Mick Hartley

It's been noted here before: the strange predilection in what used to be known as the Celtic Fringe – Scotland, Wales, Ireland – for all things trams. Here's Ella Whelan at Spiked – Trans dogma has captured Ireland:

Irish author and journalist Mary Kenny was No Platformed by the University of Limerick earlier this month. The university revoked her invitation to speak after a vocal group of students accused her of transphobia.

Kenny, a celebrated women’s rights activist, was due to give a speech on the history of feminism to coincide with International Women’s Day. But activists took to Twitter to share supposedly ‘transphobic’ tweets from Kenny, and submitted multiple complaints to the university. Kenny says that her invitation was revoked after the university was ‘put under enormous pressure to cancel’ her.

So, what are Kenny’s ‘transphobic’ crimes?

In February, she tweeted that most Scots ‘didn’t agree’ with the SNP’s plans to allow 16-year-olds to change gender – which is true. And she quoted a senior SNP source who described allowing male rapists to be housed in women’s prisons as ‘lunacy’. Away from Scotland, Kenny described NHS England’s decision to shut down the Tavistock gender clinic for young people as ‘welcome’ (the decision was taken after an independent review concluded that the Tavistock’s model of ‘gender-affirmative’ care was ‘not safe’ for children).

Yep. Burn the witch.

Sadly, the banning of Kenny comes as little surprise given the embrace of gender ideology by Ireland’s elites. Ireland’s Dáil makes Holyrood look anti-woke by comparison. It legalised gender self-ID in 2015 via the Irish Gender Recognition Act. Ireland is now frequently cited as a trailblazer when it comes to lawmaking around trans issues. Ten minutes up the road from the University of Limerick, two transwomen (that is, biological males) are currently being housed in a women’s prison. One of them was convicted of threats to rape and kill, the other of child cruelty and sexual assault.

For further evidence of Ireland's capture, see this strange article from Louise O’Neill in the Sunday Times today:

In January, Roderic O’Gorman, the minister for children, said that pupils should be educated in schools about what it means to be transgender, saying it is important children have “an understanding of the diversity of our society”. His comments were backed last week by Leo Varadkar, the taoiseach, who said: “I think the purpose of the education system is to prepare children for life and to teach them about the world. Trans people exist. They have always existed . . . This does not have to be a value judgment as to whether it is right or wrong.”

This all sounds pretty reasonable, one would imagine…

Not to me it doesn't. The belief that there are trans people just as there gay people is the keystone of trans ideology from which all else flows – in particular the idea that "trans liberation" is the next step after gay liberation. But it ain't so. True, there is "gender dysphoria", which used to be very rare but now, as we know, is increasingly common thanks to social contagion, but that doesn't mean that trans people have always existed, or that people can be "born in the wrong body". Trans people are people who decide for whatever reason to live as the opposite sex from their actual sex. That's it. 

…but not according to the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association. The CPSMA, which represents 89 per cent of primary schools in this country — truly, only in Ireland would a single organisation have such sway in its sector — outlined the views of its members in a letter to O’Gorman, which it copied to Norma Foley, the education minister. The letter argued that introducing the topic of transgender identity in schools could create “division”, saying: “There is no scientific consensus on the cause (or causes) of gender dysphoria.” The letter added that it might contribute to “a growing psychological contagion” among children.

Science supports the existence of trans people. Science is what is telling us that sex and gender are two separate things, and that sex is not binary. How else do you explain the existence of intersex people, a term used for when a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the boxes of female or male, of whom there are approximately 75,000 in Ireland?

This is nonsense. Science does not support the existence of trans people, and intersex has nothing to do with transgender.

The second part of the CPSMA’s argument, that teaching children about transgender identity could add to a “growing psychological contagion”, is also nonsensical. It sounds like a shlocky horror movie, a Fox News remake of Outbreak, designed to stir up as much hysteria as it possibly can. Forget Covid, we’re all about to catch transgenderism.

Do you really think it’s that easy to give children “ideas” about their identity? By that logic, every kid who came of age in the Eighties and Nineties would have been turned straight by the heterosexual agenda that was pushed by Disney and Big Rom-Com, and there wouldn’t be a gay person to be found in our generation.

This argument doesn't show what she thinks it shows. We know that social media have had a huge influence on so-called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, with the rate, especially for young girls, shooting up alarmingly in recent years. Centuries of oppression on the other hand have failed to eliminate homosexuality, merely driving it underground. Being gay is not a choice: being trans is.

This Roderic O’Gorman, as it happens, is having a bit of a moment himself:

A scandal is breaking in Ireland as it is emerging that the country’s equality minister, Roderic O’Gorman has been transferring large sums of money to gender identity projects for the last 18 months, money which had been earmarked for spending on initiatives for ethnic minorities and survivors of state-sponsored abuse. Most shockingly, money was taken from The Magdalene Laundry Redress fund, which aims to pay compensation for women and girls who’d been abused by the Catholic church and the Irish state in those infamous institutions.

One of the major beneficiaries is a transgender group that experienced a funding halt from Ireland’s health service due to repeated accounting lapses during the same period.