Colette Colfer, the South East Technological University lecturer at the centre of the controversy over compelled speech and gender pronouns, has discovered that five of the 19 Higher Education Institutions in the state are claiming it is “unlawful discrimination or harassment” to refuse to use preferred pronouns.
This is despite An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, saying last weekend that he “couldn’t imagine” the State prosecuting anyone for using “the wrong pronouns.
The five are University College Dublin, Trinity College, the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI), Dundalk Institute of Technology and SETU who are at the heart of the current controversy. All of the above claim that discrimination on grounds of “gender identity” is “unlawful.”
But no such law on the use of pronouns seems to exist. The universities’ claim therefore appears to be misleading, it could be called misinformation, maybe even disinformation, and the decision to assert the claim on pronoun use looks co-ordinated.
The way in which their policy is framed clearly implies, if not directly states, that someone who refuses to use an individual’s preferred pronouns, based on their subjective decision that they are of a different gender than they were biologically born into, may be subject to criminal prosecution under various acts of law.
The Trinity College Dublin Gender Identity and Gender Expression policy document refers to the Employment Equality Acts and the Equal Status Acts as the basis for their claim that “discrimination, harassment, and victimisation on the basis of gender, which encompasses gender expression and gender identity, is unlawful.”
That includes “refusing to address a person by their preferred gender pronoun or new name.”
The UCD Gender Identity and Expression Policy uses very similar language when it claims that “Under the Employment Equality Acts 1998-2015 and the Equal Status Acts 2000-2015 discrimination, and gender-related harassment, which encompasses gender expression and gender identity, is unlawful.” It specifically refers to such potentially unlawful behaviour as including “[r]efusing to address a person by their correct gender pronoun or new name.”
The Royal College of Surgeons Ireland claims that “Irish discrimination law” similarly means that “[r]efusing to address a person by their correct gender pronoun or new name” constitutes an example of “unlawful discrimination.”
The Dundalk Institute of Technology in its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion document includes as an example of “unlawful discrimination,” any discrimination related to “Gender identity (a personal sense of one’s own gender. This can correspond to or differ from the sex we are assigned at birth).”
And of course the South East Technological University, which is at the centre of the controversy involving lecturer Colette Colfer, uses exactly the same template in stating that “(e)xamples of unlawful discrimination or harassment” include [r]efusing to address a person by their correct gender pronoun or new preferred name.”
If you think that all of the above sound familiar then you would be correct because they are all the creatures, not of any groundswell of opinion within academia, but of the English NGO Advance HE who, through their Athena SWAN Charter, have been given an effective veto over research funding for Irish third level institutions.
This point cannot be emphasised enough: unless Irish universities agree to the nonsense of gender ideology and compelled speech as prescribed by an English NGO, Athena Swan, they won’t get all-important research funding – a requisite put in place by the Higher Education Authority under diversity grounds.
As previously alluded to, this situation was set out by Simon Harris in the Dáil on April 7, 2022 when he stated that:
Among our main research and innovation related actions is a requirement to promote gender equality to access research funding. Only higher education institutions that have at least an Athena SWAN bronze institutional award can apply for funding from Ireland’s main research funders.
And to cap it all, the claims that not using someone’s preferred pronouns constitutes a criminal offence appears to be without foundation.
For, as Gript pointed out last week, and as An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar himself stated last Friday, he “couldn’t imagine” the state prosecuting anyone; Collete Colfer or yourself or the barperson in the students bar in UCD, if they refuse to buy into someone else’s subjective whim that “he was a she” to quote the old Lou Reed number.
Which means that any institution that bases their authority to discipline or sack any member of the faculty or student body on the basis that they refuse to do so is most likely following an ideological, and therefore in itself, discriminatory victimisation of another person who refuses to comply with an arbitrary “law” purely of the invention of people and organisations who thankfully do not actually make the law. Yet perhaps, but sure we will face that one too.
And if all of this sounds repetitive, and if it annoys certain people with skin in the game, then it needs to be. We need more Colette Colfers to be challenging this bullshit.
And if An Taoiseach now knows that five of our leading institutions are not telling the truth when they are claiming that not using preferred pronouns is ‘unlawful’ then he needs to be telling Minister for Higher Education, Simon Harris, to be passing on the word. Cut this nonsense out of the education of our people.
Gript emailed the five third level institutions referred to, and gave them almost 24 hours to respond to the query as to whether they stood over their published claims regarding the legal situation in the light of “the remarks by An Taoiseach last Friday that he could not imagine the state prosecuting any person for “using the wrong pronouns.””
Or whether, alternatively, their published policy is in fact designed to “comply with the criteria set out by Advance HE in their Athena SWAN charter?”
As of 11am Tuesday morning, prior to publication, none of the five institutions had responded