But Bí Cineálta does not simply outline how schools should tackle bullying. It is not just a policy, but a tool for shaping our children’s moral understanding. And while doing so, it promotes a version of kindness and inclusion that most of us would not recognise. It also erodes other things that we care about just as deeply – truthfulness, freedom of conscience, and our role as parents in our children’s moral development.

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The issue here is one that C.S. Lewis wrote about in his 1943 essay, The Poison of Subjectivism. He pointed out that for most of history, people understood that when we say things like “treat others as you would like to be treated” or “we should care for the vulnerable,” we are not just expressing personal feelings or preferences. We are appealing to a set of rights and wrongs that have held true across cultures, traditions, and time. Statements such as these are an acknowledgement of an objective moral order.

Lewis warned that when we stop believing in this – when we decide that moral principles have no objective meaning and can be remade or redefined at will - they lose any solid foundation. The question is no longer “What is good?” but “Who gets to decide what counts as good?” And those who give themselves the power to decide inevitably place themselves above morality. Without a fixed standard of right and wrong, we have no way of knowing if we are moving closer to or away from what is genuinely good, and nothing to appeal to when we need to say “No – this is not progress.”

Bí Cineálta is precisely what Lewis described - an example of the poison of subjectivism. It is a policy that quietly redefines kindness and inclusion as whatever the Department of Education’s current “experts” have decided on, elevates them above all else, and asks us to call it progress. But is it progress to teach children that sex is a feeling rather than a fact, or to remove their ability to think and speak freely?

You, like me, may have spent years teaching your children that honesty matters, that they should stand up for what they believe in, and that people can disagree respectfully. Now imagine all of that being undone the moment your child walks through the school gate. Bí Cineálta tells your child that to “be kind,” they must lie. They must tell a boy in their class he’s a girl if he says so. If your child won’t, this is not treated as honest disagreement. It is treated as harm, and it can be punished. Inclusion does not extend to those children who disagree — they are labelled bullies. Hiding under the velvet glove of “being kind” lies an iron fist of forced compliance with gender ideology. And it will be the fear of this, not your voice, that shapes what your child comes to believe is right and wrong.

Of course, true kindness and inclusion matter, but they are not the only things that matter. Freedom of conscience, truthfulness, non-coercion, and the belief that every person has equal worth regardless of identity are also important. We cannot treat these as optional. They are all a part of the structure that holds our society together. To do so is to saw off the branch we sit on. Yet this is exactly what Bí Cineálta demands – that all of these must give way to “kindness” and “inclusion.”

If we truly believe that some things are always wrong, then we are already acknowledging the existence of the moral order that Lewis spoke of. We cannot then, with any integrity, accept a policy that recognises only part of that reality and treats moral principles as things to be redefined at will in service of a particular coalition or ideology. If we do, the message to our children will be clear: your deepest moral development is something designed for you by experts, mandated by the Department of Education, and justified only by the spirit of the age.

The Department’s role in education is not to invent values but to recognise and pass on what is genuinely good. Once it imagines itself free to develop our children in whatever way it decides is progressive, education stops being an initiation into truth and becomes nothing more than the manufacture of ideology and a very sophisticated form of conditioning.

If you ask me what matters most about Bí Cineálta, it is this: it is a policy that has, without so much as asking, taken from parents what was always ours – the right to raise our children according to our own morals and beliefs. And that should concern every parent in this country.

Kelly Henriques is a mother of four, with a BSc in Psychology and MSc in Health Psychology. Like many parents, it was her own children's experience of school that drew her attention to the direction of curricular reform in Ireland and parental rights in education.

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.

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.

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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.

The Irish Department of Education has said it will issue guidance to schools on LGBTQI issues, including the use of pronouns. This follows the Department’s rejection of the claim made by the Irish Council of Civil Liberties that schools are legally obliged to use student’s preferred pronouns. The new guidance will be informed by an “independent” review of an existing resource, Being LGBT in School. The updated resource will, according to the Department, be “in line with best practice.”

When the Department of Education describes a policy review as “independent”, parents are entitled to take that at face value. Independence implies a safe distance from advocacy interests, an openness to evidence, and conclusions shaped by law and fact rather than ideology. That is particularly important when the subject concerns children, schools, and identity.

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The task of independently reviewing the resource Being LGBT in School was awarded to Maynooth University academics Dr Angela Rickard, Professor Bernie Anne Grummell, and Professor Deirdre Forde in January 2024. Their proposal was one of three quotations received by the Department of Children, Disability and Equality, which co-funded the review.

Reporting on the independent review process, The Irish Times noted that one of the reviewers, Professor Grummell, “contributed to an EU resource on inclusion in education, the Tutor project, which recommended it should be mandatory for schools to have the Belong To quality mark. This would require teachers to undergo mandatory training on inclusion for LGBT and trans students.”

Before any teacher is compelled to undertake training that will influence school culture nationwide, its content should be open to scrutiny. Belong To describes itself as a ‘national services and advocacy organisation with and for LGBTQ+ children and young people’. Worryingly, the content of the Quality Mark endorsed by Professor Grummell is not publicly available. Belong To has refused to share the Quality Mark training materials with parents, claiming they are the organisation’s intellectual property. It has also stated that the programme is developed and administered exclusively by Belong To and is not formally endorsed by the Department of Education.

Collaboration between academics and external organisations is common and does not automatically imply bias. But independence is not only about actual conflicts; it is also about perceived ones. In 2021, Professor Grummell’s co-reviewer, Dr. Angela Rickard, contributed to a resource and workshop for trainee teachers on LGBTQ+ equality in Irish schools. This resource was also produced with Belong To and two other lobby groups: Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) and ShoutOut. This resource does not appear to be publicly accessible, and it is therefore impossible for parents to assess its evidential basis, ideological framing, or legal accuracy. This is no small matter. The recent Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) controversy illustrated clearly that even legal experts can misrepresent schools’ legal obligations to trans identifying students.

The environment in which the independent review takes place also shapes the public’s perception of its independence. Maynooth University’s guidelines on gender identity and preferred pronouns state: “Every effort should be made to ensure that you use the identified preferred pronoun... If you accidentally use the wrong pronoun, apologise and swiftly adjust your language.” Such policies are common across universities, but they nevertheless represent an institutional stance on matters directly related to the subject of the ‘independent’ review. Maynooth University’s Equality Officer, Sam Blanckensee, is a former employee of the Transgender Equality Network Ireland. While these facts do not, in themselves, create a conflict of interest, they contribute to the environment in which the review is being conducted.

Department of Health fails to publish expert assessment of the Cass Review

The Department of Education has said that the updated guidance will be issued to schools once the review is complete and will be in line with best practice. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that the review will refer to international developments in this area, including the United Kingdom’s independent Cass Review, which emphasised caution, evidence-informed practice and recognition of the complexity of child development in relation to gender identity issues. Its findings have already influenced education policy thinking in the UK. In February 2026, the UK Department for Education emphasised the legal duty of schools to provide single-sex toilet, changing and sleeping accommodation for pupils and warned against socially transitioning students in schools without parental knowledge or consent.

Irish politicians have raised concerns about how international evidence relating to gender identity is being considered by the Irish government. Ken O’Flynn TD has revealed that the Irish Department of Health has completed an expert assessment of the Cass Review but has not published it. The failure to publish this assessment is no minor matter. The Department of Education cannot reasonably claim to have produced guidance in line with best practice if the Department of Health has not made public its position on the same body of evidence.

None of this suggests wrongdoing by individual researchers. The concern is structural. When the government commissions a review described as ‘independent’, independence must be demonstrable. Prior collaboration with stakeholder organisations, institutional positioning, and the absence of publicly accessible materials inevitably influence how independence is perceived.

Parents are not unreasonable in demanding clear answers to basic questions: what evidence is being used, or ignored, what legal authority underpins the guidance, and who is ultimately shaping these recommendations? In policy areas that reach into the lives of children and families, trust is no longer a given; it is something governments must actively earn through transparency, rigour, and accountability.

Right now, that trust is fragile. If the Irish government wants parents to have confidence in its decisions, it cannot rely on assurances alone, it must show its work. In classrooms, children are asked to set out their reasoning step by step, to make visible the thinking that led them to an answer. The point is not perfection; it is accountability and understanding. Public policy should meet at least that same standard. When decisions are presented without the underlying evidence, assumptions, and influences clearly laid out, scepticism is inevitable. Showing the workings, honestly, and in full, is not a concession to critics. It is the foundation of trust.

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.

Detransition Awareness Day 2026: Life Beyond Transition

Join Genspect for a day of listening to Detransitioners speak about the practicalities of life beyond transition.

If you are a detransitioner and would like to attend Detrans Awareness Day in Washington, DC, on March 12th, funding support is available. Please email beyond@genspect.org to apply. You can also support this historic event by joining online or making a donation to support detransitioners.

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.

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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.

“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.

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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.

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).”

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

How Did We Get Here?

Gender recognition is a legal process that allows a person to change the sex marker on their official documents to align with their “gender identity” - their feeling of being male or female. This usually involves applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). Not all countries allow for gender recognition, and amongst those that do, the specific requirements and the process varies.

Ireland takes a strong stance on gender recognition. Since 2015 our Gender Recognition Act (GRA) has allowed anyone aged 18 and over to declare a change of sex without the need for medical assessment, diagnosis, or intervention of any kind. This is known as “self ID”. Applicants simply fill out a form online and submit a statutory declaration. They are then issued a Gender Recognition Certificate and their chosen sex is legally recognised as their actual sex for all purposes. They can apply for a revised birth certificate, essentially rewriting history, and a new passport.

Young adults, aged 16-17, can apply for a GRC with court approval, the consent of parents or guardian/s, and written approval from both their primary medical practitioner and either a psychiatrist or an endocrinologist not involved in the child’s medical care.

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Ireland was an early adopter of self declaration. We went from having no means of legally changing gender prior to 2015, to full self ID once the Gender Recognition Act was introduced. Our nearest neighbour, the UK, requires a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and evidence of two years living in the desired gender before granting a GRC. Some European countries have caught up and even surpassed us, for example in Germany as of last year there is no lower age limit on gender recognition and no medical or psychological assessment required.

The Irish legislation was developed with minimal public consultation or education - a deliberate and documented strategy employed by transgender rights activists worldwide in order to avoid scrutiny. In 2015, Irish people were focused on the campaign for same-sex marriage legislation. Everywhere we looked and listened we found discussion and debate on that issue and when the time came to vote, we voted an overwhelming “yes” for marriage equality. Irish people are generally tolerant and liberal.

Gender recognition legislation deserved at least the same level of discussion and debate. A law that allows anybody to self-declare their sex is in direct conflict with equality legislation which is in place to protect the interests of men and women in situations where sex is relevant, for example in single-sex spaces, in sport, and in ensuring equal opportunities in workplaces and education.

The Story So Far

According to Court News Ireland:

“A UK trans woman, who used her frozen sperm to have a baby with her wife, has been granted permission to bring a High Court challenge against a refusal by the State to grant Irish citizenship to the child on the basis that she is not the biological mother.

The woman - who has Irish citizenship while her wife does not - submits that if she has to claim to be the “father” of the child as part of the application, it would be an “offensive, discriminatory and unjust attack” on her person, gender identity and legal status.”

RTE, The Journal, the Irish Times, and the Irish Independent all reported on a trans woman who used “her sperm” to have a baby with her wife. Only men produce sperm, enabling them to father children. This is a basic fact of life. The fact that this person produced sperm means he is not woman. The job of the media, especially our national broadcaster, is to report the facts.

So, a man who now identifies as a woman used his frozen sperm to conceive a child with his wife in the UK. The man - the father - is an Irish citizen. Usually, a child born abroad to an Irish citizen is automatically entitled to Irish citizenship, provided that citizen is recognized as a parent under the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956.

The Irish State has refused to grant citizenship in this case. Why?

Because the Department of Foreign Affairs argues that he is not recognised as a “parent” for this purpose. Irish law only allows for a mother and a father, and the mother is always and absolutely the person who gave birth to the baby, regardless of genetics (if the baby was conceived with a donor egg) or intention (if the baby is intended to be adopted). This man’s wife is the mother, obviously. He is not a mother, and although he technically is the father of the child, his GRC means that he can’t be recognised as such on a birth certificate in the UK where he is based, or in Ireland, because he is legally a woman.

The man, who identifies as a woman, has been granted permission by the High Court to challenge this refusal, meaning the case will proceed to a full hearing.

According to the media, the man submitted that he could have claimed to be the father of the child and obtained citizenship by descent that way, but he felt that would “invalidate” him as a trans woman and invalidate his “same-sex” marriage. Being made to claim fatherhood of the child would be an “offensive, discriminatory and unjust attack” on his person, gender identity, legal status and same-sex marriage.

But the truth of the matter is that this man is the father of the child. No matter how much he wishes it to be otherwise, he provided the sperm, thus fathering the child, something only a man can do.

By choosing to legally change his sex to female, the man himself ruled out the possibility of being on his child’s birth certificate, and of his child claiming Irish citizenship through him. Gender recognition legislation allowed this situation to arise.

Truth Matters

The Gender Recognition Act compels us to lie about something really fundamental - the binary and immutable nature of sex. This lie about one of the most basic facts of life has far-reaching consequences.

Societies work because members operate on a common understanding of basic facts such as: what a human being is, how the world works, what’s physically possible or impossible, what rights and responsibilities apply to each person. This shared understanding is what allows us to coordinate government, laws, development of infrastructure, education, healthcare, and everyday life.

If we abandon objective truth in favour of beliefs that contradict physical reality, coordination breaks down. If institutions promote or endorse ideas that people know to be untrue, public trust declines. The legal system depends on definitions so when these depart from physical reality, legal consistency isn’t possible. Most professions rely on objective standards - doctors make decisions based on anatomy and physiology; educators who teach science, maths, history, geography, and many other subjects do so within a framework of objective, evidence-based facts; scientists, engineers, social workers, builders, plumbers, nannies, chefs, and almost anyone who doesn’t work in the arts relies on our common understanding of reality in order to do their jobs.

If legal categories can be redefined arbitrarily or unrealistically the rule of law is undermined. If educators depart from the truth, there is no knowledge passed on. If professionals are expected to affirm falsehoods, competence and safety degrade. A shared sense of reality is critical to social cohesion and without it, cooperation becomes difficult.

A Sticky Web

Legal gender recognition has many unintended consequences for the individual, for the family, and for society as a whole. In this case it has deprived a man of the legal acknowledgement of his fatherhood on his child’s birth certificate, and it has deprived the child of the legal recognition of his or her father and, thus far, of Irish citizenship. The man made a choice, of course, but given the ease with which one can obtain a GRC - with no legal or medical consultation - it’s impossible to know if any applicant is fully informed about the downstream ramifications of legal sex change.

It will be up to the High Court to resolve this particular issue and in the process hopefully shine a light on the Gender Recognition Act and some of it’s unforeseen consequences. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned about suppression of public discussion and debate about legislation that is at odds with our basic common sense.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored” - Aldous Huxley

Catherine Monaghan is an Irish women’s rights activist and 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.

Former Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar writes in the Sunday Times in celebration of the Gender Recognition Act in Ireland, which is now ten years old. As Varadkar explains of the GRA: “It is one of the most progressive laws of its type in the world, given that it allows people to have their preferred gender recognised in law without having to undergo a medical or psychological test, let alone surgery or medication.” Varadkar claims the GRA has been a great success. His article is full of easily refuted factual errors.

The Errors

We’ll start with the errors that Varadkar makes through simple carelessness on his part in checking facts.

Varadkar criticises “opponents of the act (who) cling to extreme and exceptional examples like that of Barbie Kardashian, a Brazilian”. Barbie is not Brazilian. He is an Irishman of Venezuelan background, as he confirmed to me when I met him recently outside Limerick Prison, from which he had just been released. We held part of our conversation in Spanish (I learned it in school), not in Portuguese, which is the language a person of Brazilian background might speak.

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In another factual error, Varadkar asserts: “For all the fuss about pronouns, how many people know that… in the Irish language, the words for 'him', 'her' and are t’ are the same?… Gaeilge is kind of queer”. Wrong. The Irish language has gendered pronouns. Him, her, and they in Irish are, respectively, é, í, and iad (I learned Irish in school, too). Even surnames are gendered in the Irish language. My name in Irish form is Pádraig Ó’Gormáin. If I had a sister, Patricia, she would be Pádraicín NíGhormain. Gaeilge is not queer.

Seriously Misleading

Now let’s move on to Varadkar’s more seriously misleading claims about how the GRA has operated over the last ten years.

Varadkar tells us that Barbie was “accommodated in a women’s prison, albeit in separate quarters”. Not true. For the first two and a half years of the five he has just completed, Barbie was placed in with the women in Limerick Prison, not in separate quarters. Barbie was in cell E2 on the E (Echo) landing. Two female prisoners were next door in E1. Another trans-identified man, a child abuser, was in E3. (All of this was detailed during the case before Limerick Circuit Court in October of 2024, in which Barbie faced charges of making threats of rape and violence against two women in the prison. Prosecution used a diagram of E wing to demonstrate that Barbie had been able to communicate with the women prisoners therein.) A third trans-identified man, one who goes by the name of Shauna Kavanagh, was also on E wing when Barbie was first sent there. Kavanagh, alone of the three men who were on E wing, is not a sex offender; he was in there for a series of assaults. All three of those trans-ID men were men whom the women had reason to fear, and they were not in quarters separate from the women.

Lest Varadkar be in any doubt about any of this, he need look no further than Barbie’s own sworn testimony at his 2024 trial. Barbie stated at that trial that he had told a female prison officer and a female prisoner that he wished to rape them with a mop handle and then “sexually electrocute their genitalia”. He was found not guilty on all charges against him, and I won’t speculate on how the jury reached that decision, but it is not disputed, least of all by Barbie, that he did make those threats. In his recent interview with me outside the prison, Barbie described, once again, in graphic and disturbing detail, the rape and sexualised torture threats he had made and the pleasure he got from hearing terrified women cry as a result of his making those threats. Barbie tells me he still plans to rape and torture two named women once he can get the opportunity to do so. Regarding the not-guilty verdict he got in court last year, Barbie says, “I got away with it.”

Varadkar’s extravagant and easily refuted claims continue: “The legally recognised trans community makes up a tiny and vulnerable minority that poses a threat to no one”. It’s not possible to plausibly claim that all the individual members of any community are a threat to no one. That remains true even if those individuals are men who like to wear dresses.

Take the case of Shauna Kavanagh, whom we mentioned earlier. Kavanagh was released from the women’s prison in Limerick in early 2022, having served a year for his assault convictions, and he was then housed in a women’s domestic violence refuge in Dublin. In April of 2022, he assaulted a 60-year-old woman resident therein (a woman of slight stature, other women who were living there have told me). At his subsequent trial for that assault, the court heard how Kavanagh had punched the woman to the head, pulled clumps of hair from her scalp, and rained blows down upon her when she was on the ground. By the time that case came up in court in September of 2023, Kavanagh was back in prison, this time in the women’s section of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, for another assault. He got a three-month suspended sentence for the attack on the woman in the refuge. (Our craven media pretended that no such man-on-woman assault had taken place and that what had occurred was an incident involving two women.) Varadkar says, “To my knowledge, there is no evidence that any person with a gender recognition certificate in Ireland has carried out an attack in a bathroom,” and he might even be right on that, but do attacks in other, formerly women-only spaces, such as domestic violence shelters, not matter to Varadkar?

Out of Touch with Reality

Varadkar makes the observation, popular with transgender activists, that people who are trans-identified are only a tiny minority, with the unspoken implication that therefore giving in to their demands will affect only a tiny minority. That contention doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. A man in a women’s football team affects all the women on that team and all the women in all the other teams that that man might play against. A man living in a women’s domestic violence refuge affects all the women living in there with him; such a man may only occasionally, or never, assault a woman in that refuge, but the fear he instils through his presence is constant. Ask any woman who has had to live with a violent or abusive man.

On the matter of bathrooms, Varadkar dishonestly implies that men in women’s toilets present no more of a threat to women than women in men’s toilets would present to men, as if the two types of threat were symmetrical. He puts it like this: “Female and male-only spaces are another dilemma. Lots of men don’t particularly like the fact that women often come into the gents’ bathroom to avoid a long queue at their own.” Really? Maybe women “often” come into the gents' toilets in pubs that Varadkar frequents, but it doesn’t happen in my local. Women, in my experience, don’t want to intrude in men’s toilets. I have been frequenting pubs for about fifty years now, and I would say that no more than half a dozen times in that fifty years has it happened to me that I have been peeing in a urinal when a woman has accidentally walked into the wrong loo. And even when that happens, it’s no big deal. It’s funny. After a moment’s shock for both parties, there is laughter all around as the woman apologises before swiftly making an embarrassed exit, as we men assure her as she vanishes out the door that we are not taking any offence. It’s an amusing incident for all concerned because we all know that nobody was ever under any threat.

If a man comes into a woman’s toilet, it’s different. A man might do this once by accident, but a man who “often” goes into women’s toilets, as Varadkar claims women often go into men’s toilets, would rightly be perceived by women to be a dangerous man. Contrary to what Varadkar says, there is no “dilemma” presented by having separate men’s and women’s toilets. It’s simple. Just as men who want to be in women’s sports are cheats, so, too, men who want to be in women’s toilets are creeps.

Dishonesty or Ignorance?

I keep asking myself, as I’m writing this article, if Varadkar’s disregard for facts is better explained by dishonesty or ignorance on his part. Now I’ll answer that question. I think Varadkar is not as ignorant as he gives the appearance of being; he understands more than he is letting on. In what seems almost like a Freudian slip, Varadkar describes Barbie Kardashian as “a Brazilian male and violent criminal who secured a gender recognition certificate”. Did you notice that? Even as he gets Barbie’s nationality wrong, he gets his sex right.

So why is Leo Varadkar not respecting Barbie Kardashian’s legally recognised gender and chosen pronouns? About 1500 people, Varadkar tells us, have acquired GRCs since the GRA became law ten years ago. Would Varadkar be as disrespectful of all of those people’s new, chosen gender as he is of Barbie’s? I think not.

Barbie Kardashian, as a result of Varadkar’s precious GRA, has a certificate that says he is a woman. But Barbie is a person who commits sexual offences against women. Most sexual offences are committed by men, and the victims are almost always women or children. Rape is a gendered crime. So that makes it especially hard to maintain the fiction that Barbie is a woman, whatever the GRA might say, when he has convictions for that most characteristically male of crimes, that is, sex crimes against women. If only Barbie had confined himself to non-gendered crimes or none, then Varadkar would still be maintaining the pretence that Barbie is a woman.

Leo Varadkar, in verbally revoking the sex change that has been legally granted to Barbie Kardashian, is tacitly admitting that people cannot really change sex.

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.

In 2015, when I was in my fourth year of secondary school, I began questioning the implications of legally changing my gender. Now, as an adult, I want parents across Ireland to understand the legal and practical challenges I face, particularly in healthcare and employment, due to the Gender Recognition Act 2015.

The Dilemma

After legally changing my gender to male, my biological sex remains female. I’ve been seeking clarity on whether this affects my rights to same-sex healthcare and employment protections. Despite reaching out to organisations like the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI), BeLonG To Youth Services, the Law and Disability Office, ADHD Ireland, AsIAm, Epilepsy Ireland, the Ombudsman for Children’s Office, Citizens Information, the Gender Identity Clinic in Loughlinstown, my GP, and An Garda Síochána, I’ve struggled to get clear answers.

In 2016, I attended the Gender Recognition Bill Review at the Ombudsman for Children’s Office to voice my concerns, but the issues remain unresolved.

Healthcare Concerns

I live with epilepsy, which raises serious questions about my medical care. If I’m unconscious and medical staff rely on my legal gender (male), will they provide treatment suited to my biological sex (female)? In 2023, I was hospitalised and given medical equipment unsuitable for my body because my records listed me as male. During the same hospital stay, a urine sample led to a misdiagnosis because the doctor didn’t review my file. I was tested for gallstones, a condition less likely in women, particularly during menstruation. Only after I clarified my biological sex did the doctor adjust the diagnosis, as my results were typical for a woman.

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While seizure treatment protocols are the same for males and females, hormone therapy can make it harder for medical staff to determine a patient’s biological sex. This increases the risk of incorrect treatment. Additionally, healthcare workers face a legal dilemma: if they treat me as female based on my biology, are they breaking the law by not adhering to my legal gender? Conversely, if I’m harmed because they treat me as male, could I take legal action against them for following the law?

I wrote to the Minister for Health, who responded that this issue falls outside her remit and advised contacting the Health Service Executive (HSE). I replied that HSE staff are bound by law, and if the law creates problems, it’s the Minister’s responsibility to address it.

Employment Rights

Under the Employment Equality Acts, employers cannot discriminate based on gender. As someone who presents as male, I wonder about the implications if I pursued a career in nursing, particularly in roles involving intimate care. Would patients, parents, or children have a right to know my biological sex? Could failing to disclose this breach their rights? Does my employer need to know my biological sex, and where do my privacy rights begin and end? Could an employer face legal consequences for hiring a transgender person without disclosing their biological sex, and would this conflict with my rights as a transgender person?

Garda vetting does not disclose biological sex to employers. Should I be required to disclose my biological sex to avoid potential issues with informed consent, particularly in sensitive roles? When I was younger, I would have preferred a biologically female nurse or carer for certain types of care, and I believe many women and girls feel the same. I’ve informed my employer of my biological sex, but this isn’t a legal obligation, and not all transgender individuals may choose to do so.

Implications of the Gender Recognition Act

When applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate, I declared, “I, Luke O’Reilly Kane, solemnly declare that I will live and be treated as a male for the rest of my life.” Does this mean I’ve forfeited sex-based rights, such as access to female spaces?

Ten years on, I am debating revoking my certificate, however, after reading through the document. I don’t understand the point. Without these questions answered, can I use male or female spaces? What provisions will revoking give me?

Concerns for People with Disabilities

The Gender Recognition Act creates challenges for people with disabilities. I experience symptoms of autism typical for females, but diagnostic criteria differ between males and females to ensure accurate identification, particularly for girls who are often underdiagnosed. Because I’m legally male, I may be assessed using male criteria, potentially denying me access to appropriate healthcare and support. This feels like discrimination against transgender individuals with disabilities.

The Social Democrats’ recent push to include non-binary genders in Irish law—through parliamentary questions and an ongoing interdepartmental working group assessing impacts—raises further questions. What will this mean for transitioners who are unconscious in A&E? If a patient’s legal gender is non-binary, how will emergency staff determine biological sex-based treatments without clear protocols?

Further, if this comes into law, psychologists and psychotherapists could be sued for not affirming a person’s preferred gender, according to the proposed ban. This is particularly concerning for conditions like autism and ADHD, where symptoms differ by sex, and where exploring gender identity through therapy might be misclassified as “conversion practices.”

Broader Implications

I may be among the first to navigate these legal complexities through school and into the workforce, but I can assure you I will not be the last. Relating to these unresolved questions, the Prohibition of Conversion Therapies Bill 2018 lapsed when the Oireachtas dissolved in 2020. After the election, the government pledged to introduce a new ban. In 2023, Minister Roderic O’Gorman reaffirmed that commitment, but by July 2024, the legislation still hadn’t been finalized. It most likely will be soon, considering the EU has urged hate speech legislation to come into Ireland within the next two months—or face legal action. As someone who receives support through Genspect—a service I find valuable and life-affirming—I worry: will the therapy I choose be criminalised under this proposed law? Will my path to self-understanding be respected or suppressed?

It is common knowledge that females go undiagnosed with autism and ADHD due to differences in symptoms—autism, for instance, has tailored diagnostic criteria for girls and boys to ensure girls don’t go overlooked. Since I declared I am “to be treated as male for the rest of my life,” is there a possibility of me not being assisted accordingly? As I still have female-typical symptoms, but am legally to be treated as male, if this bill comes through, am I neurologically a male or a female? Will there be precautions in place for psychologists that may be sued for not treating the biological sex of the individual? My TD and Prime Time stated, “This will be unlikely as the individual will want a diagnosis—who will sue them?” But without clarity, how can we trust the system?

I was astonished to see my concerns raised be ignored by organisations like the Ombudsman for Children’s Office, BeLonG To, TENI, and all our ministers. Transitioned individuals with disabilities, like me, are left in a legal grey area with limited support.

Catherine Connolly seems like a very kind, thoughtful woman and says she’s “a president for all,” but I cannot support parties backing her, including Minister Roderic O’Gorman of the Green Party, as their policies hinder my access to safe healthcare and clear employment rights. I note Minister Heather Humphreys’ recent comments distinguishing between transgender women and biological women, but as a former Minister for Social Protection, her timing—potentially tied to a non-political role—raises questions. I urge parents to consider these challenges and advocate for clearer laws to protect transitioned individuals, particularly those with disabilities, in healthcare and employment.

Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, in his Irish Times article on the GRA, stated, “Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act has been a success.” After reading my experiences, have they been? He defines sex as “biological and related to our chromosomes, organs, and related characteristics,” a view aligned with presidential candidate Heather Humphreys’ distinction between transgender and biological women. Should we amend the GRA to include sex? Varadkar also noted, “That is not to say it is perfect. Like all legislation, it should be subject to review and, where appropriate, amendment.” I plead with our next president and the Irish government to amend the GRA to support our healthcare workers, our safeguards, and the transitioned people of Ireland.

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.

Once upon a time, most of us had never heard of gender ideology, also known as trans ideology. Everybody knew about transvestism and perhaps had read the odd sensational story about a transexual. The former was a fetish that mostly men indulged. The latter was a rare phenomenon (also experienced mostly by males) and generally considered an extreme measure to relieve extreme discomfort. Now, within a couple of decades, ideas around the manipulation of one’s sex have become mainstream. There are few who haven’t encountered gender or trans ideology either in school, university, the workplace, online, or in daily life.

Talking about it can be really difficult. When the topic comes up, the shutters go down. People often don’t know much about it, but they have a rough idea what they are meant to say. They say what they think is the right thing and then shut up before they betray a lack of knowledge or political correctness. End of conversation.

Reasonable, thoughtful, curious people with reasonable questions and concerns are staying silent on this issue. As a result, the only voices we hear are those with extreme and nonsensical ideas.

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What Exactly Is Gender Ideology?

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. If you feel like both or neither, you’re nonbinary. The feeling is called your “gender identity”.

If the body you have doesn’t match the feelings, adherents of gender ideology believe you can alter it with hormones and surgery. They believe this changes your sex.

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.

People Don’t Know What They Don’t Know

There are some hardcore believers and activists out there, but there are many others who have been surface-level indoctrinated into what I can’t help but see as a kind of cult of trans ideology. The average person, I think, has been conditioned to say the right thing, but when you scratch beneath the surface, doesn’t fully understand what gender ideology is, and doesn’t agree with many aspects once they do understand. This includes people who work in medicine, law, politics, and education - people who we trust to help us make important decisions, or to make them on our behalf. People are confused about the terms, unaware of the statistics, and ignorant of the law.

• Many people don’t know that a transwoman is a male who wants to be a woman and a transman is a female who wants to be a man. When they hear talk of transwomen using women’s bathrooms, they don’t necessarily know that it means men. And if they do know it means men, they usually assume that these are men who have had surgery, and so, what harm? In fact, only 5-10% of men who identify as women actually have surgery.

• They have never heard of autogynephilia - a man’s sexual arousal and erotic interest in the thought or image of himself as a woman. Some data suggests that over 80% of men who identify as women experience autogynephilic arousal. This means that for at least some transwomen, there is a sexual component to being treated as a woman and accessing women-only spaces. This changes how people feel about men who identify as women in women’s spaces.

• They don’t know about self ID. In Ireland, we have the Gender Recognition Act 2015, which allows for anyone aged 18 or over to legally change their sex simply by filling out a form. There is no assessment or oversight. This undermines women’s right to single sex spaces because any man can easily declare himself to be a woman and is then entitled to access. It means men who identify as women can play in some women’s sport, and compete for grants, awards, or roles that have been created for the purpose of increasing women’s participation in education, employment or other facets of society. It also corrupts data collection, falsifying public health research, equal pay audits, and crime statistics by allowing people to choose their sex.

• People are unaware of the extent of the issue. There has been a dramatic rise in the number of young people, particularly adolescent girls, identifying as trans or nonbinary in recent years. In the UK alone, gender services went from handling under a hundred youth referrals in 2010 to over 5,000 referrals in 2022. This marks a huge shift, not just in volume, but demographically toward young women. Prior to this, the dominant demographic seeking to transition was adult men.

• They confuse the issue with gay rights. In Ireland, people who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual have the same rights as people who are heterosexual. As a country, we overwhelmingly supported the vote for same sex marriage in 2015. Sexuality (who you are attracted to) is a separate issue from gender ideology. Supporting trans or gender ideology is not the same as supporting gay rights.

What Should We Do?

Stop saying you don’t know enough about this topic. You DO know. You are a man or a woman, and you live in the world with other people. You are entitled and equipped to have an opinion. If you’re reading this, you know what sex means. You know who is stronger, who has the babies, and who is more vulnerable to sexual assault. You know that children and teenagers are not capable of making decisions that impact their health and fertility for life.

If you care about women’s rights, children’s mental and physical well-being, truth, and freedom of speech, then you must have conversations about them.

Here are five key points that are hard to disagree with:

1. Sex is binary and immutable - you’re either male or female, and you can’t change this. There is no new science that challenges this. A tiny number of people are born with a disorder of sex development, also known as intersex, but these people are still either male or female. People remain either male or female, no matter how they dress, what they call themselves, or what their sexuality is (who they’re attracted to).

2. Single sex spaces exist because statistically, the overwhelming majority of sexual offences are carried out by males, and the overwhelming majority of victims are women and girls. Most men do not pose a threat to women or children, but we can’t spot the bad men just by looking, so we exclude all men from spaces where women or children may be vulnerable. We don’t let some men in because they seem trustworthy. The same applies to men who identify as women - we can’t spot the bad ones just by looking, so we must exclude all of them from women’s spaces. Most men understand and respect this. Why can’t men agree to be kind and respectfully accommodate men who identify as women in men’s single sex spaces?

3. Autogynephilia (AGP) is a component of trans identity for many males (over 80% according to one study, as mentioned above). Most people, even those who thought it reasonable for a man who identifies as a woman to use women’s spaces, are not entirely comfortable with the idea of essentially indulging a man with a fetish.

4. Self ID means that in Ireland, as in many other countries, it is possible for anybody aged 18 or over to legally change their sex simply by filling out a form online. Most people are unaware of this, believing that there is a process of assessment and treatment to be gone through in order to officially change sex. Anyone, including predatory men and men for whom AGP is a driver in their trans identity, can legally change sex and access women’s spaces. In Ireland, we’ve had sexually aggressive and violent men incarcerated with women thanks to the Gender Recognition Act.

5. Teaching children that it is possible to be born in the wrong body and to change one’s sex is dishonest. No child is born in the wrong body. It is not possible to change sex. Attempts to modify one’s body in order to look like the opposite sex involve ineffective, risky surgery and lifelong dependence on medication that has serious side effects. We have a duty to protect children’s health and safety, to be honest with them about human biology, and to prepare them for life as adults. A progressive society would allow children to play, dress, behave, and dream free from the restrictions of sexist stereotyping. Any child can wear pink, play with trucks, enjoy tea parties, or dream of being a firefighter or a nurse. Preferences like these are not determinative of one’s sex. To suggest that a boy who likes dolls and fashion or a girl who likes trucks and football might be “born in the wrong body” is regressive and sexist.

Keep It Simple

People are complex, but this issue is really quite simple. In terms of our sex and our abilities and vulnerabilities related to our sex, nothing has changed. Sex is still binary and immutable (this can be your mantra).

Gender, which is really just behaviour - masculine or feminine - doesn’t matter. Male or female, it doesn’t matter how we dress, what jobs we do, whether we like to crochet and wear nail polish or chop wood and dress like a lumberjack.

Sex, which is biology, often doesn’t matter either, but when it does matter, for example in sport, or in protecting women and children from harm - it really, really matters, and we must take it seriously.

Children and teenagers now, just like all of the children and teenagers before them, do not have the maturity or wisdom to make decisions that will permanently impact their future health and fertility.

Let’s openly, respectfully call out and challenge this dangerous ideology that’s harming young people and eroding women’s rights. When it gets difficult, take comfort and confidence from the knowledge that you have truth, facts, science, and common sense on your side.

Catherine Monaghan is an Irish women’s rights activist and 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.

Barbie Kardashian says he regrets not yet having raped the two women he threatened while he was in prison but he will now postpone those rapes until he has first murdered three other named people. Barbie told me this when he came out of the gates of Limerick Prison this week, having just spent five years inside. Outside the prison, I was the first person he spoke to.

Barbie was pleased there was a media presence there waiting for him, even though it was only me and a photographer from the newspapers (another journalist, David Raleigh of the Irish Mirror, would arrive shortly afterwards). Barbie was wearing a lot of make-up. And he was sporting absurdly large fake breasts. He jiggled those breasts for the photographer and then lifted his outsize bra to show a smaller bra underneath to prove to us that he is developing real breasts, albeit small ones, as a result of the feminising hormone treatment that he has been receiving while in prison.

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Barbie’s five year sentence was for threatening to rape and torture his mother. And he had a lot of previous convictions from when he was a juvenile for threatened and actual violence and sexual assaults upon women. Upon his being sent to prison in 2022, the court heard that the then 20-year-old man before them, who had some time before changed his name to the feminine-sounding Barbie Kardashian, was now in possession of a gender recognition certificate which meant that he also had now legally changed his sex. That’s how gender self-identification works in Irish law; a man becomes a woman if he says he is a woman. Accordingly, Barbie was sent to do his prison time in a women’s prison, specifically, the women’s section of Limerick Prison. In that women’s prison, he joined two other trans-identified men who were there before him, one of whom was a sex offender, the other there for a series of physical assaults upon men.

By November of 2022, I was publishing interviews with women former-prisoners who were telling me that they had been regularly subjected to threats of rape and sexual violence from some of the men they had been incarcerated with. And whereas the threats were intermittent, the fear that these men instilled in the women was constant. I wrote to the prison authorities about what was happening and I was ignored. I telephoned and was treated with rudeness and was told I had to write, which I again did, and once again I was ignored. But, by January of 2023, the prison authorities were taking notice because, in that month, one of those men, Barbie Kardashian, started picking up criminal charges for allegedly making threats against women in the prison. By April he had picked up four such charges and the Minister for Justice took the decision that month to transfer Barbie to a part of Limerick Prison where he would have no further contact with women.

The charges against Barbie came before Limerick Circuit Court in October of 2024. He faced four charges of making threats of rape and violence against two women in the prison; one a prison officer named Roisin Linnane, the other a prisoner named Teghan McGhee. As I reported from the trial at the time, Barbie, in his evidence, did not deny he had made those threats. He did the opposite. He told the court that he had threatened to rape the prisoner Tegan McGhee with an object and thus injure her to the extent that “she would not be able to have children.” When asked what object he had in mind, he explained “I wanted to use an electric rod, but that was not available to me. I remember thinking I wanted to use the handle of a sweeping brush or a mop. I wanted to torture her sexually; I wanted to sexually electrocute her genitalia.”

He told the court he wanted to “molest” prison officer Roisin Linnane. He said he would do this by “putting my hands between her legs and grabbing her vagina.” This would be a more “realistic” threat than rape, he said, because the opportunity to rape her while he was in prison was unlikely to arise.

Barbie was the last witness to give evidence at his five-day trial. Then the jury retired and came back later that afternoon with their verdict. Barbie Kardashian was found not guilty on all counts.

So when Barbie came out of prison this week, the first thing I wanted to know from him was whether or not he still intended to rape those two women if got the chance, or did he now regret making those threats. Barbie answered: “My regret is not carrying out the threat. I really wanted to use an object to rape them. They deserve to suffer.” When I asked Barbie if he had been surprised, as I was, at his having been found innocent of the charges against him, he replied: “I got away with that.”

Teghan McGhee’s offence in Barbie’s eyes, that led to her deserving to be raped and tortured, was that she had criticised his shower hygiene, accusing him of leaving the shower she shared with him in an unsatisfactory state. That’s how Barbie explained it at his trial last year and repeated to me outside the prison this week. McGhee’s prison cell, as we heard at the trial, was Cell E1 on the E (Echo) landing. Barbie was next door in E2. Another trans-identified man, a child-abuser, was in E3. (The shower unit was at the end of the E-landing, which is how the women prisoners knew, as they have explained to me, that they were under observation from sex-offender men looking out of their cell door peepholes when they were on their way to and from using the shower.) So the cells were close enough to allow verbal communication between the prisoners. Today, Barbie still regrets that he never got to rape Teghan McGhee but, he says, he did have the satisfaction of hearing her weep in her cell after he had made extended rape threats against her. “That gave me pleasure”, said Barbie. “I enjoy making people suffer”.

So will Barbie try to rape those two women now that he is out of prison or will he not? I found it hard to get a straight answer on that, as you will hear if you listen to my podcast, but Barbie thinks he probably won’t get around to raping them just yet because his priority is to first murder three people, namely, his father, his mother and the prison governor. He doesn’t know how to find his mother or father as he doesn’t now know where they live but he has a plan for the murder of the Limerick prison governor.

Apart from the three people he wants to murder and the two women he wants to rape, Barbie says he poses no threat to the public. He will be using women’s public toilets, he told me, and he says women should understand that he is not going to harm them. Barbie criticised JK Rowling and Graham Linehan, both of whom, he said, were spreading the mistaken view that transgender people were dangerous people. As Barbie was making this last point to me as we were standing outside the prison, a woman called out “Hi Barbie” from a passing car. Barbie looked up and then exploded in anger when he recognised who the woman was. “That’s Teghan McGhee” he said. “She must have got released from prison. I want to rape her. I want to rape her with an object.”

Barbie says he is planning changes to his body. “I hate my male genitalia”, he says. “I hope to get surgery in the future. I want to have a pussy. I want to be a female porn star and get fucked on camera. I want to be a prostitute so men will pay me for sex.” And he has more surgery planned: “I want to get my nose done, my teeth done, my chin done, my jaw done, my lips done. I also want to get liposuction because I have fat around here (his middle). I want a tummy-tuck. I also want to get designer vagina surgery, so I want my labia, my vulva to be really tight. Surgery means so much to me. It’s so important. I don’t want to look natural. I want to look like a doll. That’s why I changed my name to Barbie.”

When the other two men of the press corps left us, I was left alone with Barbie. It seemed to me that this manic, angry man shouldn’t be left on the street without someone to mind him. Then, to my relief, two men joined us who Barbie introduced to me as his prison after-care minders who were going to escort him to his new residence in Dublin somewhere. The two carers were calm, friendly and good-humoured and I was pleased to be able to leave Barbie in good hands.

I’m still shocked listening back to Barbie now, as I think anyone would be who hears what he has to stay. I’m shocked and angry. There is so much there to be angry about.

I’m angry at the legislators who gave Barbie a gender recognition certificate which makes him legally a woman. Barbie says he intends using women’s public toilets, as he is now entitled to. On the street, I argued with Barbie that women might have well-founded fears about men such as he entering what were once women-only spaces. But, I’m thinking now, why should there even be an argument? How about if women could just say they don’t want men in their toilets and not have to explain their reasons? It’s a measure of the strength of the transgender lobby in Ireland that keeping men out of women’s toilets is something they have successfully made a subject that women now have to debate.

I’m angry at all the commentators, social media pundits, politicians and trans rights activists who have dismissed women prisoners’ concerns about being incarcerated with trans-ID men. Can you imagine being a woman in the cell next to Barbie’s and being forced to listen, night after night, to his vile and disturbing threats and fantasies? One well-known Irish trans activist, whose words I have heard quoted favourably in the Dail (the Irish parliament), responded to what the women on my podcast had to say with this heartless comment: “Women in the Dochas Centre (women’s prison in Dublin) can hear buses on the North Circular Road, but they’re unlikely to be run over by one!”. In which case women subjected to obscene phone calls really have nothing to complain about. It’s time that the people who said there was no issue about trans-ID men in women’s prisons admit that they got it wrong.

I’m angry at the trade unionists and people who say they stand up for working women but have let down women such as the prison officer Roisin Linnane. If, in any other circumstances, a woman had to endure ongoing threats of sexual abuse in her workplace, the trade unions and NGOs such as the National Women’s Council would be standing up for her and making sure that the abuse was stopped. But Linnane has had none of these supposed champions of women’s rights on her side because the man abusing her was wearing a dress.

I’m angry at the doctors who have led Barbie to believe that he can be a woman if he wants to be. When Barbie told me of his intention of being fucked by straight men after he gets his operation, I gently suggested to him that a man such as myself, who is sexually attracted to women, is never going to want to have sex with him, even after he gets his operation. But Barbie was undeterred, such is the level of delusion that the medical profession have fostered in him. I pray that the surgeons are never let loose on Barbie and that he never gets the “gender-affirming surgery” that Irish politicians of both Left and Right have been so keen to promote.

And I’m angry at the journalists who have broken their necks looking the other way when I and a few others have been trying to draw public attention to the suffering that women prisoners have had to endure as a result of having been locked up with men like Barbie. Now that Barbie’s out, the media seems mainly concerned to respect his pronoun preferences. He has been called “she” throughout their coverage, even when reporting the rape threats “she” made to “her” mother. A rape threat made by a man is more scary and credible than such a threat would be if made by a woman (which is one of the reasons I think the court trying Barbie last year was wrong to pretend throughout the trial that he was a woman). But the journalists are saying that pronouns are not important and that people such as me are “obsessed” with pronouns. Our newspapers have been running podcasts in which their journalists sit and agree with each other that they are using preferred pronouns to “show respect to the trans community” as one of them puts it. How about showing respect to the women who have had to endure Barbie’s threats and who have no confusion about the sex of their potential rapist? In another such podcast, two male journalists agree that the preferred pronouns of a person should always be used regardless as to whether or not that person is making rape threats against women, as in the case of Barbie, or discussing their hobbies such as fishing or surfing. “It’s just out of politeness, it doesn’t really matter”, one of the journalists says.

Barbie’s release, and his refusal to stay quiet, is causing a problem to all those powerful groups- politicians, doctors, journalists- who have promoted transgender ideology and claimed that only bigots have wanted a debate on same. But the public looks at Barbie and people see why such men shouldn’t be told that they are women. Should he really be admitted to women’s spaces? Should he really be indulged in all the bodily mutilation that he wants the surgeons to do on him? And should his delusions be supported by our media, calling him “she” even as he threatens to rape women?

I think the public will be debating all of those questions. Barbie Kardashian has made sure of that.

(You can hear the interview with Barbie Kardashian on my podcast, and also see much of the video I recorded on the Gript website here)

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.

If you remove the term “trans-identified”, I suspect most women have been given similar advice by their parents or partners: If you come across a man in a women-only space, he is likely a threat and shouldn’t be there. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

Single-sex spaces are essential in order for women and their dependents to be able to safely and freely navigate social life and society. We need to know we’ll have access to safe and private toilets, changing rooms, and hospital wards. Some unfortunate women will need access to women’s refuges, hostels, and prisons. Having been granted single-sex spaces most of us now take them for granted, but they are no longer a given.

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The commentary around the issue got me thinking about the time I attended a play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, is a beautiful venue and partially funded by the taxpayer via the Arts Council of Ireland. The play was great, but I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the facilities were “gender-neutral”.

Free-for-all

There were three sets of toilets, all of which had several cubicles and one of which also had urinals. Standing in line for a cubicle, watching others join the queue, I spotted many a confused face presumably wondering if they’d come to the wrong place for some intermission relief. Some went back out to check the sign on the wall, only to return looking no less baffled. Nobody actually said anything, although there were a few raised eyebrows.

Why are all of the toilets in the Abbey gender-neutral? What does this achieve, and who does it appease? Most of us are aware on some level that to openly ask these questions is now a bit taboo.

And yet, we all know that there are very good reasons why women need women’s toilets. The same reasons that we needed them fifty years ago - safety, dignity, and privacy at a time when we are vulnerable - still exist today. Presumably those reasons will still exist fifty years from now.

Statistically, the overwhelming majority of sexual offences are carried out by men and the overwhelming majority of victims are women and girls. Most women do not want to put themselves or their children in a position where they might be isolated or exposed around a man they don’t know. This is just common sense.

#Not All Men

If it needs saying, most men are good men but women can’t spot the bad ones just by looking so we exclude all men from women’s toilets, change-rooms, dormitories, refuges, and other spaces where we might be vulnerable. The same logic applies to men who identify as women - we can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones just by looking so we must exclude all of them from women’s single sex spaces. Most men understand and respect this, and most men also say they’d prefer single sex toilets.

This poses a problem for a small number of people - men who identify as women, or women who identify as men. The purpose of gender-neutral toilets is, one assumes, to resolve this issue. Unfortunately though, this creates a problem for women - a much larger group of people.

Women’s Troubles

Women fought long and hard for single sex public toilets, without which their lives were restricted, and it was only in the late 1800s that these facilities were introduced. If you haven’t heard the term “the urinary leash”, it refers to the constraint placed on women by lack of accessible toilets. Travel from home was limited to either how long a woman could hold on before needing a bathroom, or how far the nearest accessible toilet was. We’ve come a long way in the past hundred years but the urinary leash still applies to many women around the world today, especially in developing countries.

Where there are facilities, there is often a shortage of toilets for women compared to men, hence the ubiquitous queues for the ladies’. Public health experts say we should aim to have two female toilets for every one male toilet because women generally use toilets more frequently and for more reasons than men.

Women, especially during pregnancy, need to urinate more frequently than men, and it takes longer (not because we’re messing around in there - it just physically takes longer for a woman to empty her bladder).

Our biology dictates that we deal with issues to do with menstruation - changing tampons or sanitary pads, or dealing with unexpected bleeding or leaks. Some women now use moon cups which need to be washed in the sink between changes. At any one time, around a quarter of women of childbearing age are menstruating. Most women want privacy to deal with it.

Women are more likely than men to be caregivers to babies, children, the elderly or disabled so we need to ensure safety, privacy, and dignity not just for ourselves but for our dependents too.

Inclusion = Exclusion

Lack of single sex toilets excludes women (and men) who do not feel safe or comfortable sharing intimate spaces with the opposite sex. This includes women who are not permitted to share facilities for religious reasons - for example some Islamic, Hindu, and Jewish Orthodox women are forbidden to share toilet facilities with male strangers, especially when menstruating.

Gender-neutral toilets means less facilities for women, when what we really need is more.

Speak Up!

With all of this in mind, I wrote to the Abbey Theatre to let them know what I thought of their gender-neutral facilities. I relayed a few of the above points and suggested that, assuming 50% or so of their patrons are women, their requirements should be given serious consideration (in fact, a quick search online would indicate that women generally make up more than 50% of theatre audiences).

The response from the theatre left me with more questions than answers. They wrote:

“The introduction of all-gender bathrooms throughout the building reflects our ongoing commitment to access, inclusion and participation.”

Access, inclusion, and participation for who? There were already toilets for every body. As outlined above, some women (and men) will now have to self-exclude.

The theatre is under no legal obligation to make the facilities gender-neutral. In Ireland we have legislation, The Equal Status Act, 2000, which makes it clear that it’s reasonable to treat someone differently on the basis of gender “where embarrassment or infringement of privacy can reasonably be expected to result from the presence of a person of another gender” (page 11, 5.2.f). “Gender” in the Act refers to the male or female sex (page 8, 2.a). This means that it’s legal and reasonable to restrict entry to women’s toilets to women only (and the same goes for men’s toilets).

We also, however, have the Gender Recognition Act 2015 which allows anybody to legally change their sex simply by filling out a form online. This means that even where we do have single sex toilets, a man who identifies as a woman and has a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is entitled to enter. (In fact, whether said man has a certificate or not is largely irrelevant because it’s not considered appropriate or lawful to ask someone to show a GRC.)

If you’re thinking that Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act makes a farce of our Equal Status Act, you’re right. You can read more about Ireland’s highly “progressive” legislation here.

But let us return to the Abbey Theatre and our correspondence. They continued:

“All-gender bathrooms allow our visitors, patrons, staff and others to make an informed decision, based on their personal preference.”

How is there an option to make an informed decision based on personal preference when there are only gender-neutral bathrooms and no single sex facilities available? Patrons have no choice but to use shared facilities!

And finally, they said:

“We had also been dealing with an issue of queues at intervals and all-gender bathrooms have improved this problem.”

Here’s a suggestion: why not make the men’s toilets gender-neutral and leave the women’s toilets for the women? Many of the men won’t like it, but at least they don’t have to worry about their safety. And it will make more toilets available for women without obliging all of the women to share with men.

I replied to the Abbey with the above questions and suggestions but have yet to receive a response.

The Abbey, our national theatre and partially funded by the taxes we pay, is prioritising the wishes of a tiny minority of people who believe or pretend to believe that biological sex is irrelevant over the practical needs of women (who comprise more than 50% of their patronage) and the safeguarding of children.

The general public and the institutions that support Irish society have been insidiously indoctrinated into gender ideology. Some people actually believe the doctrine - that boy/girl, man/woman, both or neither is based on how you feel rather than your actual biology. Most people know that biology still matters - that men and women are fundamentally different and have sex-specific needs, and that it’s not possible to change sex - but they also know that to say as much is to invite accusations of transphobia, or worse.

There are few who haven’t heard of author JK Rowling’s infamous “transphobia” and the attempts to cancel her for expressing the view that women are entitled to single sex spaces (she remains mercifully uncancellable). Closer to home, Irish author John Boyne was recently the subject of controversy for his gender critical views - the Polari Prize, a literary award for LGBTQ+ writers, was cancelled for this year after other authors and industry figures objected to his inclusion on the longlist of nominees. In April this year a member of Irish parliament, TD David Cullinane (Sinn Féin), praised the UK Supreme Court ruling affirming that the terms “woman” and “sex” refer to biological sex, a clarification that effectively ensures women’s single-sex spaces can exclude trans-identified males. He called it “common sense.” The backlash was swift with Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin threatening to ban Sinn Féin from its Pride parade. Cullinane deleted the post and issued an apology for causing hurt and offence. And now, Graham Linehan arrested for tweets!

The public castigation of well-known people who refuse to toe the line should sound a loud alarm for the rest of us. Yet, we continue to accept without objection the disingenuous denial of biological reality by our leaders and institutions. We continue to allow incursions into women’s (and thus children’s) spaces. We continue to allow this ideology that has no basis in fact or evidence to become embedded in school curriculum and policy. We mostly just raise our eyebrows while saying nothing.

If you come across a situation like this and you’re not happy with it, call it out. Write an email, tweet about it, or call the venue and let them know how you feel.

Catherine Monaghan is an Irish women’s rights activist and 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.

Graham Linehan will be speaking at The Bigger Picture Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico on September 27th and 28th. Tickets selling fast - secure your seat now.

Following publication of our recent article, in which we discussed the meaning and purpose of progress pride flags on display at primary schools around Ireland, several people have been in touch to let us know that they believe the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation is responsible for the flags. In fact, they say the INTO has a dedicated pride flag campaign and goes so far as to supply the flags to primary schools.

The INTO

The INTO is the oldest and largest teachers' trade union in Ireland, representing primary school teachers in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It advocates for the rights, pay, and working conditions of its members, and plays a role in shaping education policy. It engages in collective bargaining, provides professional support, and campaigns on issues relating to education and teachers' welfare. The union is also active in promoting equality and professional development within the teaching profession. The INTO does play a role in some issues affecting students, for example, it advocates for better classroom conditions, smaller class sizes, and better school funding, but its primary role is to represent and support teachers.

What Do the Flags Mean?

The original pride or rainbow flag (above) that most of us recognise is a bold and joyful symbol of the lesbian, gay and bisexual community worldwide - a global emblem of pride and solidarity that’s been around since 1978.

Enter the progress pride flag - a very different thing (below) - in 2018. Alongside the rainbow, you’ll now find baby blue, baby pink, and white stripes to represent those who identify as transgender or nonbinary. It also has brown stripes to represent people of colour, and black to represent those lost to HIV/AIDS and those living with HIV. It’s less a flag, more a patchwork quilt of political priorities all stitched together under the ever-expanding umbrella of inclusion.

By flying this flag, the school is signalling its allegiance to gender identity ideology or trans ideology. This is the idea that boy/girl, man/woman - or something else entirely - is determined by how you feel rather than by your actual biology. It’s the belief that it’s possible to be born in the wrong body, and when that happens, it’s possible to transition to the opposite sex. It is a belief, just like a religious belief, with no basis in fact.

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The progress pride flag lets everybody know that the school will affirm trans identities – girls who think they are boys or vice versa – despite all evidence to suggest that this is a dangerous approach. And there is no shortage of evidence - the Cass Review, an independent assessment of gender identity services for children and young people in the UK, raised serious concerns about the "affirmative" approach to treating gender-related distress. This approach, where a child’s self-declared gender identity is accepted and affirmed, was found to risk overlooking complex mental health, developmental, or social issues that might underlie the distress.

Questions Abound

It needs to be asked:

• Why would a worker’s union representing teachers be pushing this dangerous ideology to children in primary schools and their families?

• Is this really the function of the union?

• Did INTO members have a say in the decision to do this? Are they aware that this is what their membership fees are funding?

• Does the Department of Education support the flying of these flags on school property?

Further, who is behind the drive to embed trans ideology in children’s lives via primary school? Is it the teachers - the members of the INTO? Is it the parents? Or could it be coming from within the INTO leadership or staff?

Taking Advantage

The Assistant General Secretaries of the INTO are senior full-time officials who play an operational and advisory role within the union’s leadership structure. David Geary, Assistant General Secretary/ Director of Communications, is responsible for the overall communications strategy for the organisation. This doesn’t seem like it would have much to do with LGBT+ inclusion, and yet, according to Involve, a global diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultancy and membership network:

“Head of Communications for the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, the oldest and largest education trade union in Ireland, David uses his position to ensure that primary schools are safe spaces for LGBT+ workers and pupils alike. David led a variety of Pride-related activities for the Union, including the rebranding of the Union’s logo and a campaign elevating the voices of LGBT+ teachers, which garnered national media attention. David actively supports LGBT+ members in promoting inclusion more broadly across the union and its members. David also held the role of Head of Political Engagement for Pride in London from 2013 – 2018 and garnered cross-party support for the event, participating in the first raising of the Pride flag over the Houses of Parliament. David has also hosted pop-up educational workshops in parliament, local councils, and even in the European Parliament.”

This is not to say that Mr Geary is responsible for the flag campaign, but to demonstrate that staff - teachers or others involved with the education system - might use their privileged and powerful position to promote contested ideologies to primary school children.

Indoctrination Dressed Up as Inclusion

This is not about LGB acceptance and inclusion. Of course, homophobia still exists, but anecdotally, teachers who are LGB are not experiencing it at work and are going about their professional duties just like everybody else. Ireland is a tolerant and progressive country with equal rights for everybody - gay, straight, bisexual - for a decade now.

It is about some adults taking every opportunity to push and normalise an ideology that has no basis in science, evidence, or fact. Trans ideology hurts children. Leading children to believe that it is possible to be born in the wrong body and to change one’s sex is dishonest. No child is born in the wrong body. It is not possible to change sex. Attempts to modify one’s body in order to look like the opposite sex involve ineffectual, risky surgery and lifelong dependence on medication that has serious side effects. We have a duty to protect children’s health and safety, to be honest with them about human biology, and to prepare them for life as adults. Additionally, teaching children that they cannot trust what their eyes and their instincts tell them to be true about a person in front of them is profoundly destabilising and dangerous.

The unquestioning support of trans ideology in the school system is not just harming children. Adults who have worked in Irish primary schools have experienced first-hand the dangers of this inhumane approach, which fails to allow for dissent or debate. People known to Genspect, among them detransitioners, have left jobs in the Irish education system due to the lack of support and acknowledgement that endorsement of trans ideology does not generally lead to happy outcomes. There is little to no understanding of the complex and devastating issues involved in detransition, an often long and painful process of reversing or discontinuing transition. To endure such an ordeal while working in an environment which cheers on the very ideology which caused the problem is, for most people, untenable. Any person, organisation, or institution willing to fly the flag for trans ideology cannot claim to know the full story unless they have listened to the stories of detransitioners, a tiny sample of which can be found here, here, and here.

A Silenced Majority

Most parents do not believe in trans ideology and do not expect or want it to be endorsed by schools, but many are afraid to raise the issue for fear of being labelled bigoted. The same goes for teachers. Some mistakenly believe the issue must be very complex and that they just “don’t get it”. It’s not - the facts that we all knew until recently remain:

1. Sex is binary (we’re either male or female).

2. Sex is immutable (you can’t change from one to the other).

3. People are either male or female, no matter how they dress, what they call themselves, or what their sexuality is (who they’re attracted to).

Alarm Bells

This isn’t the first time the INTO has caused alarm bells to ring for those who are keeping an eye out. A short, animated video for teachers explaining how to teach gender ideology and facilitate social transition of a primary school child caused concern among parents and teachers, and on social media, and was later removed from the INTO website. You can watch it here:

Speak Up!

There are difficult questions to be asked, but teachers - the paying members of the INTO - must ask them. The INTO have a duty to their members. In turn, teachers have a duty to children and their parents. They must prioritise safeguarding of children and focus on preparing them for life in the real world. Children deserve an educational environment that is reality based and free from indoctrination.

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

Genspect Ireland contacted The INTO for comment, but their office is currently closed. This article will be updated with any response.

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.

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.

Five years ago in Dublin, a man was up in court for pouring boiling water over another man’s face in an unprovoked assault. He got a suspended sentence. Our media lied to us at the time that the assailant was a woman. This week, that same man was sent to prison for having committed a sexual assault. That’s not so easy for the media to lie about. The man is 63-year-old Rolando Otto, aka Samantha Otto. He is a trans-identified, Filipino man who has been living in Ireland since 2011.

From Boiling Water to Sexual Assault

We’ll start with the boiling water attack of 2019. Reporting then, Ireland’s leading broadsheet, the Irish Times, and Ireland’s leading tabloid, the Sunday World, both told us of the “woman who poured boiling water over a man’s face”. These newspapers reported how, in the months before the attack, this woman had stalked her victim, sending him sexually explicit messages, thus causing him to block his phone against her in response. On one occasion, she followed him home. The woman wouldn’t take no for an answer. Frustrated by his rejection of her overtures, she shouted crude abuse at him in public. Then, one evening, upon seeing the man sitting at a slot machine in a casino, she went to the customer kitchen area, where she got a cup of boiling water, came behind her victim, jerked his head back, and poured the boiling water over his face. It was shocking behaviour, especially coming from a woman. Readers may have thought this sounded more like the sort of behaviour you might expect from a predatory man.

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Not For the First Time

The media lies like this all the time, passing off men’s crimes as the crimes of women. There was the case of the man, three years back, who, on being released from Limerick women’s prison, was placed in a women’s domestic violence refuge in Dublin, where he went on to beat a woman up; when he was convicted for this, our media told us that it had been a woman-on-woman assault. Another amazingly muscular woman was the one last year in England who overpowered her 30-year-old male neighbour with a garrotte and threw him into a river to die, having previously live-streamed herself killing her cat and putting it through a blender; the Irish Independent shamelessly followed the British media in pretending that this sadistic man was a woman. This week, the British media is telling us about the woman in Brighton who killed her husband, stabbing and slicing him more than fifty times with a samurai sword.

The Trouble with Otto

But the media here can no longer pretend that Otto is a woman. The evidence given in court has made that impossible. Otto was sent to prison this week for a sexual assault on an eighteen-year-old male in a Dublin laneway. The victim told the court that Otto spoke to him and then “cupped his (own) penis” through his trousers. The youth asked Otto to back off, but he refused and offered to perform oral sex upon him. The teenager took out his phone to film Otto and to call for help. Otto was later arrested. In reporting that Otto “cupped his penis,” the journalists could hardly have told us that Otto “cupped her penis”. That would have been a step too far for our media, which has in the past consistently used misleading female pronouns when reporting on this man.

Otto received a sentence of three years for the sexual assault and a further, consecutive, six months, which remained of the suspended sentence he received in 2020 for the boiling water attack. He has now been sent to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, which is a men’s prison. That’s a relief to those of us who have been campaigning to keep men out of women’s prisons, but what the judge had to say in passing sentence on Otto should cause us concern. Judge Pauline Codd said, “It created a difficulty in terms of sentencing as Otto has not yet received a gender recognition certificate”. The implication here seems to be that if Otto had a GRC, then he would have been sent to a women’s prison.

I don’t know why Otto doesn’t have a GRC. It’s easy to get one in Ireland. At least three of the trans-identified men who have been put into the women’s prison in Limerick got their GRCs between the time they were first arrested and the time that they were sent to prison. In all three cases, they were men when they committed their crimes who “turned into women” by the time they were up before the judge for sentencing. Accordingly, all three of these men were sent to a women’s prison. That’s how gender self-ID works in Ireland.

So why doesn’t Otto have a GRC? It turns out, there could be advantages for him in having to go to a male prison. Judge Codd explained when she was passing sentence: “I take into account he’s biologically a male person, who identifies as female and has undergone certain steps towards transition, and that being in a male prison is difficult for someone in the accused’s position”. (The steps he has taken, the court heard, are breast implants and the use of hormone patches.) So this difficulty that Otto will have in a men’s prison has been taken into account in sentencing, which suggests he got a lesser sentence than he otherwise might have done had he not been trans-identifying. If you are a man who is a sex offender facing justice, it’s worth your while to say you are a woman.

Sex Offenders in Prison

The judge is no doubt right that the men’s prison in Mountjoy will be especially difficult for Otto, but that’s not because he is trans but because he is a sex offender. Sex offenders are never popular, which is why they are generally kept away from other prisoners.

Trans-identified men in prison are especially likely to be sex offenders. Four of the five trans-ID men we know of who have been in Irish prisons in recent years have been sex offenders. Transgender lobbyists are always saying that trans-ID men have to be put in women’s prisons because they would not be safe with men, but sex offenders are not safe in women’s prisons either. One of the sex offenders who was in Limerick women’s prison was a man who had abused his partner’s child for years, telling the little boy that he would pull his arms off if he told anyone about what was being done to him. As some of the women ex-prisoners of Limerick have told me on my podcast, many women prisoners are mothers, and mothers don’t take kindly to men who abuse children. That’s why the child-abuser always had prison officers with him if he was out of his cell at the same time that the women were out of their cells.

Sex offender men in Ireland are usually sent to either Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin or to a wing of the Midlands Prison, which is reserved for men of their sort. They are kept apart from other prisoners for their safety. Arbour Hill or Midlands would be safe places for Otto.

No More Gaslighting

To return to the press coverage of Otto’s case, just because journalists are being less dishonest than they were last time Otto was up in court, none of them are admitting they misled the public in the past. The Sunday World is calling Otto a “transgender woman” this time, which is an improvement on five years ago when they simply called him a woman, but it’s still less clear than it could be; the term “transgender woman” gives the false impression that we are talking about a woman so I hope not too many people are misled by this. But the Irish Times has done nothing to correct its misreporting of five years ago. It seems to have chosen not to report the recent Otto case at all. Likewise, for most of the rest of the media, including my old broadcasting company, RTE, which has all ignored this case of sexual assault by a trans-ID man. The mainstream media, it seems, will only ever cheer on the trans lobby and will rarely report anything that might provoke critical discussion of the transgender agenda and the wisdom of allowing gender self-ID.

Meanwhile, those of us in what is called the gender critical camp will continue to keep a watch on any further attempts to put men into women’s prisons, and we will continue to call out journalists who mislead the public by attributing men’s crimes to 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.

Then and Now

A lot has changed in Ireland since I was in primary school. It was the 80s and the fight for gay rights was in its infancy. Homosexuality was illegal and same-sex marriage was a pipe dream in a country that was dominated by the Catholic Church. Trans or gender ideology - the notion that one could be born in the wrong body and have a ‘gender identity’ that is incompatible with one’s male or female body - was something nobody had heard of.

Fast forward forty years and Ireland has moved on. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993. Same sex marriage was voted in by a significant majority in 2015. We have well-established rights and recognitions for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people - all the same rights as straight people. We’re considered one of the most progressive countries in the world. My old school is now flying the progress pride flag, displaying it’s belief in, and support for, gender ideology.

Gender Recognition

Less widely celebrated in Ireland, because few are actually aware of its existence, is our legislation that enables anybody over 18 to legally change their sex simply by filling out a form online. The Gender Recognition Act 2015 (GRA) was surreptitiously slipped in alongside the same-sex marriage legislation, with none of the debate, consultation, or fanfare that the latter involved. Most Irish people were happily celebrating marriage equality, oblivious to the other new legislation that meant the protections afforded to women by our Equal Status Act are now meaningless. Any man can declare himself to be a woman and then legally enter women’s spaces including prisons, refuges, changing rooms. He can claim women’s seats on boards, win women’s awards, and play women’s sport. Single sex spaces and services, necessary for the safety and dignity of women and children, are no longer guaranteed.

The lack of consultation and engagement with the public about the GRA was not a simple oversight. It has since become apparent that it was part of a strategy, clearly documented in the Dentons Report. The strategic advice for advancing gender recognition legislation (including to minors) includes recommendations for activists to: lobby quietly and behind the scenes; tie a campaign to more publicly acceptable reform (e.g. same-sex marriage); and limit media exposure so as to avoid public backlash. The reason such secrecy and underhand tactics were necessary is because the general public would not automatically be onboard with gender recognition and especially self ID.

Be Kind

In the same way that endorsement of trans ideology snuck into our legal system, it has snuck into the policies and frameworks upholding many of our other institutions, including our education system. Bí Cineálta, the new anti-bullying policy about to be rolled out in all Irish primary and post primary schools is an example of this.

In June 2024 the Irish Department of Education published Bí Cineálta: Procedures to Prevent and Address Bullying Behaviour for Primary and Post-Primary Schools, replacing the 2013 Anti‑Bullying Procedures. The Department of Education claims the initiative promotes a culture of respect and inclusiveness across primary and secondary schools. Its intentions are laudable - everybody knows it’s good to be kind, after all - but its expanded scope, specifically its emphasis on identity-based bullying, has sparked concern.

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Each school drafts their own Bí Cineálta policy, based on training provided by Oide, but the policy must include reference to particular types of bullying including identity-based bullying such as transphobic, racist, and sexist bullying.

This seems reflective of the growing influence of critical theory and critical social justice frameworks on school curriculum and policy. These ideologies view society through the lens of power, privilege, and identity, dividing people into categories of oppressed and oppressor. The purported aim is to challenge inequality, but this way of viewing the world can inadvertently promote conformity of thought and suppress dissent. It encourages prejudgement of people and situations according to where they sit on an imagined social hierarchy.

Sticks & Stones

When I was at school the general dogma was that we must treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves regardless of how they looked, what they could or couldn’t do, where they came from, where they lived, and so on. Of course, this didn’t prevent all bullying; nothing will. Children can be cruel to each other for all kinds of reasons: the wrong haircut, the wrong shoes, the wrong hobby, the wrong address, the wrong use of a word, a lisp or stutter, for being too clever or not clever enough - the list is endless. Is it worse to be bullied because of your skin colour, or because you’re always top of the class? Is it worse to be bullied because you bring unusual food for lunch every day, or because you’re a boy who likes to play with dolls? Is it necessary or helpful to elevate certain types of bullying, particularly identity-based bullying, above other types of bullying?

According to Stella O’Malley, psychotherapist and author of the book Bully-Proof Kids: Practical Tools to Help Your Child to Grow Up Confident, Resilient and Strong:

“When we start ranking children’s suffering based on identity, we send the message that some pain matters more than others. That’s not helpful—it creates a hierarchy of suffering. When we focus too much on the identity of the child being bullied, we risk giving some children the impression that they are more special or more protected, while others feel invisible, as though their pain doesn’t count.”

Contested Ideas

With its particular mention of transphobic bullying, the Bí Cineálta framework pushes contested ideas about gender identity to children and encourages, or even insists upon, affirmation of trans identities in school.

This is in direct contravention of the most up-to-date and comprehensive advice available on the issue. The Cass Review (2024), a landmark report on gender identity services in the UK, concluded that even social transition (e.g. changing names and pronouns) is not a neutral act and may contribute to long-term psychological and developmental consequences. The report recommends a cautious, evidence-based approach to gender distress in children, centred on safeguarding and clinical oversight rather than affirmation. The Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland is currently aligning its gender healthcare services with the Cass Review, and the most recent Programme for Government also reflects this shift. Both emphasize the need for clinical evidence, child safeguarding, and restraint in the social or medical transitioning of children.

In contrast, the Bí Cineálta policy appears to be based on a different philosophy, one that assumes support and affirmation of trans identities is inherently kind and unproblematic, and that treats the notion of gender identity as a fixed and unquestionable truth. This divergence from international best practice should be of serious concern to parents and teachers.

Personal Beliefs

Most people do not believe that it’s possible to be born in the wrong body or to change sex. The expectation that all students must affirm a peer's self-declared gender identity, lest they be considered guilty of transphobic bullying, will result in children being compelled to speak and behave in ways that contradict their own beliefs or family values. There have been several high profile court cases in the UK where people have won the right to hold gender critical beliefs, that is, to not be compelled to go along with someone’s belief that they are the opposite sex.

Where Were the Parents?

Parents have questioned the influences behind the Bí Cineálta policy. LGBTQ+ youth organisation Belong To was involved in shaping the policy while many parents felt largely excluded from the conversation. Belong To is an organisation that openly promotes the controversial and discredited affirmative model of care for children. They have supported medical transition for minors, the promotion of breast binders to girls (a binder is a garment worn to compress and flatten the breasts which can restrict breathing, cause pain, and lead to tissue damage, including potential rib fractures or permanent chest deformation), and the withholding of information from parents (you can read more about their activities here).

The National Parents Council was involved and is cited as representing parental views, yet parents report being unaware of the policy's deeper ideological components until after its adoption. Vague surveys and surface-level engagement do not constitute meaningful consultation.

A mother from Co. Meath said:

“The ratification of the Bí Cineálta policy in our school has shattered my trust in the Irish education system. There was no meaningful consultation. The concerns brought to our school were never raised with the Department, and full ratification went ahead — placing every child, including mine, under this policy, whether we agreed with it or not.

Another mother, from Co. Carlow, explains:

“There is a fear of saying anything and then being seen as a ‘pariah’. Everyone goes along and nods their heads in agreement. Everyone buys into the ‘kindness’ narrative of Cineáltas. I could not think of a better word to be used to hoodwink parents”

Some similarities could be drawn with the Dentons strategy used to introduce the Gender Recognition Act under the radar, for example: work behind the scenes to get the concept in place, avoid public or media exposure, and tie the idea to something very palatable to the average person. Who would say no to an anti-bullying policy? Any parent who didn’t delve into the policy in detail, or one who didn’t understand the issues or the latest research on the dangers of attempting to transition children, would likely see no problem with a policy labelled “Be Kind”.

A Useful Tool

If there was any doubt that school policies are being used as a tool to ingrain trans ideology into children’s lives, the fact that the Bí Cineálta policy is directly linked in Ireland's recently published National LGBTQ+ Inclusion Strategy should expel it. The explicit aim of that strategy is to embed LGBTQ+ inclusion into public policy, education, healthcare, and community life through targeted actions and government-wide coordination. The strategy lists Bí Cineálta as the means for implementation in schools. Again, parents were not informed, with one mother from Co. Dublin saying:

“I was astonished. That strategy had clearly been in development during the ratification process, and it openly states that Cineáltas is the mechanism through which schools will implement it. This was never disclosed to parents.”

Given that Ireland has already demonstrated its commitment to equality for people who are LGB, these policies are really about the TQ+. People who identify as trans, nonbinary, and so on have beliefs about themselves and perhaps the world - just like religious beliefs - that many others do not share. In the same way that we don’t expect non-Catholics to comply with Catholic traditions or practices, we cannot expect or compel people - adults or children - to comply with trans ideology.

Children ≠ Adults

It’s notable that the policy's sample framework in Appendix A references Ireland's equality legislation and the nine protected grounds for discrimination. This legal framework plays an important role in adult employment and public life, but is it really applicable in the context of primary education? Is it developmentally appropriate to treat young children as if they are participants in adult identity politics? Can children truly understand the legal and social implications of gender identity labels? And is it fair or reasonable to expect children from families with varying beliefs to participate in practices such as pronoun changes that contradict what they see and know?

Questions Remain…

There are many questions to be asked and answered regarding the Bí Cineálta policy. Parents who have raised objections to it say they have been dismissed, ignored, and told that it’s simply about “being kind”, but kindness should not come at the cost of personal integrity or child safeguarding.

The aspiration to create respectful school environments is one we can all get behind, but using an anti-bullying policy as a means to introduce and normalize trans ideology is underhand and unethical. Children deserve to be protected not only from bullying but also from being placed at the centre of adult ideological debates. Education should be guided by clear evidence, developmental appropriateness, and a duty of care toward all children, including those from families that do not subscribe to trans ideology.

It remains to be seen if the parents who have been insistent in their objection to aspects of Bí Cineálta will be heeded. They would like to see the Department of Education revisit the Bí Cineálta framework with input from a broad cross-section of society, including parents with diverse views, child development experts, and school patrons, as well as regard for the most up-to-date research. In doing so, the Department of Education could fulfil its duty to safeguard all children and uphold parental rights, while ensuring that Irish schools remain places of learning, not ideological indoctrination.

Catherine Monaghan is an Irish women’s rights activist and 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.

Recently, I drove past my old primary school and noticed the progress pride flag flying, presumably for the month of June - Pride month. It’s quite some time since I was in primary school. I don’t remember if we flew flags for anything back then, but we definitely didn’t fly a pride flag. It was the 80s and the fight for gay rights in Ireland was in its infancy. Also, the school was, and remains, a Catholic school. The Catholic church, while supporting the dignity and rights of LGBT people in society in general, is not ok with same-sex sexual activity or same-sex marriage. But, aside from that, what would it have to do with children anyway? Until recently it would have been considered inappropriate and unnecessary to bring children or schools into a cause that revolved around adult sexuality. Sex and sexuality were not considered relevant or important in primary school. Our very basic sex education in 5th class covered the mechanics of how babies were made, with an emphasis on marriage being a prerequisite.

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A lot has changed in Ireland since then. The first Pride march in Dublin took place in 1983. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993. In 2010, civil partnerships were introduced, granting same-sex couples legal recognition and some of the rights of marriage. In 2015 Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote. For a decade now, lesbian, gay, straight - we all have the same rights and recognitions. Ireland is by any standards a progressive and tolerant country.

What’s In a Flag?

The original pride or rainbow flag (below) that most of us are familiar with was designed in 1978 as a symbol of pride for the gay community in San Francisco. Over the next few decades it came to represent the lesbian, gay and bisexual community worldwide.

The progress pride flag (below), which is flying outside my old school and many other schools around Ireland, has only been around since 2018. In addition to the original rainbow, it represents those who identify as transgender and nonbinary with baby blue, baby pink, and white stripes. It also has brown stripes to represent people of colour (although, the original flag was designed to represent all LGB people which of course includes people of colour) and black to represent those lost to HIV/AIDS, and those living with HIV.

By flying this flag the school is sending a message to pupils, parents, teachers and the wider community that it believes in and supports gender identity ideology, aka trans ideology.

Trans ideology is the idea that boy/girl, man/woman - or something else entirely - is determined by how you feel rather than by your actual biology. It’s the belief that it’s possible to be born in the wrong body and when that happens it’s possible to transition to the opposite sex. It is a belief, just like a religious belief, with no basis in science, evidence or fact.

In schools, this belief system is often translated into practices like using chosen names and pronouns, affirming transitions, and teaching that gender exists on a spectrum. While some adults might choose to adopt this worldview and go along with such practices, expecting children to understand or participate is unrealistic and potentially harmful.

In terms of legislation, Ireland is on board with trans ideology with some of the most advanced legislation in the world designed to accommodate the belief. Introduced alongside same-sex marriage in 2015, but very much on the down-low, was our Gender Recognition Act (GRA). This legislation allows individuals to legally change their sex and have it fully recognized for all legal purposes, including on birth certificates and official documents. Anyone aged 18 and over can declare a change of sex without the need for medical assessment, diagnosis, or intervention of any kind (activists continue to campaign to lower the age requirement). This is known as “self ID”. Applicants simply fill out a form online and submit a statutory declaration. They are then issued a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) and their new gender is legally recognised as their preferred gender for all purposes. Ireland was one of the first countries to adopt this approach of self declaration and it is seen as highly progressive, but the GRA is in direct conflict with the legislation that protects women from discrimination on the basis of their sex (the Equal Status Act, 2000).

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Anecdotally, many if not most people I ask have no idea about the GRA and self ID. In fact, just last year in the run-up to our general election I asked every politician who canvassed at my door for their thoughts on the GRA and self ID. Not one politician admitted to any knowledge, and all appeared shocked to learn that the legislation meant that sexually violent men who claim to be women are housed with women in our prison system. If our politicians are oblivious about the societal impacts of trans ideology, we can hardly expect the general public to be informed.

Likewise, most people by now are familiar with the rainbow pride flag but many don’t know the meaning of the progress pride flag, and have only a superficial knowledge of trans ideology. Some believe it’s just a fad that the kids are into. Surveys in the UK have shown that there are high levels of misunderstanding and confusion around the terms used in discussion about gender and trans issues.

But we must assume that the school does understand it all, as it’s flying the flag. The school is signalling that it believes in, supports, and will affirm trans identities - girls who think they are boys or vice versa - despite all evidence to suggest that this is a dangerous approach. And there is no shortage of evidence:

1. The Cass Review is a comprehensive, independent review of gender identity services for children in the UK, commissioned by the NHS and carried out by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass. The findings raised serious concerns about the lack of evidence for medical and social interventions, and highlighted the need for caution and an evidence-based approach to supporting children who are confused or distressed about gender. It concluded that there is no reliable evidence that puberty blockers are safe or reversible, that an affirmation only approach is unsafe, that gender care for children has been ideologically captured, and that medical transition for minors should be paused. Many countries such as the UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, France, and Italy have now restricted the use of puberty blockers and retreated from the gender-affirmative approach.

   One of the most important findings of the review concerned social transition (e.g. changing name, pronouns, clothing) in children with gender-related distress. The Cass Review concluded that social transition, especially in younger children, is not a neutral or benign intervention, but has “significant psychological effects and may influence the likelihood of persistence of gender dysphoria” (Cass Review, Final Report, 2024).

2. Our own Irish experts in this field have expressed support for the Cass Review. In fact, Professor Donal O’Shea (consultant endocrinologist) and Dr Paul Moran (consultant psychiatrist) of the National Gender Service (NGS), sought and have been granted a judicial review of the treatment of children in Ireland with gender identity issues because children were referred to clinics abroad which took an affirmative approach, much to the detriment of their young patients. Dr Moran and Professor O’Shea have also expressed concern over what they see as inappropriate influence of trans activist groups, such as TENI and Belongto, on gender services in Ireland. These same activist organisations have involvement with many schools around Ireland providing training and workshops for staff and students and contributing to the development of curriculum resources and school policies.

3. The current 2025 Programme for Government explicitly supports implementing the recommendations of the Cass Review and emphasises the importance of clinical evidence in treatment of children with gender-related distress.

The importance of the Cass Review cannot be overstated. It is the most up-to-date and comprehensive report available on the provision of care for children and young people dealing with distress related to gender. For the Department of Education or any individual school to ignore or be ignorant of its findings is inexcusable.

Theory Into Practice

The flag is one highly visible way of demonstrating support for trans ideology. School policies and curriculum are another, less obvious way. The flag in the middle of the photo of my old school, above, is for ‘Bí Cineálta’, a new anti-bullying policy about to be rolled out in all Irish primary and post primary schools. Implementation is set for the next school year, beginning September 2025. Bí Cineálta is Irish for ‘be kind’.

In June 2024 the Irish Department of Education published Bí Cineálta: Procedures to Prevent and Address Bullying Behaviour for Primary and Post-Primary Schools, replacing the 2013 Anti‑Bullying Procedures. As part of its broader Cineáltas: Action Plan on Bullying, the Department of Education claims the initiative promotes a culture of respect and inclusiveness across primary and secondary schools. Each school drafts their own Bí Cineálta policy, based on training provided by Oide, but the policy must include reference to particular types of bullying, including identity-based bullying such as transphobic, homophobic, racist, and sexist bullying.

Parents have expressed concern about Bí Cineálta’s emphasis on identity-based bullying and are questioning why it is necessary. They are also concerned about its uncritical adoption of trans ideology, introducing a belief system into school policy that is not grounded in fact, but in controversial ideas about gender. While all children should be protected from bullying, that protection must not be based on the promotion of one worldview as truth in a diverse and pluralistic society. The notion of having a gender identity is a belief held by some people, not an objective reality accepted by all, and schools must not compel students or families to affirm beliefs they do not share.

In Bi Cinealta-Part 2, we’ll look at how this new anti-bullying policy is being used as a tool to embed contested ideas about gender into children’s lives, despite all current research pointing to the dangers of this approach.

Catherine Monaghan is an Irish women’s rights activist and 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.

My first stop on arriving in town was the ladies’ toilets in Busaras, Dublin’s central bus station, where I encountered a large man in a dress. As an actual woman, whether this was ok with me or not is largely irrelevant because we have self ID in Ireland meaning a man can call himself a woman if he wants to and he’s legally entitled to use facilities or services for women. Whether or not he has the legal paperwork (easily obtained online) is also largely irrelevant as it’s not considered appropriate or lawful to ask to see it.

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I headed to O’Connell St, where the parade starts. It was a hive of activity with preparation in full swing. Within minutes I was being hassled by a middle-aged man because I (politely) declined to accept his flyer about Palestine. But why wouldn’t I take it? he demanded to know. Did I not agree with it? I told him I was in the middle of trying to take a photo. He said I should take it to read later. I said I didn’t have a bag to put it into. He asked why couldn’t I just read it and then throw it on the street? I said I didn’t want to litter. Nothing would satisfy him.

I wandered down towards Grafton St to get myself a coffee and on payment was asked to include a donation to a Palestine fund raiser. This was beginning to feel like a two-causes-for-the-price-of-one event and as the day wore on that proved to be the case. I had my coffee and enjoyed the people-watching, more colourful and entertaining than on an average Saturday in Dublin. There were lots of same sex couples just being themselves, holding hands and having the odd kiss - no big deal. I love to see it, not just on Pride day but on any day, because I’m grateful and proud to live in a country where same sex relationships are viewed no differently to heterosexual relationships. We all have the same rights. Love is love, after all.

In the Beginning

The origins of the Pride movement can be traced back to New York City, June 1969. Police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, sparking a spontaneous and powerful uprising among the lesbian and gay rights community. Tired of persistent discrimination and police harassment, patrons and activists fought back in what became known as the Stonewall Riots. These protests lasted several days and marked a turning point in the lesbian and gay rights movement in the US and around the world. In June 1970, on the first anniversary of the riots, the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, beginning an annual tradition of celebration, visibility, and continued advocacy for equality.

Ireland’s first Pride parade was in 1983 and it was both celebration and protest. The trigger for an initial demonstration was the tragic murder of Declan Flynn, a young gay man who was killed in a homophobic attack in a public park in Dublin. The lenient sentencing of his attackers sparked outrage and galvanized Ireland’s lesbian and gay community. In March 1983, hundreds marched from Liberty Hall to Fairview Park in a demonstration that is widely regarded as Dublin’s first Pride event. The official Pride Parade, as a more visible celebration, began later that same year in June. Early parades were modest in size and faced some public and political resistance, reflecting Ireland’s conservative attitudes at the time. However, over the decades, Dublin Pride has grown into one of the country’s largest annual events.

Progress in Ireland

The progression of gay rights in Ireland has been significant over the past few decades. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993, following a long campaign led by activists such as David Norris and a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. In 2010, civil partnerships were introduced, granting same-sex couples legal recognition and some of the rights of marriage. This was followed by a landmark moment in 2015, when Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote. The referendum passed with over 62% support, marking a dramatic shift in public attitudes.

Introduced alongside same-sex marriage, but very much on the down-low, was the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). This legislation allows individuals to legally change their sex and have it fully recognized for all legal purposes, including on birth certificates and official documents. Anyone aged 18 and over can declare a change of sex without the need for medical assessment, diagnosis, or intervention of any kind. This is known as “self ID”. Applicants simply fill out a form online and submit a statutory declaration. They are then issued a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) and their new gender is legally recognised as their preferred gender for all purposes. Ireland was one of the first countries to adopt this approach of self declaration and it is seen as highly progressive.

All in all, Ireland is ahead of the game when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights.

Back to the Present

After my coffee I wandered over to Merrion Square where the parade concludes. The last time I attended the parade this was where I watched from and it was a great spot. There were colourful floats with the requisite drag queens and music and dancing, marching bands, the guards, the postal service, the fire brigade, etc. Not so this time. Perhaps not everyone made it to the end? Footage from O’Connell St showed a more Mardi Gras atmosphere and maybe the experience would have been different there. The parade that arrived in at my end of town felt less like a celebration and more like a moan about trans rights (exactly which rights remains unclear) combined with a pro-Palestine protest, with a few furries thrown in for good measure. It was as though most of the fun crowd had dropped out and gone to another party (apart from Dublin Front Runners, a running club who seemed to be having a blast!).

Leading the way was our Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, accompanied by Philippa Ryder, transgender activist, civil servant, and Chair of the Dublin Pride Board. Philippa, formerly Phillip, can be seen below discussing the tactics used to bring in self ID in Ireland. Presumably, Micheál Martin is ok with this and with the fact that there was no consultation with Irish women’s groups about the impact self ID would have on women’s rights, or with child safeguarding organisations about the impact it would have on children.

But back to the parade. There followed a procession of representatives from various groups and organisations. Despite it being the 10 year anniversary of the legalisation of same sex marriage I didn’t see any mention or celebration of that, or of the GRA for that matter - one would imagine that the trans rights activists would be celebrating it.

There was the National Women’s Council of Ireland marching alongside TENI (Transgender Equality Network Ireland), purveyors of advice and ideas that contradict all current medical and scientific research (to children).

Then came the Scouts, a youth organisation, displaying their allegiance to gender ideology.

They were followed by the mammies who support transitioning children.

People Before Profit are all about the QT+.

The Irish Furries, who (thank goodness!) are fighting fascism.

Then there were the puppies and the guys who like leather. At least they seemed to be enjoying their day out.

Has Pride Passed Its Use-By Date?

Ireland is by any standards a liberal country. People who identify as transgender have all of the same rights as everybody else, and yet there was a real air of discontent among those marching ostensibly for trans rights. I saw little celebration of lesbian, gay, and bisexual life and the great progress Ireland has made in the past few decades. Dublin Pride, as far as I could see, has become mostly about the T for Trans and a demand for blind allegiance to gender ideology no matter the harm it causes to vulnerable children, young people, and women. It seems to have shifted from a celebration of diversity and equality to a platform demanding ideological conformity on a range of issues, one which pushes contested beliefs and does not tolerate dissent. What was once a movement for inclusion risks becoming one of exclusion, not based on who you are but on what you think. The parade in Dublin was certainly not inclusive of all those who are liberal, left-leaning traditional supporters of gay rights and same-sex marriage and who also want to protect women’s spaces and safeguard children and young people.

Is this what happens when a cause goes on past its prime or fails to evolve? We’re living in a time of polarised views and hot takes, where critical thinking isn’t encouraged or valued and it’s easy to just jump on the next bandwagon. People, especially young people, want to belong. Social media offers them endless soundbites and superficial knowledge about many issues; the algorithms then keep them in their echo chambers. It would be lazy to blame this on the young, though. There are many well-intentioned adults supporting the cause. Some are ignorant or naïve and some think it’s just a fad that will blow over. Others see it for what it is - a belief - but are afraid of losing friends, jobs, or worse - their children - if they speak out.

Maybe it’s time to take back some pride in being the adults in the room? Adults would say no to practices that harm children and young people who are not old enough to consent, and no to men in women’s spaces and sport.

Dublin Pride 2025 in Pictures

Catherine Monaghan, Irish women’s rights activist and 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.

But in Northern Ireland, that clarity has been shelved.

The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI) has today refused to issue updated guidance following the ruling. Instead, it has cast doubt on what terms like "woman," "man," and even "sex" might mean in our legal context. The reason? A trade deal.

The Windsor Framework, signed after Brexit, includes Article 2, which obliges Northern Ireland to keep in step with certain EU equality laws. The Commission now says this may prevent them from applying the Supreme Court ruling here. So instead of clarity, we have delay. Possibly for another year.

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A Dangerous Vacuum

Rather than confirm the ruling applies in Northern Ireland, ECNI has deepened the confusion. Chief Commissioner Geraldine McGahey has openly admitted that if it weren’t for the Windsor Framework, the ruling would apply. Rather than accept the ruling as binding, ECNI is now asking the High Court to determine whether it can be applied here at all. In effect, a taxpayer-funded equality body is going to court to question whether the word “woman” means the same thing in Northern Ireland as it does in the rest of the UK. But because of EU obligations, the Commission wants the High Court to decide whether “sex” means something different in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the UK.

In today’s statement, McGahey claimed the situation is “much more nuanced and complicated” in Northern Ireland. She noted that various local laws refer to “sex,” “men,” and “women” without ever defining them clearly. The Commission’s position is that the law here may diverge from the rest of the UK, and that a domestic court must settle the matter.

That is a remarkable stance from a body meant to protect equality.

Women in Northern Ireland are now being told that their rights may depend not on biology or UK precedent, but on a post-Brexit trade protocol. That the word “woman” might mean one thing in Birmingham and something else in Belfast. That’s not nuance. That’s legal absurdity.

Real-World Impacts

This isn’t some niche legal quarrel. It has real-world consequences. Women’s refuges, hospital wards, rape crisis centres, sports teams, and changing rooms are all caught in the middle. Organisations don’t know whether they’re allowed to run female-only services, or if doing so will land them in legal trouble.

And let’s be clear: it’s the most vulnerable women who suffer. Women in prison. Women in psychiatric wards. Women fleeing violent men, seeking shelter in spaces where they can feel safe. These are the people the Equality Commission has failed to protect.

We’ve already seen what happens when institutions ignore sex. In England, male offenders with GRCs have been housed in women’s prisons, including violent offenders and those with histories of sexual assault. The Isla Bryson case in Scotland sparked outrage after a convicted rapist was initially placed in a women’s prison. These are not hypotheticals. These are cautionary tales.

Too often, this whole issue is reduced to toilets, as if it's just about where someone pees. But toilets are something everyone uses. This is about intimate, high-risk spaces where the presence of a male body, no matter how someone identifies, can retraumatise or endanger.

This is about fairness in sport. Privacy in healthcare. Boundaries in criminal justice. None of this is abstract. These are the daily realities of women who have nowhere else to turn.

And now, after months of silence, the Commission’s long-awaited statement has arrived, and said nothing. Instead of firm guidance, we get a "roadmap" of steps, with no timeframe and no certainty. Meanwhile, the legal limbo drags on.

The Pattern Is Familiar

This isn’t just about Northern Ireland. It fits a wider trend. Across the UK and beyond, institutions are using complexity and ambiguity as excuses for inaction, while women are left exposed.

In our case, a Brexit trade deal is being used to block a Supreme Court ruling. Brussels is being prioritised over Belfast. That’s not how democracy should work.

Across the UK, public bodies have been captured by ideology. The NHS talks about “people with cervixes.” Government departments still cling to Stonewall guidance that blurs the lines between sex and gender identity. In schools, young people are being taught that biology is bigotry. It’s the same pattern: obfuscate, delay, deny.

Can a UK-wide legal decision be ignored in one part of the country? Can the definition of “sex” be allowed to shift according to postcode? And if so, what does that mean for the rule of law?

This isn’t just a policy delay. It’s ideological capture, not just of language, but of the law itself.

What Needs to Happen

This can’t go on. The UK Government must make clear that the Supreme Court ruling applies in full to Northern Ireland. The Equality Commission must stop hiding behind EU obligations and start doing its job: defending women, not dodging responsibility.

This is no longer just a women’s rights issue; it is a constitutional crisis. If a UK Supreme Court ruling does not apply in Northern Ireland because of a trade deal, then the principle of equal citizenship across the UK is at risk. Are we still one country under one law? Or is Northern Ireland now subject to a parallel legal system where biological reality can be overridden by EU interpretation under Article 2 of the Windsor Framework? The UK Government must step in. This situation demands political leadership, not bureaucratic stalling.

If the Commission won’t act, then women’s rights organisations should seriously consider seeking a judicial review of its failure. Westminster should also provide an unambiguous statement confirming the legal interpretation of “woman” across all four nations of the UK.

Women in Northern Ireland are UK citizens. We are entitled to the same clarity, the same protections, and the same respect as every other woman in these islands.

The Supreme Court has already spoken. The definition of “woman” is not up for renegotiation. It’s time our institutions caught up.

The Toy Show - We love it!

The RTÉ Late Late Toy Show is an annual special broadcast each November or December on RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster. It’s a TV programme, but more than just that. It’s a cultural institution and often the most watched show of the year in Ireland. It’s been on the go since 1975.

The Toy Show is hosted by the Late Late Show’s regular host, currently Patrick Kielty, and is entirely devoted to showcasing popular children’s toys and books. The host is always helped by a variety of adorable children onstage and there are appearances by various celebrities such as musicians or sports people. It may sound commercial, and it is no doubt great marketing for the toys that make it on to the show, but in truth the toys and celebrities are secondary to the children who take part. It’s all about the kids and it’s always funny and heart-warming. It’s about children, and for children, from all walks of life with a wide range of abilities and special needs.

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There is huge build-up to the show with advertising and countdowns on radio, television and social media. On the big night, and in the days following, social media is abuzz with commentary on the whole thing from Kielty’s antics and his Christmas jumpers to the cute kids and the funny things they do or say, and the amazing talent that’s showcased with young people singing and dancing.

All that to say, the Toy Show is a Really Big Deal here in Ireland. You’d be hard pressed to find an Irish person who didn’t know about it. For lots of people, children especially, it signals the beginning of Christmas. It’s a family occasion with children staying up late, sweets and treats, and maybe Christmas pyjamas. Last year there were even suggestions in the media of making it Toy Show Day and allowing pyjamas at school and a ban on homework (the show always airs on a Friday night)!

It’s one of the few moments of genuine national unity these days and it’s rooted in the belief that all children should be cherished and protected.

The Toy Show Appeal

The Toy Show Appeal, established in 2020, builds on that sentiment and has so far raised over €26 million. This money has contributed to a range of initiatives that foster the health and wellbeing of children, with RTÉ stating:

“We work to bring the magic of The Late Late Toy Show to every child in Ireland. By funding essential support, health, well-being, play and creativity, we aim to change children's lives for good.”

Throughout the show there are regular appeals from the host and updates on how much money has been raised so far. Irish people are incredibly generous, and everyone gets enthusiastic watching the numbers climb. People want to help, and people especially want to help children.

Where Does Our Money Go?

The list of grants given in 2025 includes the Irish Heart Foundation, Down Syndrome Ireland, the Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation, and Women’s Aid, among many other deserving causes. Most people who donate are not following up on exactly where their money goes, assuming in good faith that it will help support children who are sick, in crisis, or living in poverty.

In recent days, however, two well known Irish organisations have announced that they’ve been fortunate to receive funding from the RTÉ Toy Show Appeal - Belong To (€40,000) and TENI (€15,000). Both organisations say the funds are earmarked for family support services. On the surface, this sounds innocuous. Who could object to supporting families?

Belong To is a national LGBTQ+ youth organisation and TENI (Transgender Equality Network Ireland) is a group advocating for transgender people in Ireland. Both groups offer support and advice for children, and families of children, who are confused or distressed about gender. Both groups are involved in education and training in schools and other organisations and have been influential in development of policy and legislation such as the Gender Recognition Act.

But - and this is critical - these are not neutral support organisations. Both openly promote a highly controversial and increasingly discredited model of care for children, one rooted not in evidence but in ideology.

Belong To actively promotes the gender-affirmative model, which encourages children who express discomfort with their sex to adopt a trans identity, often without meaningful psychological exploration or any clinical safeguards. The organisation has supported medical transition for minors, the promotion of breast binders to girls (a binder is a garment worn to compress and flatten the breasts which can restrict breathing, cause pain, and lead to tissue damage, including potential rib fractures or permanent chest deformation), and the withholding of information from parents. Belong To routinely undermines parental authority and characterises any critical viewpoint as hate, even when those views come from feminists, clinicians, or same-sex attracted people.

Annaig Birdy is one of the founders of Not All Gays, a grassroots group of young same-sex attracted people in Ireland who reject gender identity ideology. She spent several years as a young woman attending meetings at Belong To and has spoken at length about her experiences:

“Belong To calls itself a crisis support service, but what it actually operates is more akin to a taxpayer-funded cult for confused and vulnerable kids. Youngsters, just beginning to explore their sexuality or feeling disconnected from their changing bodies are plunged into a culture of fear, secrecy, and ideological obedience. They’re told that anyone outside the group; parents, teachers, even other LGB people is a potential threat, and that Belong To is the only true safe space. Young girls, often struggling with eating disorders and who are typically gender non-conforming, as most lesbians are, are instructed on how to hide breast binders from their families, to have them delivered to a friend’s house, to secretly wash them in sinks so they won’t be spotted in the laundry. This isn’t support. It’s calculated, coercive isolation. Children are told not to read alternative views, not to speak about what happens inside Belong To. The first rule of 'gay club' is you don’t talk about gay club. And yet RTÉ and the Irish state continue to funnel public money into this machinery of fear and indoctrination. It’s a scandal hiding in plain sight, and no one seems to care, because it’s happening to gay kids.”

TENI also promotes the affirmative approach and the concept of being ‘born in the wrong body’ (they also promote binding for young women, among other dangerous practices, and suggest contacting them to obtain free or discounted binders). TENI actively endorses and promotes WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health). The WPATH guidelines have been globally criticised for being unsafe, ideologically driven, and lacking scientific rigour. The HSE (Ireland’s Health Service Executive) does not follow WPATH standards of care for these reasons. TENI’s promotion of affirmation and early medicalisation for gender-distressed young people, based on WPATH, contradicts Irish and international best practice guidelines. WPATH, and the activists who endorse them, do not have the best interests of children at heart.

The ideas and practices promoted by Belong To and TENI have been explicitly criticised by The Cass Review, the most up-to-date and rigorous examination of gender healthcare available.

Cass Review

The Cass Review is a comprehensive, independent review of gender identity services for children in the UK, commissioned by the NHS and carried out by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass. The findings raised serious concerns about the lack of evidence for medical and social interventions, and highlighted the need for a more cautious, holistic, and evidence-based approach to supporting gender-questioning youth. It concluded that there is no reliable evidence that puberty blockers are safe or reversible, that an affirmation only approach is unsafe, that gender care for children has been ideologically captured, and that medical transition for minors should be paused. The Cass Review underscored the vulnerability of these children and the potential for harm when affirmation is prioritised over careful assessment.

Many countries such as the UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, France, and Italy have now restricted the use of puberty blockers and retreated from the gender-affirmative care approach.

Our own Irish experts in this field do not support an affirmation only approach, or WPATH guidelines. In fact, Professor Donal O’Shea (consultant endocrinologist) and Dr Paul Moran (consultant psychiatrist) of the National Gender Service (NGS), sought and have been granted a judicial review of the treatment of children in Ireland with gender identity issues because children were referred to clinics abroad which took an affirmative approach, much to the detriment of their young patients. Dr Moran and Professor O’Shea have also expressed concern over what they see as inappropriate influence of activist driven ideology on gender services in Ireland.

Activist Overreach

TENI and Belong To are vocal and well known transgender activists with a foot in the door of many sectors of Irish life including education, healthcare, and government. In fact, TENI is formally registered as a lobbying organisation. Its lobbying activities, which are a matter of public record, include direct engagement with politicians and public officials on legislation and healthcare policy relating to gender identity. Their declared purpose is to influence policy and legislation on issues that are medically and ethically contested such as:

• provision of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to young people.

• changes to Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act - TENI had considerable influence on the drafting of this controversial act, to the exclusion of women’s rights groups, child safeguarding organisations, and other important voices. It continues to campaign for legal gender recognition for minors.

• school and healthcare policies that promote a particular ideological and unscientific stance on gender identity.

This is explicit political advocacy which is surely in conflict with the intended purpose of Toy Show Appeal funds. Irish families who donate through RTÉ’s televised campaign do not expect their contributions to fund lobbying organisations promoting controversial legislative change, particularly where children are involved.

It is deeply concerning that a high-profile charity appeal, particularly one associated with a beloved family programme like the Toy Show, would fund any organisation whose approach to such sensitive issues runs counter to international clinical guidelines.

RTÉ Muted

Equally troubling is the fact that RTÉ, Ireland’s publicly funded broadcaster, has consistently refused to engage seriously with the growing global debate around gender identity, medicalisation, and child safeguarding. A small handful of programmes (a meagre four) have confronted the issues with the most recent of these being 18 months ago. Neither the Cass Review nor the recent UK Supreme Court Ruling on the meaning of ‘sex’ in law (that it refers to biology, not gender identity) have been covered in any meaningful way. RTÉ has rarely platformed critical voices and has never interviewed prominent Irish experts such as Helen Joyce or Stella O’Malley.

Paddy O’Gorman, multi-award winning radio and television broadcaster formerly with RTÉ, has expressed dismay over RTE’s avoidance of the gender identity issue:

“I’m sad to see my old broadcast company, RTÉ, dodge public debate on the transgender agenda. Three years ago the Live Line phone-in programme, presented by Joe Duffy, stepped into the trans debate and got itself into a lot of controversy, as good current affairs programmes are supposed to do. The politicians and much of the media piled on against RTÉ. The pile-on worked. The trans lobby said “no debate” and RTÉ has complied ever since.

Recently we’ve seen developments that cry out for public debate on mainstream media. We saw the British Supreme Court ruling that in British law a woman is a woman, and not a man who says he is a woman as is the case in Irish law. Opinion polls show that the Irish public, in both states in Ireland, strongly agrees with British law and disagrees with Irish law on this. But the Irish public is not getting a chance to debate this on mainstream media. There has been radio silence from RTÉ.

Now we hear that money raised by the Late Late Toy Show for children in need is going to be directed towards transgender lobby groups. I would dearly love to hear Joe Duffy host a Live Line discussion on this. I would love to see RTÉ once again doing its job. Sadly, we can expect that any such debate is only going to take place on social media and, accordingly, the public’s trust in RTÉ will continue to diminish.”

RTÉ has gone from avoiding debate to actively funding one side of it by giving funds to Belong To and TENI. Irish people pay a compulsory television license fee to support RTÉ and yet we cannot trust that they will provide objective and balanced information or spend our charitable donations wisely.

Passing the Buck

In response to enquiries from concerned citizens in recent days, RTÉ has stated that funding decisions are made independently by Community Foundation Ireland (CFI). They say that only registered charities are eligible for funding from the Toy Show Appeal and that an independent panel oversees the process.

Be that as it may, RTÉ is still accountable. The Toy Show Appeal is marketed, promoted, and endorsed by RTÉ. Donations are made by the public on the basis of RTÉ’s branding, credibility, and trust. Where this money ultimately goes is therefore a matter of public interest and reputational significance for RTÉ.

This is not about denying support to LGBTQ+ youth. It is about recognising that real support requires caution, nuance, and accountability, especially when children’s health and lifelong wellbeing are at stake. Until Irish media, policymakers, and institutions are willing to ask hard questions, it falls to concerned citizens to do so.

Catherine Monaghan, Irish women’s rights activist and 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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