Last week, the UK Supreme Court affirmed that the terms “woman” and “sex” refer to a biological woman and biological sex, much to the delight of the women who had battled the establishment for years on the issue.
As observed over the weekend, the Irish taxpayer-funded media mostly did their best to downplay the significance of the victory, just as they did when the Irish electorate, in what was seen as a backlash to the sheer nonsense that has become the hallmark of gender ideology, delivered a landslide NO vote last year to the government’s attempt to remove the only reference to ‘mother’ in our constitution.
It can feel as if the world – which had taken a wild lurch towards the absurd in claiming that gender was fluid – is returning to common sense, but as ever, Ireland is late to the party. David Cullinane, the Sinn Féin TD, beat a hasty retreat in the face of trans anger – and the tight discipline enforced by the party’s controlling committee – when he deleted a tweet saying that the UK ruling was a common sense position.
It reminded me that last week I spoke to a mother who told me that her 8 year-old daughter who attends a Galway primary school brought home a book from her school library entitled “Marvin Redpost: Is he a girl?” – and that this is not happening in isolation.
In fact, our entire school curriculum in this area is still operating as if the Cass report and the ongoing retreat from the wilder shores of gender ideology has never happened.
That, in effect, means that where the most radical transgender ideology can actually do the most harm – in schools – nothing has really changed. Given what we know about contagion, social transitioning, and pathways to medical transitioning, if you’re a parent with kids in school you should be alarmed.
I should preface this piece by saying that I believe it is a great pity that the extremists in the transgender movement have likely succeeded in making life harder for people who have genuine gender dysphoria.
The entirely wrong-headed and often dangerous insistence that gender is fluid: the idea that lunatic, violent male rapists can be housed in women’s prisons; that it is somehow fair to include hulking big men in female sports competitions; that women should be described as a ‘person with a cervix’; that even domestic violence shelters should be open to men who now say they are women; and much more, all fatally damaged what could have been a movement simply seeking better understanding of the needs of a traditionally tiny number of people who want to change sex.
When it comes to young people – and by that I also mean children, including children in primary school, and even younger – we also have the Cass report, which not only said that puberty blockers should not be given to under-18s, but also issued a serious caution regarding social transitioning in schools that the Irish Department of Education and it’s many attendant bodies continue to merrily ignore.
What the Cass review relayed about social transitioning in schools is a vitally important and sometimes overlooked finding, and its worth parsing it further in view of the fact that even in Irish primary schools children are being told that they can choose their gender and they can be a boy or girl, neither or both.
Social transition generally means social changes for a child who says they want to change sex – so that schools accept an altered name, clothing, hairstyle, pronouns and more. Under pressure from trans activists, some schools seemed to accept social transitioning and gender affirmation without question, even to the point of failing to inform parents, distorting single-sex spaces, and refusing to recognise they might have been failing to consider safeguarding duties according to critics who analysed what was happening in schools.
Irish parents will recall the utter confidence in the gender-affirming approach which underpinned the video (below) issued by the Irish National Teacher’s Organisation and entitled “Facilitating a social transition“. Note how the narrator explains that he set about “preparing the child’s social-transition” by reassuring them that boys can change into girls and girls can change into boys – and the proposed strong-arming of primary school children who all must agree to comply.
The narrator goes onto say he also introduced the children to “non-binary” identities, where people don’t identify as either a boy or a girl. This sort of insidious nonsense was widely pushed out across the media on the basis that anyone who disagreed or questioned what was being said was actively leading to extreme distress and even suicidality amongst gender-confused children. The blindingly obvious was deliberately ignored – that most children grew out of the confusion they might be feeling and that adults choosing to get involved in social transitioning and forcing others to do the same might be causing more harm than good.
In her review, Dr Cass looked at both claims regarding social transition: at the arguments that it improves the mental health of children experiencing gender distress – and at the belief that it sets children on a pathway what can be irreversible and/or life-long medical interventions.
Her report found that social transitioning was not a neutral act and that ‘those who had socially transitioned at an earlier age and/or prior to being seen in clinic were more likely to proceed to a medical pathway’.
And yet, in Irish schools, our children are still being subject to nonsense in schoolbooks – and in school libraries – which tell children unscientific theories as if they were facts, and are written as if the compelling evidence reviewed by Dr Cass and others simply doesn’t exist.
That’s why the new editions of SPHE books still tell students in first year and beyond that while sex is “assigned at birth” that “a person’s gender identity is how someone identifies themselves based on how they feel – it is an internal feeling of being male, female, both or neither.”
Students are also told to undertake hideous exercises such as advising a teenage girl who says she feels trapped in a “stupid body with stupid breasts”. Why do we allow this unscientific theory to be taught to our children as fact?
In primary schools, we have the Busybodies booklet, produced by the HSE, telling children that “as well as a biological sex, we all have a gender identity. This is how we think of ourselves as a boy, a girl, neither or both”.
And then, as that Galway mother told me last week, 8 year-olds are being sent home from school with books from the school library asking if a boy is really a girl. Until now, of course, anyone who objected to this propaganda was shouted down as a transphobe and hounded out of polite society.
Has that changed? Maybe not. The Galway mother told me that when she complained to the teacher she received no acknowledgement that the book was inappropriate or that its message may now be considered unsuitable for 8-year-olds.
“My daughter went with her class to the library in the school, and picked out a book. These are 8-year-olds, and the book she came home with was written for children, but the message is confusing,” she told me.
“In the book, Marvin Redpost: Is he a girl?, the boy has a dream that he is wearing a dress and is painting finger and toenails, and he checked in his pants to see if he has changed into a girl.”
“I emailed the teacher to say I wasn’t happy. It might be humorous but I don’t like the message. I feel like parents should have been told that these books are in the library. Children are so young at that age, they are just discovering themselves. I think they are too young to think about gender confusion or transgenderism. A lot of the time what they say about the subject is all innocent.”
“I think that parents are being primed to think this must mean that children want to transition when they are just questioning things as part of childhood. It’s something they grow out of. And in any case, girls can play with action figures, boys can play with dolls, it shouldn’t be taken as an indication they want to change sex,” she said.
She emphasised that she didn’t want to ban books, and its obvious that the book in question isn’t anywhere near as offensive as ‘This Book is Gay’ or other controversial items that appeared on reading lists for school students. But the Marvin Redpost book does address gender confusion and transgenderism, and it brings us back to the reality that Irish schools, and the Department of Education, seem to be ignoring the science – ignoring the warning bells being rung by Cass and others in relation to how transgenderism and gender ideology is embedded in our school system, with no sign from the Minister for Education that she is going to do undertake a review of same.
So as women in the UK celebrate that their Supreme Court and Department of Education recognise that biological sex is real, we have schoolbooks telling kids that they can have two genders or none, and 8 year olds coming home with books asking if a boy is a girl.
Parents and TDs have said that the entire SPHE course needs to be reviewed in light of the Cass report and of studies that show the folly of allowing an untested and unscientific theory which tears up biological reality to be taught to school kids as if it were fact. Until that happens, parents are perfectly right to raise serious concerns with schools, and have those concerns acknowledged and respected. We are, after all, the primary guardians of our children.