Congratulations are in order to Sinn Fein’s David Cullinane, who, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, has won the final victory over himself.
He loves Big Brother.
Per the Sunday Independent’s Mark Tighe:
Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane has told LGBTQ+ groups that he accepts transgender women are women in a recent private meeting where he accompanied party leader Mary Lou McDonald.
Last month, Mr Cullinane posted on X that he believed the UK Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman in equality law is based on biological sex was “common sense”.
He later deleted the post and apologised. The remarks led Trans and Intersex Pride Dublin to say Sinn Féin is banned from its annual march in July.
Mr Cullinane and Ms McDonald held a meeting in Dublin on May 1 with a number of groups, including LGTB Ireland, BelongTo, Pathi, Dublin Pride, Teni and representatives from Northern Ireland, who are affected by the UK ruling.
A source said Mr Cullinane was challenged and asked how he would feel if it was stated that he was “not a man”.
The TD apologised again for his comments and acknowledged that transgender women are women.
The notable thing here, for my money, is that you know, dear reader, and I know, and the trans rights groups know, and Mary Lou McDonald knows, that David Cullinane has not changed his views at all. You simply do not go from believing, a month ago, that there are two genders and that men and women are different and not interchangeable, to believing four weeks later that “trans women are women”. That is not an intellectual journey that a normal person takes.
This whole business brings to mind – for me, anyway – the oath of supremacy. When Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church of England in 1534, he passed a law requiring all clergymen and public officials to take an oath of allegiance to him as head of the Church. The historical record indicates that more than a few people took that oath to avoid the penalty for refusing to take it which was, as Sir (later Saint) Thomas More found out, imprisonment and death. The simple calculation for many Englishmen who privately disapproved of the King was to agree with him in public and live, or disagree with him in public and face ruin or death.
We like to believe we are different, these days. That we’ve moved on. We like to believe that.
But of course what is the phrase “trans women are women” if not just a modern day version of the Oath of Supremacy? In order to remain a front bench member of Sinn Fein in good standing, you must take it. In fact, in order to remain a member of the broad Irish progressive left in good standing, you must take that oath. Failure to do so might not result in actual death, but social death and political consequences will surely flow your way.
The reasons for this are obvious: Alongside their article about Mr. Cullinane’s damascene conversion, the Sunday Independent carried results of a recent poll finding that fully 70% of Irish people agreed with Cullinane’s original heresy: They agree that the UK supreme court ruling, which essentially said “trans women are men” is “common sense”.
This is a not dissimilar position to the one in which Henry VIII found himself: It will have come as news to the vast majority of his subjects that everything they had known about the Christian religion for 1,500 years was false, and that the King, not the Pope, was head of the Church. If hundreds of prominent nobles and clergymen had been free to say “this idea that the King is head of the church is nonsense”, then discontent with the King might have found serious public support which might have threatened the entire project. The point of the Oath of Supremacy in 1534, just as it is today, was to whip the nobility into line and deprive the English public of political leadership capable of expressing their views.
For Henry VIII, switch in the LGBTQIAXYZ organisations today, and you have an almost perfect analogy. They do not need to persuade the public of their views: They need only ensure that public representatives are too frightened to express the public’s views.
The other dynamic here, of course, is – and this cannot be repeated enough – that Sinn Fein is not an ordinary political party. There is no such thing as the Sinn Fein TD who says, or would dream of feeling free to say, a sentence beginning with the words “I don’t agree with my party on everything”.
I have written about this before: Sinn Fein is a democratic centralist organisation. That means that policy does not come from the grassroots, flowing upwards through policy workshops and open debates. It means that policy is imposed from the top down by what in other countries would be called a politburo. David Cullinane – like any other Sinn Fein TD – is simply not free to say what he personally believes. Personal beliefs are entirely at odds with the concept of democratic centralism, in which personal views are sacrificed for the greater good of the cause.
It is, in fact, the very system of political organisation on which Orwell based 1984: Authoritarian Marxist-Leninism. When you vote for a Sinn Fein TD, you should never for a moment think that you are voting for an individual. You are voting instead for a footsoldier, bound to do the politburos will.
And thus, here we have David Cullinane – an intelligent and reasonable man – having to publicly announce the results of his struggle session, and his successful victory over his own conscience. You and I (and he) know that he no more believes “trans women are women” than Enoch Burke does. But he will say the magic words if the oath of supremacy demands them, and thus he may some day be a Minister, taking orders from the Sinn Fein Politburo, while Enoch remains an oddball outcast.
Such is how politics works in progressive Ireland. And such is how it works even more ruthlessly in Sinn Fein, that most creepy of all Ireland’s political organisations.