Michael McDowell: There is no ‘right' to subvert women's freedom to have their own events and spaces

Irish Times

23-04-2025

The
decision by the UK's
supreme
court
on the meaning of the term 'woman' for the purposes of its Equality Act created a small but noisy reaction among trans activists.
The court held that 'the concept of sex is binary' – that is, there is a male and a female sex. This outcome is reassuring for many people who have become increasingly alarmed and bewildered by the claims of trans ideologists that gender is, somehow, entirely separate from sex and is a social and psychological construct rather than observable reality.
In Ireland, the Oireachtas enacted the Gender Recognition Act 2015 with an understanding that sex was not divorced from gender and that a person issued with a gender recognition certificate would if he was previously considered a man thereafter be regarded as a woman or if previously considered a woman thereafter be considered a man.
The Irish legislation was unusually deficient, in my view, in that it required no form of corroboration whatever from those applying to have their gender legally changed. UK law only recognises male and female genders. The UK's Gender Recognition Act 2004 gave people with gender dysphoria legal recognition based on objective evidence of dysphoria.
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Trans activists took satisfaction from their legislative achievement in Ireland, which eschewed any need for objective corroboration by people applying for gender recognition certificates.
However, the Irish act, which was entirely binary in effect and analysis, was insufficient to satisfy the ideological aims of the trans activist community, however large it may be. By exertion of well-placed influence, they pressed forward with plans to replace the term 'women who are pregnant' with 'people who are pregnant' in social legislation. Official publications were urged to use non-sexual language to describe many aspects of womanhood. The
HSE
has used the term 'chestfeeding' in official documentation.
Perhaps the high tide of the trans ideological wave came in 2022 with the evidence tendered by the government-appointed leader of Seanad Éireann,
Regina Doherty
, (now an MEP)
that there were at least
nine genders in existence
, without limiting that number.
To the best of my knowledge, neither she nor any of her colleagues in government ever attempted to enumerate these other genders, despite many requests that they should do so. She told The Irish Times that she feared that Ireland might have 'a summer of discontent' ahead of us, suggesting that a campaign to reverse the binary Gender Recognition Act 2015 might be launched by a 'very small but growing campaign'. And so the trans ideological train rolled on until it ran straight into the buffers in the form of
massive rejection in the Family and Care referendums in March last year
.
Quite apart from the gross ineptitude and dishonesty deployed by the government at the time and its state-funded NGO allies in proposing those constitutional amendments, there was at the heart of the people's decision an antipathy towards removal from the Constitution of recognition for the value and status of motherhood itself.
For many people, the significance of sex understood as a binary concept is reality – not an emotional or intellectual construct. Even the term 'same-sex attraction' means something. Among many gay and lesbian Irish people, whether married or not, there is a fundamental unease about their equal rights – as vindicated most recently in the marriage equality referendum – being handcuffed to an ideology which seeks to superimpose imagined genders over those of male and female.
It is now years since I wrote here about our capacity to deal with gender dysphoria on a kind and a reasonable basis socially and legally, without abandoning the fundamental social and legal realities of sexuality, masculinity, femininity and motherhood.
The mantra 'trans rights are human rights' is chanted in pursuit of trans ideological goals. For most people, the idea that a 6ft 3in man who may or may not have obtained a gender recognition certificate has a 'right' to participate in, say, women's rugby competitions is bizarre. Single-sex sports exist to reflect physical capacities and realities; they do not create such realities or infringe the rights of others who seek to avoid or deny such realities.
There is no 'right' to subvert the freedom of women to have facilities and events confined to their own sex. There is nothing inhuman about asserting the contrary. The idea that a person convicted of rape and sexual assault against women as a man should have the right to be incarcerated as though a woman is so patently counterintuitive as to have done serious damage to
Nicola Sturgeon
's Scottish government.
David Cullinane
TD was forced into an
abject and humiliating apology and retraction of his initial statement that the UK decision was 'common sense'
. While Sinn Féin is free to enforce party discipline over its members, the knee-jerk response to trans ideology and rejection of what most people would consider as common sense is part of a wider and more ingrained capacity for political, historical and social self-delusion.