Full disclosure: As somebody who knew Leo Varadkar a little bit – not very well, but a little bit – back in the days when he was just another ambitious councillor, I can say with some certainty that he knows that there are only two genders.
And yet, when we sent Ben Scallan along to ask him about how many genders there are, this past Monday, I was never in any doubt that he would dodge the question. Not because he does not know the answer – he does – but because he fears the LGBT backlash to the truth more than he fears looking like an idiot.
Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says his government has "no official position" on how many genders there are, even though genders "other than male or female" are protected categories under his government's hate speech bill.#gript pic.twitter.com/wH0kKmUnLP
— gript (@griptmedia) June 26, 2023
Most of the time, the Taoiseach does not have to worry about this issue, for the simple reason that no mainstream journalist would ever seek to pin him down on the question of how many genders exist. That is because mainstream journalists work within the same structure of incentives that Varadkar does on this, and on other “woke” issues: If you are a career journalist in good standing with the Irish Times or the Independent, then that question, and suspicions over your “phobias”, will follow your career around like a bad smell.
This kind of career intimidation is only necessary, of course, to defend the absurd: Varadkar need not fear airing his genuine views on taxation, or on housing, or even on welfare payments or neutrality, because there is no organised lobby on any of those issues that would seek to paint him as a hateful person simply because of what he believes. The hate speech bill, for example, does not target those who speak out against higher taxes, simply because there is a logical case for higher taxes which can be articulated in response.
It is needed to defend gender identity, though, because there is no logical case for suggesting that there are nine or ten or seventy-three genders. That which cannot be defended with logic must be defended instead with law.
And this is the true paradox of the hate speech bill: Speech which is truly hateful need never be banned, because there will almost always be a plurality of people in the country significantly opposed to true hatred. Ask yourself, for example, why the hate speech bill does not make “Irishness” a protected characteristic: The answer is because nobody preaching hate against the Irish race would ever get anywhere in Ireland, politically: Their speech need not be banned because it is not a threat to the powers that be.
The bill is instead explicitly intended to prevent criticism of the illogical: For example, there is no coherent or logical case to be made for an immigration system that continues to admit limitless numbers of people at a time when the country cannot accommodate those immigrants – to say nothing of Irish people – already here. It is a policy which is explicitly and obviously contra-rational, which is why its defenders tend to fare very poorly in public debate. The same goes for claims that there are a dozen genders, or that people with penises are in fact women, or that every problem in traveller culture is the fault of settled people.
And here’s another truism: No form of speech would ever be banned if it was not feared by the Government that those who heard it might agree.
This is why the concept of offence has been turned into a legal weapon: Because the truth can be offensive. And if the offensive can be banned, then the truth can be banned.
The fact that there are only two genders is just about the most perfect example of this: It is the truth, but it also offends some people who fervently wish – or even believe – that it is not the truth. Therefore, if they are offended by the truth, they can ask the Gardai to have the truth declared criminal. It’s easier than winning an unwinnable argument.
And because the truth can be criminalised, fewer and fewer people will dare to speak it. It is the literal embodiment of the old 1984 trope – Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. In the book, to deny this lie was a crime. And so in Ireland, to deny the existence of multiple genders may soon be a crime.
This is why here at Gript, we will not only ignore the existence of this law – we will deliberately and consciously disobey it, specifically on the topic of gender identity. It is for the Government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anything this publication writes or publishes is an incitement to hatred: We do not believe that it is, and we believe that the Government will struggle to find a single witness who admits to hating anybody because they read an article in an online publication.
We also, we believe, have a solemn duty to do so. We are a media organisation, with protected speech to a higher degree than that of the average citizen. We have a duty to put ourselves in the firing line, deliberately.
More to the point, this law is an absurdist offence against common sense. In a democratic society, the right to speak your mind is of paramount importance: We have seen the consequences of people fearing to speak up with disastrous consequences around the world – from Chernobyl, to Rotherham, and at home in the case of clerical child abuse. Making people afraid to speak has bad consequences, everywhere it has been tried.
Free speech is not negotiable. And laws which seek to shut you up should always, everywhere and on every occasion, be disobeyed.