A layup, this one, but when you’re a humble blogger looking for a bit of daily content, there are days you wish when Regina Doherty was still in the Seanad making regular speeches. Here she is yesterday:
Dublin MEP Regina Doherty has said she is not sure if evidence she gave in the Seanad in 2022 that there are nine genders would stand up to scrutiny today, after being criticised by Senator Michael McDowell…..
…. “You don’t need to address women’s issues by politicising people who have a medical condition who are exceptionally vulnerable, as Michael McDowell has sought to do, and I think that’s a real pity, and it’s not something that I’ve ever done, and I mightn’t have got everything right, and I really don’t know, you know, whether the evidence that I gave based on the interactions that I had with TENI at the time would stand up today.”
Note the language here carefully: Regina Doherty is not saying here that she was wrong that there were nine genders. It is simply the case that there might not be nine genders after all. The total number of genders remains indecipherable. One of the great mysteries of progressive faith, we might call it, like the Holy Trinity but for the truly enlightened.
A friend texted me the news yesterday, shortly after Regina’s big u-turn on the genders, noting that “it shows that the direction of travel is positive, at least, when even people on the trendy-train are pulling back a bit”. I think my friend is both right and wrong.
Right, obviously, in that Doherty publicly expressing doubt as to the number of genders is clearly a little bit, marginally, more sane than her insistence that there are “about nine genders”. Wrong, in that this really isn’t enough or close to enough.
Is it really progress that an elected representative of the people of Dublin doesn’t appear to know how many genders there are?
And anyway, this is where we get to the real point, and the real villain in the piece: RTE.
The open goal that Doherty left them here was so gaping that even a Manchester United striker would just about have been able to poke the ball home: “So, Regina: How many genders do you think there are, now, in 2025?”
This isn’t a small oversight. The very purpose of the media in a democracy is to put the views of politicians on the record and pin them down. This is to aid the voter: A voter who wants to know what Regina Doherty actually thinks about matters of public importance is almost entirely reliant on the media to obtain answers for them. What Doherty was doing here, as a matter of politics, was engaging in a little creative obfuscation: She at once wanted to signal to people like my friend that she was “pulling back a bit”. But she also wanted to signal to the trans activists that she was still on their side by allowing the possibility to remain that there are more than two genders. With the statement that she made on RTE, she can now plausibly say anything she wants in private to various interest groups with her true position perfectly obfuscated with the assistance of RTE.
And here’s the other reason why my friend is wrong: Ask yourself, why wasn’t she pushed on how many genders there actually are? Was it because RTE is desperately committed to helping a Fine Gael MEP avoid public embarrassment? I don’t think so, friends.
I think the real reason that somebody like Regina Doherty wasn’t pressed to specify the true number of genders is not because of what that might say about Regina Doherty, but because of what it might say about the presenter who pressed her.
Who wants to be the weirdo RTE presenter who pushes a politician to say – as I suspect Doherty might have – that there are only two genders? In that case, I promise you, the anger from the Trans Rights/LGBT groups would not be directed at Doherty, but at RTE for pushing “that narrative” in the first place. Why, like Sinn Fein, there is every chance that RTE might be banned from “Trans Pride” this summer if its presenters continued to push “anti trans narratives”.
This wouldn’t be new, would it?
“Dublin Pride has announced it is terminating its media partnership with RTÉ, saying it is “angered and disappointed” by recent discussions about the transgender community on the Liveline radio programme.
In a statement this evening, Dublin Pride said it has worked with RTÉ over the past three years “to increase positive representation of LGBTQ+ people on TV, radio and online, and to see the good work of so many people undone is saddening in the extreme and negates much of the efforts made to date”.
That particular hissy fit, you might remember, was in response to RTE’s “liveline” radio show permitting ordinary members of the public to come on the airwaves and voluntarily offer their opinion that there are only two genders. Imagine what might happen if an RTE presenter actually cajoled a senior politician into saying the same thing.
There’s a difference between “platforming” transphobia and “encouraging” transphobia. RTE would have been raked over the coals. Cowardice in the face of the trans lobby means that to this day, some awkward questions still cannot be asked.
So no, I disagree with my friend. This isn’t really progress, and those of us who just want a return of sanity to the public square on this question should not be settling for it. From either Regina Doherty, or from RTE.