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This year to date, seven women have been murdered in the North. That’s the same number as died violently in the Republic, with three times the North’s population, in the whole of 2025.
And yet a community festival in Belfast has denied a platform to a group campaigning for women’s safety.
Since the Troubles ended, sexual and physical assaults on women have steadily increased in the North, with 98% of its female population now reporting that they’ve suffered gender-based violence. And yet, a community festival in Belfast has denied a platform to a group campaigning for women’s safety.
Just yesterday, a video of a man viciously battering a woman on the head with a brick in Belfast appeared online, and yet a festival has denied a platform to Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland (WRNNI).
I probably don’t need to tell you why.
It’s because the ‘cancelled’ group, believes that women’s rights and safety requires single-sex spaces – in sport, in domestic violence shelters, in changing rooms and toilets, in healthcare.
But Féile an Phobail believes that the rights of males to ‘identify’ as women, and invade these spaces at will, should take priority.
Féile an Phobail favours that sector of the ‘phobail’ who believe that males in dresses are women, and that anyone who disagrees must be chastised, silenced and shamed. It really is that simple.
Wouldn’t you think that of all the places in the world that should have learned the meaning of ‘civil rights’, it’s the North?
Of all the communities that should have learned the importance of freedom of speech and expression, of freedom of conscience and belief, of equality of status and respect, of listening to the genuine concerns of half the population rather than dismissing them as ‘bigots’, it’d be Belfast.
Féile an Phobail had initially agreed to run an event called ‘Respect, Rights and Reality’ by the women’s group at this summer’s festival. But it seems that the pesky ‘reality’ bit posed a problem.
This group believes that biology is real, humans can’t change sex and a man can’t become a woman just by acquiring a legal certificate – or, you know, beliefs that humans have held since time immemorial.
Some people would even say these are not a beliefs or opinions, they’re facts.
At the very least, it is a rather widely held viewpoint that is fully entitled to be aired, and all the more so in a place where the rights of one community were stifled and denied for generations.
But after it emerged that the women’s group was to participate in the festival, the abuse, the threats, and the misogynistic bile that elements of ‘trans’ activism routinely direct at women’s rights campaigners began to disgorge. Rather than standing by this brave and beleaguered group, Féile caved in to the bullies and couched its craven capitulation as a valiant blow for the most oppressed, most demonised, most persecuted women in the North: biological males.
‘Féile an Phobail’, its pompous statement boasted, ‘takes pride in standing up for those who are marginalised and attacked.’
In a society where murders, violence and sexual assaults on women are spiralling out of control, and have been steadily rising for decades, it seems the ones most in need of protection from attack in the North are males.
Féile accused the women of ‘campaigning against the rights of the transgender community’, and pulled the plug on their festival slot.
Let’s get this straight: transgender people have the exact same rights as everyone else. What they’re demanding – in many cases with extreme menaces, death threats and misogynistic abuse – are superior rights: as well as being fully entitled to access male spaces, they also want to be able to intrude, intimidate and dominate women in the female estate.
This is not about protecting a tiny, marginalised community – this is a male supremacy movement aimed at stripping women of their liberties, entitlements and safety.
Trans people are free to ‘identify’ however they want, but when that identification requires the rights of women to be sacrificed, then we have a problem. And for Féile an Phobail to accuse women of oppression, discrimination and bigotry in the pursuit of their rights is not just offensive, it’s defamatory.
That, it seems, is where JK Rowling and her billions come in. The Harry Potter author, and fearless women’s rights campaigner, has offered to help fund any legal action WRNNI wants to take against Féile, and I suspect her pockets are deeper than the group’s.
The international tide is steadily turning against the insanity of the trans cult – look at the support for US basketball star Sophie Cunningham, who would surely have been cancelled just a couple of years ago for her objection to biological males in women’s sports.
On this island, though, we’re always a bit slow to catch up. But perhaps when the legal actions begin to roll in, from mutilated children, from misled parents, and from wronged women, the likes of Féile na Phobail might just conclude that ‘reality’ has its advantages after all.