Answering Varadkar on the Gender Recognition Act

Paddy O'Gorman's Letters from Ireland

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.

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.

Barbie Kardashian: not Brazilian or a woman

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.

---