Helen Joyce has observed that one of the most reliable ways gender ideology captures an institution is through the single employee with a trans-identified relative. That employee becomes the resident authority on all matters of sex and gender, and cites the “lived experience” of their trans-identified brother or non-binary niece as a way of foreclosing any argument. Often, their presence in a room makes sensible discussion impossible.
They treat disagreement as violence, which conveniently entitles them to retaliate using the weapons provided by HR departments. Accusations. Complaints. Tribunals. Punishment by process, followed by mandatory training days where the rest of the staff are taught what they may no longer say. A Soviet-style informer apparatus inside Western corporations, weaponised by those with a trans-identified relative and a permanent grudge.
The fallout continues. Policies get rewritten. Toilets become mixed-sex. Pronouns go in email signatures. Not because anyone examined the evidence and found it persuasive, but because the cost of resistance is professional destruction and social death. Nobody wants to find out what happens when they upset the boss – or even the nice new temp – by pointing out that her da is not her ma.
This dynamic has now reached the highest levels of Irish politics. Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Féin and would-be Taoiseach, has a brother who identifies as a woman. In interviews, on the Late Late Show, in the pages of the Times, the sibling is invoked as proof of understanding, compassion, and all the other qualities that suddenly matter to Sinn Féin. A movement that once settled arguments with baseball bats now bludgeons its opponents with sentimental cliché. This is what passes for growth in today’s Ireland.
But having a trans-identified relative does not, in my view, make someone more qualified to shape policy on sex and gender – and may in fact make them less so. This excludes, of course, the desperate parents trying to humour their 16-year-old so that she doesn’t undergo an elective double mastectomy on the day of her 18th birthday – they understand all too well the destructive nature of this fad.
In her recent Times interview, McDonald called for “calm, cop-on and common sense” on transgender policy. She criticised a “limited but loud” group that seeks to “divide, demonise and marginalise.” She advocated a “case-by-case” approach to placing trans-identified males in women’s prisons. She said policy on children should follow “medical advice” from the chief medical officer. And she invoked her brother: “On the gender issue, with my own sister, of course we’ve had conversations… your lived experience matters.”
Note what is absent: Any acknowledgement that women might have legitimate concerns about males in their spaces. Any engagement with the continuing mutilation and sterilisation of children in gender clinics. Any concern for the vulnerable women in prison who are meeting violent misogynists like ‘Barbie Kardashian’ and ‘Isla’ Bryson on a “case-by-case” basis.
To understand why personal experience of this kind can be a hindrance rather than a help in policy-making, you must understand what often happens when a family member announces a transgender identity.
The family faces a choice. Affirm – use the new name, the new pronouns, refer to your brother as your sister – or refuse, and run the risk of losing the relationship entirely.
McDonald cannot say “sex is immutable” without implicitly stating that her brother is male. She cannot defend women’s single-sex spaces without acknowledging that he has no right to enter them. Taking that position is personally costly for her in a way it is not for the rest of us.
We recognise this dynamic in other contexts. We don’t treat having an alcoholic relative as a qualification to set alcohol policy. We do not assume that having a family member in prison makes you the ideal person to determine sentencing guidelines. We understand that emotional proximity can cloud judgment, and that the closer we are to something, the harder it can be to see it clearly.
“I have a trans sibling and I love my sister” is all very interesting but it has nothing to do with policy making. It can, however, make questions put to an elected politician feel like an attack on a vulnerable minority. Very convenient, given how many politicians’ heads are already strung along this subject like beads on a necklace: From the disgraceful Leo Varadakar, who asked the Irish public to remove the words “woman” and “mother” from the Irish constitution, to Nicola Sturgeon refusing to accept that the rapist calling himself ‘Isla Bryson’ was a man.
Whatever McDonald’s intent, the practical effect of saying “I have a trans sibling and I my sister” is stopping an awkward conversation before it happens.
And it works. Few Irish journalists ask McDonald about her brother. They accept the framing before the first question is asked. They say “your sister” back to her. In return for access, they have learned to adopt language which treats fiction as fact. The fiction extends outward from the family through the press to the public.
Those who can see that humans cannot change sex – that a man in a dress is just a man in a dress, that words have to mean things or chaos reigns – are positioned as the ones with something wrong with them. They lack compassion. They lack understanding. They have not had the “lived experience” of loving someone through a transition, by which they mean you have not yet been broken in.
Irish cultural elites embraced gender ideology like the inhabitants of Springfield embraced the monorail. Meanwhile, those without trans-identified relatives – who can therefore be capable of assessing the evidence without that personal cost – were dismissed as lacking understanding, as outsiders to a mystery only the initiated could comprehend.
The “limited but loud” critics she mentions are never named, never engaged with, simply waved away as a divisive fringe. But who are they? Women who have lost jobs for stating that sex is real? Academics hounded from their posts? Parents concerned about what their kids are being taught behind their backs? The women who turned out for Let Women Speak in Dublin? These are the people McDonald dismisses as marginal – while the activists who got Sinn Féin banned from Pride for insufficient loyalty are presumably the mainstream she respects.
She has had years to arrive at a position. She has watched the evidence accumulate from around the world. She has seen court rulings and medical reviews. And still she offers only the process – “taking time,” “consultation,” “listening” – where policy should be.
While Mary Lou McDonald and her sibling deserve sympathy for their personal circumstances this is not thoughtfulness, it is disgraceful cowardice and avoidance.
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The Author, Graham Linehan, is a screenwriter, comedian, and activist. He is best known for being the creator of Father Ted.