Letter from Ireland, what is a woman?

Under Irish law, a man becomes a woman if he says he is a woman. Under British law, you can only be a woman if you are born a woman. That’s the difference between Irish law, where there has been gender self-ID as enacted by the politicians since the year 2015 and British law, as it has been declared to be by a recent ruling of the British Supreme Court.

The immediate reaction of the politicians and the transgender lobby here in Ireland to the British court ruling has been to say that it has nothing to do with us. We are a different jurisdiction, they say, and, anyway, this was all settled in Ireland a decade ago so we don’t need to discuss it now. But it’s not turning out that way. The Irish transgender lobby is worried. They are acting, it seems to me, as if they have a bad feeling that a lot of Irish people, if given the chance to speak about it, might agree not with Irish law on this one but rather with British law.

George Bernard Shaw said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. In Ireland, I think we can adapt that to say that a crude appeal to anti-British sentiment is the last refuge of someone who can’t come up with any actual argument. Thus Irish Times columnist Una Mullally declares “the Republic of Ireland is not part of an extinct British Empire, and our feminism is also our own”. And should you have any doubt about Mullally’s lack of a coherent argument, she tells us that if we “follow the UK down the drain… by locking in a version of ‘biological sex’ at birth as immovable – regardless of the person’s true identity – trans men could be entitled to fill the seats on boards allocated to women, access women’s refuges, and so on”. Translated, that means that, under British law, gender-dysphoric women will not be placed in men’s refuges should they become homeless. That sounds like a good idea to me. Does Mullally really think that such vulnerable women should be put in a hostel with men? And is she oblivious to the now-proven danger posed to women caused by putting trans-identified men in refuges with them? This is the debate we should have had in Ireland a decade ago. Now, thanks to the British Supreme Court ruling, that debate is finally happening.

This isn’t the first time that we have seen an appeal to anti-foreign sentiment in a bid to quell discussion on the transgender issue. “We don’t need that kind of debate in Ireland” the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin said in 2022, in response to a radio discussion on the RTE phone-in programme Live Line (the last discussion of its kind, as it has turned out). Next, we were hearing the bizarre claim from the trans lobby that British feminists were causing this unnecessary debate. If we weren’t being led astray by the Brits, it was implied, we Irish would not have any issue with the advance of transgender ideology in our country. That’s a view that’s insulting to Irish people. Do they think we Irish have no minds of our own? Our enemies try to be anti-British and succeed in being anti-Irish.

Sinn Fein is the quintessential nationalist party of Irish politics and the British Supreme Court ruling is proving particularly problematic for them. As a nationalist party, you might think it would come easy to Sinn Fein to say they will resist any encroachment of British law in Ireland, either in the Republic of Ireland where Sinn Fein are the main Opposition party or in Northern Ireland where Sinn Fein are part of a power-sharing devolved government within the United Kingdom. Sinn Fein is also, on paper at least, strongly supportive of the most extreme trans demands; their policy documents have called for gender self-ID for children and “affirmative” surgery to be paid for by the state. But Sinn Fein are not stupid. Embracing trans ideology must have once seemed to them to be a cost-free way of broadening their support among young middle-class voters but they have come to realise that their core, working class and rural voters won’t like the trans stuff if they get to hear about it. Now Sinn Fein is paying the price for this duplicity.

Following the British court ruling on 19 April, Sinn Fein’s Health Spokesman, Deputy David Cullinane, took to X (Twitter) that evening to say that the “ruling on the legal meaning of woman is a common-sense judgment” and that its implications need “to be fully examined in this State”. This was astonishing. Not only was Cullinane welcoming the judgement for how it would affect the definition of a woman in the United Kingdom but he was also suggesting that the Republic of Ireland could learn from this too. Seasoned Sinn Fein observers, such as myself, fully expected Sinn Fein to run for cover on this one so as not to have to give a straight answer to anyone about where they stood on the issue. That would certainly have been how the party leadership would have dealt with it. But Cullinane, on his solo run, spoiled that approach.

Within hours of the Cullinane tweet being published, the trans pride people had disinvited Sinn Fein from their next march. Party leader Mary Lou McDonald no doubt contacted her Health spokesman to give him a severe scolding. Cullinane’s offending tweet, which was published on a Wednesday evening, was deleted by Thursday lunchtime. In a new tweet, a chastened Cullinane stated: “I want to apologise for the hurt and offence that I have caused to the Trans community following a tweet I sent last night. That was never my intention… I’m sure those in the Trans community will feel vulnerable and isolated today in the aftermath of yesterday’s judgement, and I apologise that my words added to that.” Then, in a form of words doubtless dictated to him by the party leadership, Cullinane ended his tweet, saying “This is a complex issue for many but we need to approach it with compassion, understanding and dignity for all.” That marked a return to form for Sinn Fein, that is, a run for cover.

By Friday Mary Lou McDonald was on television’s Late Late Show, which is a favoured platform among politicians due to its penchant for soft, personality-centred interviews rather than fair questions about politics. So McDonald was able to speak about the Cullinane debacle without having to explain what Sinn Fein’s stance actually is. Compassion and understanding were there in plenty. Plain answers were not.

On that Late Late Show, McDonald talked about her sibling, whom she calls her sister, who is a trans-identified man. Many observers say that Sinn Fein’s transgender policy has been shaped in response to their party-leader having this sibling. I don’t think so. Sinn Fein’s behaviour on the trans issue is determined by whatever they think will give them most electoral advantage, or cause them least electoral damage.

If you think that is an unduly cynical observation on my part, then look at the party’s recent behaviour on puberty blockers. Last September, following the Cass review, the British Government banned the use of puberty blockers on gender-confused teenagers. That was in direct conflict with Sinn Fein policy which was in favour of what they called “affirmative healthcare” for such teenagers. So would Sinn Fein resist this British ban in so far as it pertained to Northern Ireland? No. The party’s response was to immediately cave. That’s because they weren’t prepared to defend their trans policy publicly and thus endanger their traditional voter base who, they knew, would more likely agree with the British government than with Sinn Fein party policy. Panicked by the British move, Sinn Fein deleted their transgender policy documents from their website and dropped their support for affirmative healthcare. Party president Mary Lou McDonald came to discover that puberty blockers may not be safe after all, telling us that they may endanger “bone density, cognitive function, brain development (and) potentially (cause) fertility issues down the line”. As the late US president Richard Nixon is reputed to have said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

Sinn Fein has now partitioned itself on the puberty blocker issue. It supports a ban on puberty blockers in one state in Ireland while supporting their use in the other. If McDonald thinks these drugs may not be safe for use on kids in Northern Ireland, then how can she think that they’re safe for use on kids in the Republic? The party has taken to hiding behind a formula of words that doctors, not politicians, must decide on what is appropriate transgender healthcare but they won’t explain how, as politicians, they have ended up with mutually contradictory positions presumably based on the same medical advice.

The effects of the British Supreme Court judgement continue to spread in Ireland. The Ladies Gaelic Football Associationis organised on an all-island basis. The LGFA allows trans-identified men to play on its teams with girls as young as 12. It defends this policy, describing itself as a “diverse and inclusive” organisation. Not all women who play Gaelic football are happy about this and they have organised themselves into a group called Gaels for Fair Play to campaign to get men out of their sport. The Gaels have so far been rebuffed by LGFA management but now these dissenting women know that, in Northern Ireland at least, they appear to have the law on their side and they have wasted no time in letting the LGFA know that they know this. And if the Gaels win on this in Northern Ireland it will surely force the LGFA to get men out of women’s sport in the Republic of Ireland too.

The Gaels should never doubt that the great majority of the Irish public will support them, once that public learns what is going on. People immediately and intuitively know that it’s wrong to put men up against women in sport. It’s unfair, it’s unsafe and it’s disrespectful of people’s privacy in the changing rooms. And it’s unsporting. A man who wins fairly in sport is respected. If he loses fairly he is respected. If he wins against women he should be ashamed of himself and he deserves zero respect from anyone.

The LGFA dispute within Northern Ireland is just one dispute that we can expect will spill over the border into the Irish Republic. I predict there will be more. Contrary to what the politicians are saying, a British court ruling can be taken into consideration by an Irish court if that court so chooses. If legal disputes arise within sports, prisons, hostels, healthcare, education or wherever, an Irish court may take note that British law says a person can’t change sex. Irish law gives gender recognition certificates to say that they can. But I have seen in prisons, for one, how sex offender men with GRCs are now being kept at a sensible distance away from women prisoners. That’s because the prison authorities know that men are not women, whatever the law says. If a prisoner should take a legal case over being “misgendered” in this way by the prison, an Irish court may be forced to ask “what is a woman?” And that will cause the Gender Recognition Act to come under the sort of scrutiny that it should have done before it was made law in 2015.

In the meantime, our media response to the British court ruling seems to be to mislead the public about what that ruling means. On Virgin Media Television in Ireland a trans activist and a sympathetic journalist were interviewed, with nobody to put an opposing view. The presenter, Elaine Crowley, told us that “unfortunately” a “looming step backwards” is happening in Britain. You read that right, the presenter said that. I was many years a producer in current affairs broadcasting in Ireland. You generally went for balance in panel discussions and, if you weren’t doing that, your presenter would do what we called “devil’s advocate”, that is, your presenter would put opposing points to the person being interviewed. The Virgin Media discussion did none of that. The journalist told us, his facial expression one of hurt incredulity, that in Britain “male police officers are now going to be able to strip search trans women”. That sounds shocking until you decode what is actually being said here. The presenter made no attempt to do that decoding for the public.

And it’s not as if there no-one available to the Irish media to put an alternative point of view. It’s noteworthy that a lot of the most prominent gender critical voices internationally are Irish. Helen Joyce, Graham Linehan, Stella O’Malley to name a few. These people are virtually never invited to speak on Irish media. You have to go to online media to hear from them. As a person who worked for decades in mainstream media, I find it sad, and disturbing, that my journalistic colleagues are letting the public down in this way.

But the media here won’t be able to keep the public in the dark forever. As the gender row develops in Britain and in Northern Ireland, the rest of Ireland will notice.

Genspect is delighted to welcome back journalist Paddy O’Gorman to Inspecting Gender with his Letter from Ireland. A celebrated radio and television broadcaster in Ireland, Paddy has earned multiple awards for his work and now brings his distinctive voice to paddyspodcast.ie.