So-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ being positioned as two of the greatest crimes of the day, you’d think it would have been bigger news this week that State-funded and platformed NGOs were caught red-handed, having published a blatantly misleading guide about ‘trans rights’, every page of which conveniently carried the disclaimer:
“This guide is for information only, it is not intended to be a substitute for legal advice.”
For those who took a week off the internet, to catch you up, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties’ (ICCL) ‘Trans Rights Guide’, published in December with help from TENI and LGBTQ+ youth organisation ShoutOut, caused a stir when the Irish Times published an article that took the guide’s line, reiterating its claim that schools “must” use the students’ preferred names and pronouns.
As published by Gript then, and subsequently by the Irish Times, the Department of Education took a less certain view, suggesting rather that there’s nothing to “preclude” schools from using a student’s preferred name and pronouns, which is obviously a very different position to that suggested by the at least partially taxpayer-funded guide.
What all of this means is that you have taxpayer-funded organisations in the forms of TENI and ShoutOut, working with the heavily foreign-funded ICCL (its current CEO, Joe O’Brien’s, previous position was as a Government minister), to produce an ideological, misleading guide with project funding from the State-funded Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.
In other words: the State’s fingerprints are all over this particular piece of misinformation.
The obvious issues referred to here were raised by Senator Rónán Mullen in the Seanad this week, who said that what concerns him is that you have two “legal advocacy bodies, one that gets quite a lot of money I understand from foreign sources and another which gets a considerable amount of money from the taxpayer, basically pushing an idea that certain approaches on schools are somehow legally mandated”.
“Their narrative on this is cloaked in the language of legality: ‘Your school must make every effort to update your name and pronoun in relevant systems and documents’, and a layperson reading this would think that the laws in this area are clear, and passed, and things have changed, and everything here is mandated.
“This is pure dishonesty on the part of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, to the extent that they stand behind such an approach, because what they’re trying to do is to pretend that the law is clear in this area, when in fact our courts have not determined meanings around gender in the way that they are leading us all to think,” Senator Mullen said.
He went on to say that what he’s objecting to is “the dishonesty of these organisations, who are cloaking their advocacy in legal language, and pretending that the laws of this State require schools or other institutions to act in a particular way”.
In this writer’s humble opinion, that’s about as good an encapsulation of the situation as I’ve yet encountered, and his concluding suggestion that the relevant ministers be questioned about the law in this area is a worthwhile one.
Unfortunately, I suspect that that’s unlikely to go as many would like it to, because the fact that this document was produced at all is indicative of the State’s not-so-tacit support of the ideological origin of the guide.
As evidence of this, try to imagine the ‘opposite’ document, if you will, getting any level of State support, whether directly or indirectly, from State funded NGOs and the like. A guide that sought to reassure parents of their rights, as the State tentatively attempts to figure out the best approach to providing help for children who experience gender dysphoria.
Or even better, a State-sanctioned guide that sought to combat misinformation surrounding the issues of gender and sexuality, that made crystal clear the fact that schools are not mandated to use students’ preferred pronouns, and clarified that in fact, there is very little that is legally settled in this area at all.
A guide that made clear that self-determination is but one right among many, frequently clashing rights, and that sometimes children’s welfare is not served by elevating autonomy above all else.
The point of this little thought experiment is to highlight the unlikeliness of any such guides, which in and of itself tells us something, I think, about where the State is coming from. Which is why you shouldn’t expect to see any official condemnation of this egregious case of State-sponsored misinformation anytime soon.
This whole episode will do little to reassure critics of the surging use of the Soviet phrases ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that such terminology isn’t simply being employed to shut down alternative viewpoints that don’t have the State’s blessing.
It is things like this that, over the years, have taken a sledgehammer to the State’s legitimacy in a growing number of people’s eyes, and unless it wakes up, defunds the activists and starts addressing their excesses, it’s a trend that’s only going to get worse. And worse. And worse.