Over the weekend the Journal.ie published an OpEd defending radical gender theology in the wake of the Enoch Burke controversy. You may have seen it (and wished you hadn’t).
Entitled “Trans rights issues are being used as a right-wing recruitment tool,” this polemic seeks to declare a kind of woke jihad on more conservative-minded people who have fallen for spooky far-right ideas, like the dangerous view that your uncle can’t menstruate.
Opinion: Anti-trans campaigners do not have science on their side no matter how hard they try, argues @aoifegall https://t.co/4YUOnvLMDh
— TheJournal.ie (@thejournal_ie) September 10, 2022
Penned by Aoife Gallagher, this piece truthfully started out somewhat promising – or at least, as promising as an article attempting to defend indefensible absurdities can be:
Now based on that, you assume she’s going to bring something new to the table, right? That’s what I thought – it sounds like she’s gearing up for a really dynamic, fresh new take on the whole issue that we’ve never heard before.
Instead, the piece proceeds to devolve into what is effectively a protracted “Yadda yadda misinformation, yadda yadda rightwing extremism, yadda yadda Christian fundamentalism.” You know the drill at this stage – an A.I. could write these things it’s so formulaic.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they just had part-time transition year students on minimum wage churning these things out like Oompa Loompa’s on a Henry Ford-esque assembly line.
But one line in particular caught my eye, wherein Gallagher argues that transgender activists have science on their side:
Well colour me interested. She goes on:
Now, I want to be careful here, because of course there are people who are born intersex, and I’m sure that’s very difficult and complicates their lives considerably. It’s a very real condition, and the last thing any decent person would want to do is belittle those who have to live with it.
But, with all due respect and sensitivity to those people, being intersex is a disability – not a sex. It’s a genetic problem, like being born with a missing limb or a cleft lip.
That doesn’t mean that people who have it are somehow less than anyone else – it should go without saying that they’re obviously human beings deserving of all the same dignity and love as the rest of us. But this is not the norm, nor has Aoife Gallagher stumbled across some magical third human sex.
It’s also worth pointing out that the figure she gives, that 1.7% of the world’s population is intersex, is almost certainly a massive over-estimate.
The figure originally came from a study by American sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, who is a radical Gender Studies professor. This same woman published a paper entitled “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” containing a thought experiment proposing five sexes: male, female, merm, ferm, and herm.
Eh, whatever you say, lady.
Physician and psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax has argued that Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7% figure is way off, because most of the conditions included in the study are not considered intersex from a clinical perspective:
Other studies came up with a figure of somewhere between 0.02% and 0.05%. Whatever the true figure is, it seems likely that the 1.7% number is inflated orders of magnitude greater than the reality – in Aoife Gallagher’s case, apparently to make biological sex seem more ambiguous and hazy than it actually is.
Moreover, she seems to imply that a certain section of the human population experiencing an aberration in their genitals means that there aren’t necessarily two sexes, and that “male” and “female” is not a hard fast rule. This is clearly preposterous.
First of all, “polydactyly” – that is, the genetic condition of being born with more than ten fingers or toes – affects roughly 1 in 500 people.
Does that mean that if you asked Aoife Gallagher “How many fingers do humans have?” she would say “I don’t know”?
“Some have no fingers, some have fourteen. It’s sort of a spectrum, it’s hard to say.”
I mean, she might say that, but everyone would rightly point and laugh at her if she did, myself included. Because it’s so clearly ridiculous on its face. Humans have ten fingers and ten toes – the fact that you can find the occasional anomalous case where someone was born with more or less due to a genetic defect doesn’t invalidate the fact that there is a broad human standard.
She also scoffs at the concerns of individuals who don’t buy into gender ideology, and mocks the fears that these ideas are being forced on people:
She says this, mind you, after mentioning Enoch Burke, who found himself in court after a fiasco that started after his refusal to use “they/them” pronouns at work. And this was solely because of his views, by the way – he was jailed for contempt of court, but the courts were only involved after the controversy regarding his initial “misgendering.”
For what it’s worth, I would say that a court which entertained such blatant nonsense is worthy of our contempt. But that’s for a different article.
The piece goes on to defend Drag Queen Story Hour for children, and to accuse people who are sceptical of gender ideology of sharing the same views as “neo-Nazis”:
She then says that these views have led to “bomb threats being issued against children’s hospitals in the US.”
So to be clear, if you don’t think your Dad can give birth, you are in the same camp as neo-Nazi extremists who want to blow up children’s hospitals.
Honestly, I’m going to say this in the nicest way possible: this Journal article is embarrassing.
It’s like something you would expect from a Junior Cert ‘C’ student’s essay – not a mainstream Irish news publication. And the fact such unadulterated low-effort swill can actually make it into the mainstream shows just how far journalistic standards have fallen in this country.