On Monday, the schools will re-open after the Christmas break, and it’s very likely that the courts will once again be asked to deal with the recurring and increasingly thorny question of what to do with Enoch Burke.
Before Christmas, the secondary school teacher was freed from Mountjoy prison because, Justice Mark Sanfey decided that, having reviewed the situation, and given that state examinations were completed and Wilson’s Hospital School was now on holidays, he would direct that Mr Burke be released.
However, the judge made it clear that the order against Enoch Burke remained in place and that he expected the board of the school would make an application for the teacher’s further committal to prison if he breached the order in the New Year.
It’s likely, given past performance, that Enoch will return to the school because he argues that the real issue at the heart of the long-running dispute is his refusal to abide with what he describes as “transgenderism” and, in particular, his belief that he should not be obliged to describe a student at the school as “they” – a pronoun used to describe a person who says they are neither male or female.
The Burke family said before Christmas that they believe Enoch was released due to public pressure. I don’t know if that’s the case, because people generally have short attention spans, and it is far easier to forget that Enoch Burke is in prison than to spend even one of the almost 500 days he has now been incarcerated in durance vile, but there may be a growing understanding that some of the frustration and anger evident in the actions of the Burkes is precisely because the authorities continue to push a damaging ideology on young children, despite the evidence that it may be very harmful to do so.
Fr Brendan Kilcoyne, host of the popular online show, The Brendan Option, touched on this subject recently when he questioned his own previous stance on whether Mr Burke had, in fact, been right in taking the position that he has.
He sad that many people seemed to be uncomfortable that “a decent man was spending so much time in jail” and said that his sympathy for the schoolteacher had grown, even though he originally had felt “that Enoch could have dealt differently with the issue in the school”.
He said that his sympathy for Mr Burke was growing “as a result of his persistent personal witness and the appalling price he’s paying for it” – and that he wanted to acknowledge that he was “being taught by” the imprisoned schoolteacher. That was despite having originally been critical of the conduct of the Burke family in the court – and Fr Kilcoyne pointed out that if the Burke’s sincerely believed that the “courts are applying unjust law” then “what choice does a citizen have?”.
“How far is all our diplomacy getting us?” he asked, adding that “horrors” were being taught, or intended to be taught, in schools.
It’s an interesting point because it raises a vitally important issue that is usually overlooked, namely that despite the international reports and findings, despite the evidence of alarming outcomes for children, despite the medical experts issuing warnings, transgender ideology is still being taught as fact in Irish schools, and our schoolbooks are presenting unscientific nonsense to children – including vulnerable teenagers.
“There is a huge problem if you’re teaching [about transgenderism] in a Christian school. There is a huge problem if you are acknowledging alleged gender transformation, gender transition in a Christian school,” Fr Kilcoyne said.
But this problem isn’t just about Christian schools or Catholic teaching: it’s about the rush by the educational authorities to embrace an unscientific ideology and the refusal of the same authorities to now change what’s on the curriculum given the national and international evidence that is repeatedly telling us that it may be very harmful to school children.
Telling students that biological sex doesn’t decide your gender, and instructing teachers to go along with social transitioning – changing names in schools, using nonsense pronouns such as ‘they’ for young children, having non-binary toilets, avoidance of terms such as ‘boys and girls’ ) as part of a ‘gender-affirming’ approach – isn’t a neutral act, and, as Gript revealed, we have taxpayer-funded groups with access to our schools telling teachers they can lie to parents where a child’s parents are asking directly if they have come out as trans in school.
This is a new year, yet despite the landslide NO in the March referendum, despite the Cass Review, despite the evidence of top experts like Prof Dónal O’Shea, Irish schools and textbooks are still presenting gender affirmation and transgender theory as fact.
The SPHE books are full of nonsense about ‘Gingerbread persons’ and lessons where children are told that their sex is “assigned at birth”, but that they can decide their own gender – and students are told to undertake ‘matching activities’ where people not feeling gender confusion are described as ‘cisgender’. One lesson for first year students tells them to advises other young people regarding gender confusion – with the possibility of sex change implied.
“The tweets below have been posted to a Twitter support group for teenagers,” 12 and 13-year olds are instructed. “In groups, imagine that you run the support groups Twitter page and reply to the tweets.”
Amongst the messages that First Year students are supposed to respond to are a girl who describes her body as being “stupid” with “stupid breasts”.
Our children are forced to use school textbooks, as one teacher wrote, which include “detailed lists of gender labels, which young people are undoubtedly feeling pressured to pick”. That same SPHE teacher was told that if she had conscientious objections to what was being taught maybe she “shouldn’t be teaching SPHE”.
She said: “It’s horrifying to think that the ideology behind gender self-ID legislation has trickled down to children as young as eight looking to change their names and pronouns in school when all they should be interested in is playing with their peers. The fallout has seen the number of students coming to our doors for counselling increase exponentially, many in extreme states of confusion and despair”.
What they are not being told is that confusion and mixed feelings are a normal part of puberty, and that rushing to change their gender can lead to more rather than less of these feelings. Neither are they being told that, according to experts: “for a majority of young children presenting with gender incongruence, this resolves through puberty.” In other words, most children grow out of it.
That is such a key insight – and one that has now been backed repeatedly by medical experts. Tiny numbers of young people suffer from genuine gender dysphoria. They should be given the understanding and support they need. Pretending that biological sex isn’t real and affirming any youthful confusion as a reason to undergo transition is another matter altogether. And the teacher added:
In working with teachers over the last five years, I have met a wide variety of viewpoints and belief systems. Some were already teaching ‘gender ideology’ as fact before the specification was updated, others felt very uncomfortable and nervous about what was expected of them as teachers, given the limited training which they had received.
There were huge concerns about how to ‘manage’ challenging conversations or situations which might arise in the SPHE classroom. As many teachers pointed out: ‘we are not counsellors’.
What I also observed was a genuine ‘fear’ of saying or doing the ‘wrong’ thing. Teachers are terrified of being labelled as discriminatory or non-inclusive and being ‘cancelled’ due to adversely causing offence to students in their care. Ultimately, teachers care for their students, so it goes without saying that they do not want to cause them hurt.
How can teachers who know transgender ideology is not based on scientific foundations be forced to teach against their conscience? Another teacher, Mary Creedon, who appeared in a viral video discussing what she had been taught in a DCU course for SPHE teachers, said that “it was assumed that everybody agreed with transgender ideology” and a lecturer “referred to us as cis women, referred to people with vulvas”.
(That’s ALL apart from the anti-Irish, Family A, drivel which has made its way into the classrooms, which as I previously noted, was akin to something you might have expected in a 1880’s edition of Punch.)
None of this is new to Gript readers, but the point is that despite the controversies, despite parental concerns, despite the landslide NO vote in the referendum, despite the medical evidence, we still have a situation where the textbooks in our schools, with the approval of our curriculum body, are teaching gender ideology to our children.
In fact, the NCCA guidance for schools tells teachers:
Use affirming and gender-inclusive language. Avoid heteronormative language and assumptions, such as referring to romantic relationships only in terms of boy/girl relationships and binary-based language that doesn’t take into account the diversity of ways that people can express gender and sexuality.
And adds:
When you greet your students for the first time, announce your name and pronouns (e.g. “My name is Ms Murphy and my pronouns are ‘she/her’). This signals that you are aware and respectful of the fact that not everyone will use the pronouns that people expect or the name and pronouns that are on official records.
The rot is coming from the top – and this is what Fr Kilcoyne believes may be at the heart of the frustration expressed by Enoch Burke, a frustration that is also growing amongst many parents who aren’t at the gates of Wilson’s Hospital school. The problem hasn’t gone away.
There has been no referendum on the bonkers fallout from the Gender Recognition Act (Barbie Kardashian, women described as chest-feeders), but in my view the public took the opportunity in March of last year to deliver a message in the crushing NO to Roderic O’Gorman’s referendum to remove mothers from the Constitution.
As I wrote at the time, the referendum “was rightly seen by mothers as a move urged on by the state’s embrace of nebulous but pernicious gender identity ideology, where women are “chest-feeders” and mothering is belittled and demeaned. The current government and most in Oppositon seem wholly captured by this nonsensical ideology.”
But nine months after the referendum, where is the row-back on dangerous gender ideology practices that could harm our children by blindly setting them on a gender-affirmation pathway that might lead to medication and irreversible surgery and a lifetime of distress? Where is the child-centered approach? Where is the respect for parents’ rights? Where do we see the Irish educational authorities catching up with best international practice? Instead we have institutes like DCU riddled with queer theory drivel and captured by the most harmful aspects of gender ideology. Where, as Fr Kilcoyne asks, has the diplomacy got us?
He says parents should “get your schools back”. I agree. Get children back too, from the lunatics who want to tell them that biological sex isn’t real, that they are ‘people with vulvas’ and that its normal to head into a life of puberty blockers and distressing surgeries which remove your penis or breasts.
Last year Enoch Burke pointed the court towards a report prepared by then-school principal Niamh McShane which he said was central to the controversy around his dispute with the school. He said it stated there were “concerns around Mr Burke’s public statements of his refusal to accept transgenderism”.
And that it continued: “This has implications not only for the particular student but other students who may wish to transition in the future and indeed the entire student population”.
Enoch Burke isn’t looking for my advice, but I’d I had the opportunity to meet him, I’d tell him this: Don’t go back to jail. You’ve done enough. It’s time parents put a stop to the harmful gender madness that is being taught in schools.