Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.
Tinfoil Tuesday 🧪 Sci Man Dan addresses Young Earth Creationist pseudoscience on dinosaurs and chickens.
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| Micheál Choilm Mac Giolla Easbuig is an independent councillor on Donegal County Council. |
Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.
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.
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.
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. |
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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| ‘Respect, Rights and Reality: Women’s Voices From Ireland and Europe’ hosted by WRN NI in Belfast’s Hilton Hotel. |
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.
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| Seamus Kearney is a former Blanketman and author of No Greater Love - The Memoirs of Seamus Kearney. |
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| Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter Dr Coulter has been a journalist since 1978 and is currently a political commentator with GB News. |
Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.
