I confess that I find writing about and covering “trans” issues hard.
In part, it’s because we should all be conscious that there are, and have always been, those who sincerely and deeply feel that their body is entirely out of sync with their identity, and tolerance and decency require that we treat those people with understanding, and compassion. Twenty years ago, when I was an officer with the Union of Students in Ireland, part of my job was to help combat prejudice against “trannies”, as they were then, cruelly, called. I didn’t envy their plight then, and I do not envy it now. We should always be conscious that behind every “issue”, there are real people, and few enough of them are represented by the most extreme advocates for their cause.
And in part, it’s because some of the trans stuff that crops up every day in 2022 is so absurd that I just don’t think ordinary people really believe it when you tell it to them. “Nah, that couldn’t be right” is not an uncommon reaction.
I’m not immune to that myself: Last week, one of my colleagues came to me with a story about a ladies GAA final in Dublin where one of the players, apparently, was a fully biological male person.
Instinctively, I was a sceptic: “Don’t do that story just yet”, I said, conscious of a range of possibilities: Was this really a man? Could we not be looking at – sorry now – just a very masculine woman, or maybe someone with a medical condition that meant they’d lost their hair? The world is full of examples of people who printed in haste, and repented at leisure, and to be honest, I just instinctively didn’t believe that, even in Ireland, there’d be a fully biological bloke contesting the ladies GAA final.
Some of the girls who play senior GAA are, after all, 15 or 16 years of age. No sensible organisation would expect those girls to take the field against a 40 year old, 13 stone male. That was my view – even as somebody who writes about the insanity of modern Ireland for a living, I thought “there’s no way this could be real”.
“Look into it”, I told our reporter, expecting to hear no more of the matter.
How wrong I was – and in the end, the Sunday Independent beat us to the story, and, probably, the best referee quote in GAA history:
Na Gaeil Aeracha, the GAA’s first openly LGBT club, last Wednesday won its first silverware when it beat Na Fianna’s ladies E team in the Dublin Junior J Shield football final.
Before the game, a Na Fianna manager approached the referee to question the presence of Giulia Valentino, a transgender woman, in the opposition team.
A source at the game said the referee initially believed Valentino was part of Na Gaeil Aeracha’s back room team until she won a high ball in the game’s first few minutes.
The referee, a man, stopped the game after the first break in play to tell Na Gaeil Aeracha that there was “a problem with your number 21” and told them “the player is a man”.
Na Gaeil Aeracha’s captain said that Valentino was a trans woman but the referee said “this is the Ladies’ Gaelic football association”.
There’s comedy, in that story, of course. It’s the comedy of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, a tale that’s been told for generations. It’s the comedy of living in a society where everybody can see that something is absurd, but nobody, except for the most innocent child – or, in this case, a plain spoken ref – is willing to speak truth to power. It’s the comedy of a man barrelling through a bunch of women in a woman’s game, and everyone on the sidelines feeling sheepishly obliged to applaud and pretend that everything is normal, while casting their eyes around to see if anyone else shares their true feelings on the matter.
There is much less comedy, though, in Mark Tighe’s other story, this weekend, on the same subject:
Senior doctors in the National Gender Service (NGS) warned the HSE in 2019 that it would face a wave of patients who would regret medical gender reassignments due to the poor level of care given to Irish children by the Tavistock clinic….
….In an email on April 26, 2019, Dr Moran predicted it will be “difficult to defend” a legacy of “significant levels of regret and other adverse outcomes” from Tavistock’s Irish patients. He warned an “unknown percentage” of children given hormones or puberty blockers were “not suitable or ready”.
Needless to say, the warnings were ignored. Hundreds of Irish children were sent, by the Irish Government, to the Tavistock Clinic for “gender affirming care”. Many of these children were under 10 years old. The Tavistock Clinic has recently been shut down on safety grounds.
If we had a normal political system, this scandal really should be enough to bring down the Government. Polling on this stuff is very clear: According to Ireland Thinks, 70% of the public oppose prescribing puberty blockers to children. Instinctively, almost every sensible adult knows that giving biology-altering medicine to children is deeply wrong. Instinctively – even without all the science that exists to back our instincts up – we know that children do, regularly, go through phases that they later grow out of. Changing the physiological development of a young girl because she says she wants to be a boy isn’t just wrong, but something almost everybody with a brain recognises as monstrous.
And yet it is the policy of the Government. Even now, after Tavistock, Tighe reports that they are seeking alternative locations to carry out this “work”:
Dr Moran told the Sunday Independent he fears the HSE is “ideologically committed” to hormone-based care for children “which is wrong and unsafe” given growing concerns puberty blockers can have detrimental health effects on developing children.
He has been told the HSE is now considering linking up with a children’s clinic in Belgium to take referrals for children previously sent to Tavistock. Between 2011 and 2021, 234 Irish children were referred to Tavistock with 32 of them 10 years old or younger.
It is the policy of the Irish Government to allow children to receive this “gender affirming care”. Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman, the single most dangerous ideologue ever to hold that post (which is saying something) is committed to allowing children under 16 to change their gender by law, and access “the care” he apparently believes they need.
But “gender affirming care” is another one of those phrases that is deliberately designed to obscure what it means. It does not mean counselling, and psychological support, and compassion. It usually means prescribing hormones to prevent puberty, and then moving on to “top surgery” (the removal of the breasts in the case of girls) or “bottom surgery” (the removal of the penis and testicles in the case of boys). In the latter case, where boys undergo “bottom surgery” to create an artificial vagina, their body, thinking it has been wounded, attempts to heal. In order to keep their “vagina”, a male who has been through this surgery faces a lifetime of “dilating” their wound, to keep it open. Such details may be stomach churning, but stating them openly is better than adhering to the nonsense that is the phrase “gender affirming care”. It is not care. It is more akin to butchery.
But on all of this, the political parties are silent. So captured are all of them by the LGBT lobby groups that they would sooner stay silent in the face of this nonsense than risk being called “transphobic”. And the consequence of that, as ever, is that terrible things are happening, because people are too scared to open their mouths.
So, men playing in ladies finals. Children being shipped overseas for castration and mutilation. We laugh and chuckle in the safety of our Whatsapp groups at the first one, and we’d prefer to pretend the second one wasn’t happening. But we shouldn’t be chuckling. We should be demanding prosecutions.