-based TDs. Rural Ireland is less credulous of transgenderism than is young, urban, middle-class Ireland. Farmers know you need a bull and a cow to make a calf, and no animal changes sex. So I think if Carroll MacNeill and Butler take their plans to the cabinet for an Icelandic-type, transgender healthcare model for Ireland, they will be frustrated.

But that’s not the end of the story. In October 2025, Butler said that she was “working behind the scenes to deliver healthcare support for young trans people”, adding that this was “very hard to speak openly about”. What’s Butler up to? Much of the advance of transgenderism in Ireland has been achieved “behind the scenes” with little or no prior public scrutiny having taken place. Whatever Butler might be planning, we won’t let that happen this time.

THE OPPOSITION

The main opposition party in Ireland is Sinn Féin. Like the Government, Sinn Féin has ditched large parts of its trans agenda in recent years. It has had to.

Sinn Féin is in a complicated position: it is a party in power in Northern Ireland, part of a devolved, power-sharing government within the United Kingdom, while it is in opposition in the Republic of Ireland. When, in 2024, the British Government banned the use of puberty blockers for teenagers, following the damning findings of the Cass report, Sinn Féin immediately caved and supported the extension of that ban to Northern Ireland, even though this directly contradicted Sinn Féin’s policy. The reason Sinn Féin did this is that they knew that most of their voters in Northern Ireland would support the ban, so Sinn Féin weren’t going to fight the British on that one. Sinn Féin has now partitioned itself on transgender healthcare; it supports a puberty blocker ban in Northern Ireland but not in the Republic of Ireland.

Just months after its puberty-blocker debacle, Sinn Féin was faced with another dilemma arising from a development in Britain. In April of 2025, the British Supreme Court ruled that men can’t turn into women. Sinn Féin knew that most Irish people, in both states in Ireland, would agree with the British Supreme Court on this, rather than with Irish law (which Sinn Féin supports), which says that a man turns into a woman if he says he is one. The party’s conundrum was compounded when, a few hours after the British Supreme Court ruling was issued, Sinn Féin’s Health Spokesman, Deputy David Cullinane, on a solo run, took to X (Twitter) to say that the British court’s “ruling on the legal meaning of woman is a common-sense judgment”. We can only imagine the phone call Cullinane got from his aghast party leader after that. Within hours, Cullinane had deleted his comment and, in words no doubt dictated to him from party headquarters, he profusely apologised on X for the “hurt” he had caused to the trans community.

But the damage was done. The trans activists disinvited Sinn Féin from their upcoming Pride celebrations. Sinn Féin could live with that. For Sinn Féin, taking a pro-trans stance was all very well when it seemed like a low-cost way to augment their traditional, working-class voter base with a new, young, well-educated, middle-class one, but they were never going to abandon the former for the latter. They had shown this the previous year when they ruthlessly sidelined their trans supporters when the party judged it to be politically expedient to do a policy pivot on puberty blockers. But the longer-term problem for Sinn Féin is that the Left-wing parties, with whose support they aspire to one day form a government in the Republic of Ireland, are, unlike Sinn Féin, committed to the trans agenda in dead earnest.

With this in mind, at the beginning of this year, 2026, the Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald, gave an interview, ostensibly to clarify where her party stands on the transgender issue, in which she uses all her powers of verbal ambiguity to clarify as little as she possibly can.

McDonald calls for “calm, cop on and common sense”, which I’m sure no-one could disagree with, whatever it’s supposed to mean. Party policy on puberty blockers is, she says, to listen to medical advice, but she doesn’t explain how, having listened to that advice, the party supports a ban on these drugs in one of the states in Ireland but not in the other.

On letting men into what were once women-only spaces, such as women’s prisons, public toilets, and so on, McDonald says we should “come through that prism on a case-by-case basis”. So if we are to take McDonald seriously, women are expected to argue, on a case-by-case basis, what it might be about any particular man who wants to get into their changing room that would make them want to keep him out.

McDonald lashes out at those who, she says, seek to “divide, to demonise and marginalise… using rhetoric which has sparked a growing sense of fear within Ireland’s LGBTQ+ community”. McDonald is in her comfort zone here. Demonising us gender-critical types is easy. It commits her to nothing, and it will go down well with the trans activists. But it’s not going to fool them. Those activists know that Sinn Féin is not the ally they once believed it to be. And it’s not going to impress the Left-wing parties who expect more from Sinn Féin than just rhetoric if they are to support them in getting into government.

McDonald says this about her trans-identified brother: “On the gender issue, with my own sister, of course, we’ve had conversations. We don’t have public policy discussions, but, like anyone else, your lived experience matters.” So Mary Lou McDonald is no Mary Butler. Butler, you will recall, tells us of her trans-identified family member, that “there is no replacing lived and living experience in the crafting of good policy”. McDonald says her brother’s “lived experience” doesn’t lead her to consult with him on party policy. I believe McDonald. If McDonald’s brother feels aggrieved over not being allowed into women’s toilets, or over whatever rights he feels he is currently being denied, that’s not going to unduly trouble Sinn Féin. That’s not what Sinn Féin is about.

Reminding Sinn Féin what they are really about is, I think, what Mary Lou McDonald is doing when she says people need to “cop on” about the trans issue. The “people” she is addressing are her own party members. They need to cop on that trans is something the party needs only ever pretend to care about when it seems to be to their political advantage to do so, but it must never be allowed to hinder the path of Sinn Féin into government, which is what the party is really about.

I don’t think this duplicity from Sinn Féin is going to work. The Left-wing alliance they hope to lead is doomed because the Left no longer believes what Sinn Féin says about trans. Here’s what one Left-wing TD, Ruth Coppinger, had to say, when speaking in the Dáil in December of 2025: “…on trans healthcare… I heard Sinn Féin Deputies talking in riddles…. I say to the Sinn Féin Members not to wait for clinicians. It is trans people themselves who understand their needs.”

What Coppinger is calling for here describes the reckless and barbaric approach of medicating gender-confused teenagers on demand that was Sinn Féin policy until quite recently. But now that Sinn Féin, for electoral reasons, has backed away from that position and resorted instead to talking in riddles, it will never again be able to satisfy the demands of trans zealots like Coppinger.

And it’s not just in healthcare that the Left’s trans demands have grown insatiable. Women will not be allowed women-only spaces of any sort if the Left-wing parties have their way. When, in 2022, I started podcasting the voices of women who have been physically and sexually assaulted by trans-ID men in women’s spaces, the above-mentioned Ruth Coppinger took to social media to tell her followers that I was “spreading hate”. No, Deputy Coppinger. I am giving voice to women who would remain silenced if you had your way. If you think it is “spreading hate” to want to protect women from gendered violence, then you have lost the ability to tell right from wrong.

The next general election in the Republic of Ireland is due to take place by the year 2029 at the latest. My own view is that if Sinn Féin should then succeed in getting into government, it will be through forming a coalition not with the Left but with one of the centre-right parties currently in government (that would be with Fianna Fáil rather than with Fine Gael, for reasons dating back to the Irish Civil War of 1922/1923).

If Sinn Féin persists in courting the trans-obsessed Left, it will remain a party in opposition.

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

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16 January 2026

Dear Secretary of State,

We are writing in response to your remarks of 13 January regarding the PATHWAYS trial. We welcome your acknowledgement of the serious failings identified by the Cass Review and your commitment to evidence-based paediatric healthcare. Our main concern is that the clinical trial you defend rests on a diagnostic concept—gender incongruence—whose origins are political rather than scientific, rendering it an inappropriate basis for medical intervention in young people.

Your letter states that your approach thus far “has been led by the evidence, not ideology,” and asserts that “gender incongruence is [a] real and internationally recognised disorder,” defined in ICD-11 as “a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex.”

Yet this ICD-11 category did not emerge from new scientific discoveries. It is the product of a decades-long depsychopathologization campaign by activists and advocacy organisations, whose explicit goal was to remove psychiatric framing and guardrails around hormonal and surgical interventions, secure third-party payment for these treatments, and ultimately implement a transition-on-demand model across the entire field of gender medicine.

This ambitious campaign succeeded. Over successive revisions, diagnoses such as “gender identity disorder” and “transsexualism” were deliberately reshaped and relocated, shifting language away from any implication of mental disorder and towards a vague condition involving an inner identity at odds with the body. The ICD-11 construct of gender incongruence is the culmination of that process: an impressive political achievement, to be sure, but a far cry from the rigorous scientific inquiry upon which medicine ought to be built.

The activist influence is clear in the language itself. “Experienced gender” is an unfalsifiable inner claim, not a measurable clinical marker. “Assigned sex” is not a scientific term; it is activist language designed to obscure the reality that sex is determined at conception, observed before or at birth, and plainly immutable. When such concepts are written into diagnostic criteria, ideology forms the foundation of treatment before any discussion of interventions even begins.

This is especially important in the context of children and adolescents. The young people now being diagnosed under this framework are not a discrete, clearly understood patient group. They include boys and girls with very high rates of autism; adolescents with long-standing mental health problems and trauma; young people struggling with emerging same-sex attraction; and teenagers who have misinterpreted the normal discomfort of puberty as a sign they are transgender because they are coming of age in a culture saturated with the messaging of trans rights. Their distress is real. But the idea that it is best conceptualised as “gender incongruence” requiring medical intervention is a contested ideological view, not an established scientific fact.

It is crucial not to exceptionalise this group of young people. They are children and adolescents like any other, meaning all the well-established rules of child and adolescent development apply to them equally. On that basis, the “triple lock” of safeguards described in your letter cannot address the fundamental ethical problem: no child or adolescent is capable of giving “informed assent” to such drastic, life-altering interventions.

A young person may be able to memorise a list of risks and repeat them back to a clinician, but that does not mean they comprehend what lifelong infertility, impaired sexual function, or permanent changes to their body will mean at 25, 35 or beyond. Moreover, parental consent cannot make up for the child’s lack of maturity, nor can a national multidisciplinary team override what decades of high quality developmental science tells us about adolescents’ limited capacity to foresee long-term consequences and the importance of keeping future options open.

You argue that, with the strongest safeguards in place, the PATHWAYS trial is “the only way” to manage “the risks to young people who are using puberty suppressing hormones in an unmanaged way and the risks to young people experiencing extreme mental anguish by not accessing puberty suppressing hormones.” We agree that unregulated self-medication is dangerous, and that some young people are in profound distress. But it does not follow that testing a highly invasive medical treatment on healthy adolescents given an activist-crafted diagnosis is the only or best response.

Instead, it is vital to address the underlying reasons why so many healthy young people feel compelled to pursue these drastic medical interventions. This requires the courage to confront the root cause: these youth are caught up in a powerful, internet-fuelled social phenomenon—a culture-bound event driven by the messaging of the trans rights movement.

It is time to face the fact that, as a society, we have let these young people down by allowing them to be exposed to a political ideology with no grounding in truth at a crucial stage of their identity development—an ideology that untethered them from reality and convinced them that drastic medical interventions were the only solution to their pain. The answer is to restore reality carefully and compassionately, not to conduct a clinical trial that legitimises the very belief system that put these youth in harm’s way in the first place.

If your government is serious about protecting young people and being led by evidence, you will halt the PATHWAYS trial before it begins.

With sincere respect,

Genspect

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An Employment Tribunal in Scotland has delivered a mixed ruling in the case of Sandie Peggie, an NHS nurse who raised concerns about sharing a female changing room with a male colleague who identifies as a woman.

The tribunal found that NHS Fife harassed Mrs Peggie on four grounds: failing to revisit its interim decision once she raised concerns; taking an unreasonably long time to investigate allegations against her; introducing patient-care matters that were later found unsubstantiated; and issuing an overly broad instruction restricting her from discussing the case. Genspect welcomes these findings. Mrs Peggie deserved a timely and proportionate response—not a two-year ordeal.

The tribunal dismissed her remaining claims, concluding that the way she expressed her gender-critical beliefs in the workplace amounted to an impermissible manifestation of those beliefs. It also held that NHS Fife’s initial decision to grant interim access to the female changing room was lawful, as no objection had yet been raised. Once Mrs Peggie did raise concerns, however, alternative arrangements should have been considered.

As her solicitor Margaret Gribbon observed, this approach risks placing the burden on women to object before their privacy and dignity are taken into account. Genspect agrees. Single-sex spaces exist to protect privacy, dignity, and personal boundaries—particularly in intimate settings such as changing rooms. These are long-standing safeguards that women rely on, and they work best when institutions take responsibility for upholding them rather than expecting individual women to speak up under pressure.

NHS Fife’s situation highlights a challenge facing many employers: without clear guidance, staff are left to navigate impossible situations alone. The tribunal’s decision offers little clarity for the future. Genspect believes it is entirely possible to uphold everyone’s dignity while maintaining single-sex spaces—but this is achieved through clear, thoughtful policies established from the outset.

Mrs Peggie has shown remarkable courage in pursuing this case through years of investigation, special leave, and public scrutiny. She acted not only on her own behalf, but on behalf of women who should not have to justify why their privacy matters. Genspect hopes the aspects of this ruling that create uncertainty for women will be reconsidered on appeal.

Media Contact:
Genspect welcomes all media enquiries. Director Stella O’Malley is available for immediate comment and interview.
Email: media@genspect.org

About Genspect: Genspect is an international organisation promoting evidence-based, non-medicalised approaches to gender distress. Active in 25+ countries, we defend biological reality, support families and detransitioners, and advocate for healthier outcomes for individuals and society.

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Anyone who has spent time in Ireland will know that the national sports – Gaelic football, hurling, and camogie – are an integral part of Irish community life. The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is one of Ireland’s most well-known cultural institutions. Every town and parish has its GAA club with local people investing time and energy into running and supporting these clubs on a voluntary basis. Gaelic sport involves social structures, community centres, and shared traditions that connect generations. The women’s football, overseen by the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) – a sister organisation of the GAA – enjoys the same grassroots enthusiasm, with ladies’ football thriving alongside the men’s games, often sustained by the same families, volunteers, and local rivalries. Gaelic sport is a living expression of Irish culture and community spirit.

The GAA and the LGFA are separate organisations but they work together, and many clubs have adopted a “one club” model to cater for both male and female members. The organisations work together on the “Go Games” policy for under-12s sport where teams can occasionally be mixed sex. After that, players move on to the appropriate age category in the ladies’ under the LGFA, or the men’s under the GAA.

The GAA and the LGFA, along with the Camogie Association, are in the process of merging to become one organization by 2027. A steering group chaired by Former President of Ireland Mary McAleese is leading this process.

In the News

Recently, an Irish newspaper ran a story about an under-12s ladies’ Gaelic football match. Allegedly there were repeated, vocal claims from a parent that there was a boy on one of the teams and that this was unfair. The article goes on to explain that the father of the child in question – the alleged boy – says in no uncertain terms that the child is a 12-year-old girl, that the situation caused the family great distress and that he had hoped – and was told – that there would be an investigation into the matter. Both clubs released statements condemning the behaviour and the sharing of the story on social media. The father was later told by his daughter’s club that there had been an investigation and the matter was closed although he had not seen or heard any evidence of an investigation. When he pursued the matter with higher authorities he was told that the appropriate protocols had been followed and the matter was now closed. The article ends:

“The matter remains a live Garda enquiry. But the question remains: When (not if) this happens to another child, who do you call?”

The article skimmed the surface of an issue that Irish media and politicians now routinely and determinedly avoid – the importance of biological sex when it comes to sport, spaces and rights.

Why did this happen?

As mentioned above, mixed-sex teams can and do occasionally play Gaelic football under the age of 12. This was a ladies’ team though, and under the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. As such, it would seem fair to assume that a parent can be confident no matter how boyish a player looks that they are, in fact, a girl and have every right to compete.

However, the LGFA allows boys and men who identify as female to play with and against girls and women. This is despite the fact that the GAA – the men’s association – explicitly bars girls aged 12 and over from playing with the boys.

The parent who questioned the sex of the player may have handled the situation badly, but that a boy could be on the team creating an unfair advantage as well as posing a physical risk to girls playing against him was not beyond the realms of possibility. No child or team should be subjected to heckling or abuse from the side-lines, but if the LGFA is prepared to put girls at risk, then they must be prepared to deal with concerned parents.

The fact that girls and women can be pitted against adolescent boys and men in ladies Gaelic football is an alarming safeguarding fail on behalf of the sport’s governing body. The journalist reporting on the incident above missed an opportunity to draw attention to the LGFA Transgender Policy which is the root of the problem.

Captured

The LGFA, set up in 1974 to protect and promote women’s participation in Gaelic football, has been captured by gender ideology and is now prioritising the feelings of boys and men over the right of girls and women to safe and fair sport.

Gender ideology is the idea that boy or girl, man or woman, is determined by how you feel rather than your actual biology. So, if you feel like a man you’re a man, regardless of your biology, and if you feel like a woman you’re a woman, even if you have a male body. The feeling is called your “gender identity”. Gender ideology is a belief system, like a religion, and has no basis in science or fact. In fact, sex is binary and immutable – one is either male or female, and cannot change.

Believers in gender ideology see no problem with men who identify as women accessing single-sex spaces such as women’s toilets and changing rooms, women’s refuges and hostels, and even women’s prisons. They see nothing wrong with children and young adults who are confused about their bodies or have mental health issues being prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries which render them unhealthy, infertile, and dependent on the medical system for life.

When it comes to sport, it is challenging for even the most ardent proselytisers of gender ideology to justify male inclusion in the female category without revealing at best a disregard for women, at worst outright misogyny. From a young age, boys have a physical advantage over girls and from the onset of puberty the advantage is so obvious that it takes willful blindness to deny it. Men, even if testosterone is supressed, retain all the advantage of male puberty – they are generally taller, bigger, heavier, with bigger hearts and lungs and longer, stronger muscles.

And yet, for several decades sporting bodies as high up as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allowed males to compete in female categories. From the 1960s to the 1990s, international sporting bodies including the IOC, World Athletics, and others required sex verification for female competitors. Then, around the turn of the century, some organisations abolished sex testing due to claims it was invasive, limited, and discriminatory. In 2003 the IOC moved toward allowing male athletes who identified as women into the female category under certain conditions which varied from sport to sport. In 2015, they implemented a requirement for testosterone levels to be below 10 nmol/L, a figure which is still far above normal female range of 0.5–2.4 nmol/L.

Seeing Sense

The tide is turning again, though. As biological males competed and often won in female categories, sporting federations faced increasing evidence of unremovable male physiology advantages and safety risks, especially in contact sports. In the past five years, many sporting bodies including World Rugby, World Athletics, World Swimming/FINA, and World Cycling/UCI have restored sex-based eligibility rules. In Ireland the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU), Athletics Ireland, Swim Ireland, and Cycling Ireland have all aligned with their international federations’ move back to sex-based categories.

The IOC is now preparing to ban males who identify as female from competing in female categories across all Olympic sports following a scientific review on physical advantages linked to male puberty. The review found that the physical benefits of being born male remain even after testosterone suppression. IOC President Kirsty Coventry has made it clear that she wants to protect the female category.

Meanwhile in Ireland

The LGFA is lagging behind the main international and Irish sporting bodies with their transgender policy, introduced in 2023, which allows males who identify as transgender women to participate in female games. Males aged 12-15 must submit an application form along with a letter from a GP stating that they have transitioned or intend to transition to “living as a female”. Males aged 16 and up submit the same, along with evidence that their testosterone level is 10 nmol/L or below. As mentioned above, males who suppress their testosterone still retain the advantages of male puberty. A man whose testosterone level is half of the upper limit of 10 nmol/L is still well above the normal range for a woman. Testosterone suppression is a useless and tokenistic gesture which does nothing to ensure safety and fairness for women playing with and against men.

The LGFA is aware of this because they have been contacted by members expressing concern and dismay over a policy which was brought in with inadequate consultation and which severely compromises the integrity of the women’s category in Gaelic football.

Mary-Anne McNulty and Danielle Loughrey, who co-founded Gaels for Fair Play in response to the LGFA’s refusal to engage with members on this issue, emailed Helen O’Rourke (CEO) and other management committee members, outlining their concerns with the policy and requesting a meeting.

The LGFA’s response? Not, as one might expect, an offer to listen to women’s concerns and work towards a fair solution, but a solicitor’s letter that was utterly dismissive of the issues raised and said that the LGFA “…is not under any circumstances going to take steps to amend or replace the policy despite your request for it to do so.” The letter said that points raised by the concerned women including about fairness, safety, and dignity, about safeguarding, and about the likelihood of girls and women now self-excluding from the sport if they were unwilling to compete with and share facilities with males were “very subjective” and without “a shred of evidence”.

Mary-Anne said:

“I’ll never forget the morning I opened up the email, seeing the name of solicitors firm at the top and the words ‘strictly private and confidential’ marked in bold and underlined. A feeling of sheer panic and terror took hold of me – which was the LGFA’s intention, I suppose.”

Situations have arisen where girls and women have suffered injury to their bodies and to their dignity due to competing with and against males who identify as women. Female players and parents of girls around the country are seriously concerned about this, but most are reluctant to speak out for fear of causing hurt or offence to people in their community – as mentioned above Gaelic football clubs are interwoven with close-knit communities in towns big and small around Ireland. Most people don’t know much about gender ideology, but they know just enough to know that questioning it is a no-no, unless one is prepared to be labelled a bigot or a transphobe.

The LGFA seems determined to include males in the female games, and they imply in their correspondence with members that the Gender Recognition Act obliges them to do so. However, guidance from Sport Ireland says that sporting bodies can use their discretion in how they define participation categories – they may use sex-based categories provided they comply with equality law constraints meaning that exceptions must be reasonably necessary. There is no question that sex-based categories would be considered reasonably necessary when it comes to Gaelic football just like rugby, athletics, swimming, and other sports in Ireland.

What Next?

Will the GAA speak up for women where the LGFA have failed? The upcoming merger of the GAA, LGFA and Camogie Association is likely to become a decisive moment for women’s sport in Ireland, as it will require a single, unified policy on eligibility and participation. At present, only the LGFA has a formal transgender policy, while the GAA and Camogie Association do not. Integration will force the issue. Advocacy groups such as Gaels for Fair Play and The Countess have already urged the merger steering group to adopt a sex-based policy to protect fairness, safety and single-sex competition for women and girls, warning that the wrong approach will undermine female sport. Although no official policy has been drafted yet, the new unified organisation will have to address this issue, and members across all three associations will eventually vote on the final rules. As a result, women players will see either a strengthened, sex-based framework aligned with other major sports, or the continuation of the current gender-identity-based approach which endangers women and girls.

Catherine Monaghan is an Irish women’s rights activist and founding member of Wicklow Women 4 Women.

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Dear Dr Cass

We offer our sincere thanks for your scholarship, your integrity, and the clarity of thought embodied in the Cass Review. Your work marked a decisive line in the sand. We now speak of a post-Cass landscape because you helped the world recognise that something had gone seriously wrong in the treatment of distressed young people. For this we remain deeply grateful.

It is in this spirit of respect that we write to you regarding the proposed NHS puberty blocker trial. This trial is unethical in principle and unsafe in practice. The multiple foundational flaws in the PATHWAYS study design, along with the conceptual errors on which the entire protocol rests, have already been well documented.

More importantly, the very notion of a trial designed to test whether it is appropriate to block a child’s development toward healthy adulthood is conceptually flawed. To accept the validity of such a trial is to accept the existence of the transgender child. This is exactly what Harriet Hall described as Tooth Fairy Science, where researchers gather data without ever asking whether the phenomenon under investigation exists at all. The PATHWAYS trial administers a potent endocrine disruptor to healthy adolescents on the basis of a condition that is experienced in the mind rather than rooted in the body. No amount of survey data or bone density measurements can salvage a study whose premise was mistaken from the outset.

The entire trial is fruit from a poisoned tree because its foundational premise is false. If the diagnosis itself is a fiction, then every data point derived from it is contaminated. No methodological rigor can redeem research that begins with a mistaken assumption.

The PATHWAYS trial will not “put the issue to bed by establishing whether the drugs are effective,” despite your recent comments in the Sunday Times. We already know that the drugs are effective. Puberty blockers halt the natural process of sexual maturation in adolescence. They stop children from developing into healthy adults. These drugs reliably block puberty, prevent the awakening of reproductive systems, impede the development of sexual function, compromise future fertility, and impair a young person’s capacity to pair bond, to fall in love, and to mature into healthy adulthood. No trial is needed to confirm any of this. We already know this.

The two-year follow-up period cannot capture the long-term consequences, because the very nature of the intervention ensures that the damage unfolds only in adulthood. Short-term satisfaction cannot be allowed to eclipse the well-documented long-term harms. This is precisely why medicine cannot be demand led. Medicine must be guided by first principles that protect the young and the vulnerable from making decisions they cannot possibly comprehend.

The entire field of “gender medicine” is still searching for a cautious route along the same misguided path rather than finding the courage to acknowledge that we took the wrong road. We cannot medicalise identity; an individual’s identity is forged through life’s experiences, not through pills.

Many people view extremely gender nonconforming children as a transgender child. (I once was one of those children.) Yet the intensity of conviction often seen in children like this is matched only by the immaturity that leaves them prone to magical thinking. The long-term consequences are entirely incomprehensible to a pubescent child. They cannot meaningfully grasp the reality of lifelong infertility or impaired sexual functioning. They cannot understand what it means to reach adulthood unable to experience romantic attachment in a healthy and fulfilling way. These are adult challenges and adult losses.

This is why we created the Memorandum of Understanding on the Role of Puberty in Adolescence. Puberty is not an optional stage of life. It is the only gateway to healthy adulthood and it must be protected. Children deserve compassionate psychological care as well as the right to an open future whenever possible. You will also find attached Genspect’s briefing on detransition and puberty blockers, in which detransitioners reflect on what they would like to say to young people considering medical transition. Their experiences have so much to teach us about how to prevent further harm.

We urge you, with the respect your work commands, to reconsider support for this trial. Putting children into an experiment that suppresses their development, based on a trial that is designed around short-term outcomes, cannot meet ethical standards in any era, least of all post-Cass.

Thank you once again for all you have done to realign this field with evidence, reality, and safeguarding. We now have an opportunity to complete that realignment and protect children from further harm.

With sincere respect,

Stella O’Malley

Director and Founder, Genspect

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