They censored voices and attempted to stifle opinions with which they disagreed and of which they were afraid.
Belfast’s Hilton Hotel was the venue on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, for the Respect, Rights and Reality: Women’s Voices from Ireland and Europe event organised by Women’s Rights Network NI (WRN NI).
The event was originally scheduled to take place in St Mary’s University College Belfast as part of Féile an Phobail 2026. However, on July 21, 2026, Féile an Phobail, in response to an online campaign, cancelled the event, claiming in a social media post “it would promote campaigns against rights for the Transgender community”.
A sold-out audience which had travelled from all over Ireland and England, listened to and engaged with a stellar panel: Nora Calder (WRN NI); Danielle Loughrey (Gaels For Fair Play), Sorcha Nic Lochlainn (The Countess), Marianne Driessen (Athena Forum) and Fiona McAnena (Sex Matters), moderated by Derry journalist, Catherine McGinty.
Opening the event, Ms Calder described WRN NI as representing “the majority of women in Northern Ireland who believe biological sex is immutable”.
“Women who understand, when we stop recognising biological sex, we start rolling back women’s rights,” she said.
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Sex Discrimination Order. For half a century, it has protected women (in Northern Ireland) because of our sex, just as it has done across the rest of the UK,” she added.
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Sex Discrimination Order. For half a century, it has protected women (in Northern Ireland) because of our sex, just as it has done across the rest of the UK,” she added.
However, there is one important difference - the Windsor Framework. Following Brexit, the UK Government agreed Northern Ireland would continue to keep pace with six EU equality directives.
After the Supreme Court's judgement in For Women Scotland, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI) asked the High Court whether the Windsor Framework changes the legal position in Northern Ireland.
“We say it does not,” said Ms Calder. Those directives require men and women to be treated equally. They do not redefine sex. Ms Calder said:
We have heard the argument applying the Supreme Court's judgement would diminish the rights of men entering women's single-sex cases but a right that has never existed cannot be diminished. Our concern is the opposite. If Northern Ireland becomes the only part of the UK where the Supreme Court judgement doesn't apply, it will be women's rights that are diminished. That is why WRN NI is involved in three legal cases currently before the High Court.
Highlighting the real-life implications of removing a person’s legal right to hold gender critical beliefs, Ms Calder continued:
Whilst one woman is denied female intimate care, we won't be silenced. Whilst one lesbian is told that she must include men in her dating pool, we won't be silenced. Whilst one woman seeking help from a rape crisis centre is told that she must reframe her trauma, we won't be silenced. And whilst one female police officer in PSNI is told she must intimately search a man, we won't be silenced.
She concluded: "Whilst women are told that our rights, our privacy, our dignity, and our safety must come second, we won't be silenced.”
Following Féile an Phobail’s de-platforming of Respect, Rights and Reality: Women’s Voices from Ireland and Europe, Geraldine McGahey, chief commissioner of Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI) issued a statement in which she said:
Commentary, whether on social media or elsewhere, is misleading and wrong if it suggests that people who hold protected ‘gender critical beliefs’ or ‘gender identity beliefs’ are not entitled to hold those beliefs or should not be able to express them respectfully.
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| The guest speakers at ‘Respect, Rights and Reality: Women’s Voices From Ireland and Europe’, from left: Marianne Driessen, Danielle Loughrey, Fiona McAnena, Sorche Nic Lochlainn and Nora Calder. |
Ms McGahey added:
Employers and service providers should be encouraged and supported to ensure that their policies and their implementation are operating in a way that affords everyone dignity while at work or accessing services.
Public debate that fails to respect everyone’s dignity or that mispresents the law can make these responsibilities under equality law more difficult to meet. Ultimately, equality law in Northern Ireland protects everyone’s right to be treated with dignity and respect.
Danielle Loughrey, co-founder of Gaels For Fair Play - a network of players, coaches and volunteers - spoke about its advocacy for fair and safe sport for women and girls who play Gaelic Football and Camogie.
Ms Loughrey said:
We continue to campaign for the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) to return to protecting the female category. Sport Ireland and the UK Sports Council have both agreed, through thorough consultation, the majority of people want the single-sex categories protected and to remain as they are.
She added:
Ms Loughrey said the LGFA’s policy of “allowing trans-identified men to play on women’s teams had thrown the safeguarding of children and adults out the window”.
She continued:
She added:
Sports bodies really should be looking to protect those categories by providing open or other categories to prioritise fairness for all. The GAA sports bodies can look into making their male categories more inclusive. They should be looking to welcome non-conforming males and make them comfortable within the male category.
Ms Loughrey said the LGFA’s policy of “allowing trans-identified men to play on women’s teams had thrown the safeguarding of children and adults out the window”.
She continued:
Not only is this policy creating the risk of extra injury on the pitch, it is forfeiting our right to build safety and dignity within our changing rooms and within our facilities.
The LGFA policy was introduced without any consultation at grassroots level and with no guidance provided to the clubs on how to deal with changing facilities.
Club and county officials have been deterring and blocking members from even raising their concerns with LGFA management because they [officials] fear repercussions.
A parent at one club came to Gaels For Fair Play about a serious safeguarding concern they had regarding their underage daughter’s team. The girls faced a number of clubs with a juvenile male player. At one match, the girls came over to their parents and said, ‘Please, we don’t want to play against boys’.
Ms Loughrey, who warned girls under 12 and under 14 were already starting to self-exclude from their sport added:
30 parents have since signed that letter from that club and sent it to the LGFA National Safeguarding Officer. As of yet, parents still haven't received any information on whether the LGFA opened an investigation into it or if it is looking at creating any review. The parents are sitting in limbo wondering if, going into next season, they are going to be faced with that same scenario.
It has become quite clear there is a major clash of rights where trans-identified men are demanding to be treated as if they are actually women, and given access to women's spaces and women's sports.
She continued:
The simple fact remains: humans cannot change sex. Women cannot become men, and men cannot become women. Having a transgender identity does not change one's sex.
Effective safeguarding requires that no one be above suspicion. This was a hard learned lesson and should never be forgotten.
The shocking revelation that a violent male prisoner was being held in the women's wing of Limerick Prison was the focus of the first ever tweet by The Countess.
Barbie Kardashian had a harrowing upbringing and a history of violence against women. He had previously attacked a social worker and was charged with threatening to rape and murder his own mother. He was placed in the women's wing of Limerick Prison upon conviction because he had a gender recognition certificate, making him legally female.
No women's organisations or civil rights NGOs said anything about this. The Countess spoke up instead. Their response to the tweet was swift condemnation. Not of the practice of housing violent men with women but of us for calling attention to it, for not understanding this was acceptable collateral damage, the price to pay for inclusion.
She explained:
She explained:
A petition was started, an open letter was penned, condemning us for our bigotry, and calling for women, for us, and for women like us, to be disenfranchised within media and politics.
This petition was signed by individuals and organisations such as Amnesty International Ireland, the National Women's Council of Ireland, and the Irish Penal Reform Trust - a powerful few.
This petition has now closed. I looked the other day; it has 974 signatures. In comparison, a petition to remove Barbie Kardashian from the women’s wing of Limerick Prison had more than 7,000 signatures when it closed.
Based in The Netherlands, education specialist Marianne Driessen represented Athena Forum at Respect, Rights and Reality: Women’s Voices from Ireland and Europe.
Ms Driessen has written on the protection of women's sports, lesbian visibility, and reform of the gender care for youth.
She said:
Last May, I spoke at a Dutch educational symposium, arguing that schools should teach about the biological reality of sex rather than the activist concept of gender identity.
Afterwards, teachers lined up to thank me, not for saying anything radical, but for finally saying something true.
She added: "They told me how much they self-censored. I got comments such as, ‘If I said even half of what you just said, I would be fired’."
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| ‘Respect, Rights and Reality: Women’s voices from Ireland and Europe’ question and answer session, from left: Fiona McAnena, Sorcha Nic Lochlainn, Danielle Loughrey, Marianne Driessan, Nora Calder, and Catherine McGinty |
She continued:
Across Europe, we know self-censoring and cancellations very well. Contrary to what some might think, they have not died down, and the EU continues to develop new instruments to label speech as hateful when it comes to sex and gender.
While much attention focuses on the European Union, the Council of Europe, whose primary role is to promote human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, and in which the UK continues to participate fully, has been an even earlier driver of the gender identity concepts, not through binding legislation, but through soft power, recommendations, resolutions, strategies, funding programmes, expert forums, and partnerships with NGOs.
Marianne Driessen explained:
Instead of seeking democratic majorities at a national level, these activist organisations focus on influencing international institutions, where highly specialised policy processes often attract less public attention and very little organised opposition. From there, these recommendations and policy frameworks filter back into national law and more into the wide array of public sectors with the authority of so-called European standards. One of the most profoundly affected fields is education. Contested concepts, in confusing language, like for example, sex can vary, children are assigned sex at birth, and that children can be born into the born body have made their way into teaching materials and even into the core curriculum objectives of children as young as four.
While:
At the same time, European institutions have increasingly promoted the idea that certain forms of speech about gender identity should be regarded as harmful, hateful, and discriminatory. Genuine harassment should never be tolerated, but the boundary between protecting people from abuse and protecting ideas from criticism has become blurred.
Originally from the Pennyburn area of Derry City, Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at Sex Matters, which promotes human rights where they relate to biological sex, closed the presentations, with the observation "blatant discrimination” such as the Marriage Bar (against women) was outlawed by the 2010 Equality Act and “a set of consistent laws in Northern Ireland”.
Ms McAnena said:
Sex discrimination is outlawed in principle, but the law recognises sometimes the fair or safe thing to do is to treat men and women differently or separately, and that is because of reality. We’re intellectually equal. Some women can be stronger than some men, maybe, but the reality is that, on average, men are bigger and stronger than women. We all know that. That’s why we need separate sports’ categories.
She continued:
For Fiona McAnena:
She continued:
In boxing, the difference between a man and a woman of the same weight, so the sex difference alone, is equivalent to eight weight classes. You can’t train away from that, it's a biological reality. That takes us into male violence, and in particular, male sexual violence. Of those prosecuted for violent crimes in the UK, 91% are men, for sexual crimes, it is 98%.
It is one reason we have single-sex spaces as separate across society, anywhere strangers take their clothes off or are vulnerable. This was never contested. Everyone accepts the constraint you don’t go into the other sex’s spaces, and that’s for everyone’s privacy and peace of mind. And of course, for women and girls, it is about more than that.
For Fiona McAnena:
Some people talk about human rights and claim it is all very complicated, but it’s simple. Everyone’s human rights are being considered and factored into the laws we have and they work on a group or category level. There can be no exception for men who claim they are not a risk. I am furious this has become a negotiation. It isn’t branding all men as predators. It is all men because it is some men, and we can’t tell which ones.The vast majority of men don’t complain they are being labelled predators. They know they are not. They understand and accept the Social Contract.
“The problem,” she added, “is if anyone can claim to be a woman, then any man, even the wrong’uns can access women’s private spaces, single-sex services and support just by claiming to be trans."
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| ‘Respect, Rights and Reality: Women’s Voices From Ireland and Europe’ hosted by WRN NI in Belfast’s Hilton Hotel. |
She claimed that:
It is not opening the door to a small number of trans people, it is opening the door to all men.
So, for the sake of 51% of the population, the female majority, the boundaries must be based on sex, not on identity. We still need single-sex provision to help keep us safe.
Ironically, Féile an Phobail amplified the voices of the women they sought to silence.
And, the law of unintended consequences served only to give veracity to Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai who said: “We realise the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.”
⏩Catherine McGinty is a journalist covering the North West.
