Yesterday RTÉ reported on a story which highlighted the confusion at the heart of gender ideology – and illustrated just how nonsensical, and devoid of reality, reporting can become when said ideology is adhered to.
This is not about a lack of sympathy for people who experience genuine gender dysphoria – which is rare, but absolutely exists and must be a hugely distressing experience. What is sometimes called the social contagion effect, or the sudden explosion in the number of adolescents presenting as trans or non-binary, must have contributed to the long waiting lists for professional supports required in genuine cases. But it has also led to the sheer madness of national media platforms describing a homicidal man as “she”, and male rapists as “women”.
At the heart of gender ideology is the desire to tear up what its exponents consider “social constructs”, such as the biological fact that we are male and female. The disruption this intentionally causes leads to a deliberate denial of reality – as seen in said court reporting from RTÉ News yesterday.
Her frozen sperm? The ridiculousness, the absurdity, the sheer ludicrousness just jumps out at you. There was more of the gobbledy-gook in the full report, but it should be pointed out that the RTÉ reporting is actually just reflecting the madness in the law.
A UK trans woman, who used her frozen sperm to have a baby with her wife, has been granted permission to bring a High Court challenge against a refusal by the State to grant Irish citizenship to the child on the basis that she is not the biological mother.
The woman – who has Irish citizenship while her wife does not – submits that if she has to claim to be the “father” of the child as part of the application, it would be an “offensive, discriminatory and unjust attack” on her person, gender identity and legal status.
She was granted leave at the High Court to challenge a refusal by the State, which does not recognise her as the birth mother, to enter the child on the Foreign Births Register.
If your head is swimming, you are not alone. RTE actually turned off comments on the post, which had a million views on X alone, probably because so many responses were directed at the nonsense in the summation.
In short, the case concerns a man who was resident in the UK but has Irish citizenship through lineage. He changed gender under UK law – which allows a person to legally change sex by applying to a panel – and then legally married a woman. They used his sperm, presumably through IVF in a UK clinic, to have a baby.
This isn’t the case of a woman who mysteriously produced sperm.
Women can’t produce sperm, or freeze it, or use it to have babies, just as they don’t have penises – and just as men can’t get pregnant and aren’t mothers. It seems entirely bonkers that we are still having these kinds of conversations, but we are, and much as some commentators would like to believe the fog of insanity has lifted, woke is absolutely not dead, and the law in this country still facilitates gender affirmation and a ridiculously easy path to claiming your sex is changed.
It’s worth repeating again just how easy it is in Ireland to legally change sex, because I don’t actually think most people are aware that a change this fundamental is so easily obtained. The Gender Recognition Act – supported by all the political parties at the time in the Dáil at the height (a sustained height) of hysteria around the issue – requires nothing more than to “self-declare your own identity”. It’s just a matter of swearing a statement to become a woman if you are a man. No need for therapy or operations or any of that bother. Everyone was too terrified of the insane cancel culture at the time to say anything: at one point a Sinn Fein spokesman even said they supported allowing children under the age of 16 to take their parents to court in order to change their legal gender without the parents consent, while Fine Gael’s Regina Doherty said there were “at least” 9 genders.
Other countries are slowing coming to the realisation that this might have been a calamitous mistake, but not Ireland, and not, incidentally, the EU who are fully committed to gender affirmation and the wilder shores of gender ideology. It’s still in your kids’ schoolbooks too – check out SPHE workbooks, and even booklets for primary schools.
In the case before the court yesterday – which is being taken on behalf of the child through the man-who-is now-legally-a-woman against the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Attorney General and Ireland – the central complaint is that the Irish state is denying the child Irish citizenship because it does not recognise the applicant as “the biological mother of the child”.
That’s because facts are hard things. A man can legally change his gender and wish away inconvenient facts, but a person using frozen sperm to conceive a child is not the biological mother of that child.
From RTÉ: The woman further submits that she could have claimed to be the “father” of the child and “could have possibly obtained citizenship by descent that way”.
“I feel it would invalidate me as a trans woman, invalidate my legal status as a woman and invalidate my same-sex marriage,” she said.
The woman submits that if she had to claim to be the “father” of the child, it would be an “offensive, discriminatory and unjust attack” on her person, gender identity, legal status and on same-sex marriage.
The woman also submits this would also be an unjust attack “on the State’s obligation to protect the family as the natural and fundamental unit group of society”.
But the applicant can’t have it both ways, and that’s the problem with gender ideology: it eventually relies on a circular argument to respond to fundamental questions such as “What Is A Woman?”.
A biological mother does not produce sperm. One can’t claim to be a mother just because your feelings will be hurt if that is denied to you. But the issue here isn’t with RTÉ: their reporting merely mirrors the nonsense and the inherent contradictions in gender ideology. For the confusion and upending of reality to stop, the law must change.