Gender Critical in Ireland Part 3

[VaddaABeetch]

I’m watching RTE news. They mentioned the Garda representatives organisation are concerned about Gender Identity in the workplace. It’s been brought in without consultation & without training.

the Garda Commissioner has said that Garda may be disciplined for misgendering.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Yes. I lived in the UK for many years and we decided to move home to Ireland when we knew we wanted to start family. This is the first time and only reason that I've regretted that decision. At least in the UK they haven't got Self ID and sex is still a protected characteristic under the EA. I despair...

Even the glossary of terms they use are infuriating! For example "Transgender - An umbrella term for anyone whose gender identity or gender expression is different from the biological sex they were assigned at birth"
Sex is not assigned at birth! It's noted. Surely to God they could have got the actual facts right 😩

Having had a quick read through I am pleasantly surprised....there has definitely been a change in thinking in the past few years. Members concerns seem to bring recognised and listened to....unlike the Dept of Ed curriculum surveys where concerns were basically ascribed to a bigoted minority. People are finally waking up to how unfair this has been to women and girls. While the guidelines are very softly softly and "we're not telling you what to do", sex is clearly defined and the physical advantages of male sex are repeatedly mentioned. Advice is given on how to ensure sex based categories through the registration forms. The need to be inclusive of people other than trans people (i.e. those who would be excluded if categories are not sex based is also mentioned). Slowly slowly we may be getting there. Thank you Giulia et al.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2F4w.pub%2Fcontent%2Fimages%2F2022%2F09%2Fmarco-valentino.png&tbnid=tD3qWifbTHg0xM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2F4w.pub%2Ffetish-footballer-policy%2F&docid=1eoLK3a7IFGJKM&w=1920&h=1080&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F2&kgs=2c4ce76648724db9&shem=abme%2Ctrie

I'm getting a bit dizzy trying to keep an eye on all the different locations where Irish gender-y stuff is being discussed - on the main FWR board, under a number of different headings on Craicnet... so maybe this deserves a thread of its own: proposed hate speech legislation in Ireland. Maybe there is already one that has escaped my attention.

Anyway, I wanted to draw attention to something that Minister McEntee said that is one of those 'they said it out loud' moments:
“There are people in our country, who do not feel safe simply because of who they are” .
Indeed there are, Minister. They're called w o m e n. They used to have protection in the law and then they were magically erased from the list of 9 protected groups in equality legislation.

@MarieDeGournay very well said.

I completely agree. I emailed my local TDs about it last year and got no replies! If anyone doorsteps me before an election I will be asking them if they can tell me what a woman is. If they can't answer that, the conversation will be over.

I emailed j Carroll McNeill & o smyth when they were talking about removing the word woman from the maternity protection act. Smyth didn’t reply (I’ve always voted green but not any more thanks to R o Gormon who seems to hate women); and McNeill did reply to let me know it was more inclusive 🙄.
it didn’t go thru thanks I think to the efforts of the countess; but I am very stuck about who to vote for tbh.

MarieDeGournay
Indeed there are, Minister. They're called w o m e n. They used to have protection in the law and then they were magically erased from the list of 9 protected groups in equality legislation.

Does anyone know when this happened? I only realised a few years ago that the protected characteristic is gender rather than sex, when was it changed? Was there any public discussion about it?

I know what you mean, Jennifer Carroll McNeill is in my constituency - I've emailed her and other before about Self ID law and other related issues (Barbie Kardashian in a women's prison) and gotten no real response. I think I got a generic - I will pass on your sentiments etc. from a staffer.
I have no idea who to vote for in the next election - all parties are enmeshed in this crap.

I've never got the 'Roderic O'Gorman hates women' thing. He doesn't seem to manifest misogyny any more than all the other members of the government who agree the policies of his departments, or the rest of the Oireachtas who pass legislation. TWAW was enshrined in law before he became a minister, so he's not an outlier in that.
I profoundly disagree with the whole anti-women tone of current and proposed legislation, and with O'Gorman's role in it, but is he worse than the rest of them?

No tweet yet from Roderic O'Gorman re Trans Day of Visibility after the fiasco that was last years tweet😅

In case anyone missed it, The Countess have announced a really interesting event in the RDS in April, a thread is here:

The Countess Conference: Resisting Ideology - 27 April 2024 Dublin

I hadn't heard about that so thank you @Genesis1v27

A piece in The Irish Examiner today, on the Sport Ireland "guidance" and the recent BBC survey responses:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/sport-columnists/arid-41364850.html

Subscriber-only, but the full text may be available on archive sites. It ends as follows:

"they, like other governing bodies, know well that the women’s category is protected for a reason, based on the undeniable performance chasm between the sexes. Many might still be too afraid to say it, but most in women’s sport are thinking the same thing. It must be protected."

Irish grounds always included gender rather than sex - anecdotally because we were 'too delicate' to discuss sex

FFS that's so depressing....I can't believe our lawmakers are such idiots.

Irish grounds always included gender rather than sex - anecdotally because we were 'too delicate' to discuss sex.

Not true - Irish equality legislation was always clearly about sex as in women and men, for example
Employment Equality Act, 1977
2.—For the purposes of this Act, discrimination shall be taken to occur in any of the following cases—
(a) where by reason of his sex a person is treated less favourably than a person of the other sex

That's the word 'sex' twice in one sentence, in 1977, and nobody fainted!
Mind you, they hadn't got around to his OR HER yet.

The use of the word 'gender' is recent, and far from being a prudish way of avoiding saying sex, it is a misogynist way of removing women's hard-won rights.

OK - i was talking about the 9 grounds for discrimination, which i am pretty sure have always included gender?

I think you're right about gender making its appearance in the 9 Grounds, and that's where it started to go downhill....

The fact that our legislation uses both sex and gender and has used both with both meaning sex (while of course not defining gender as meaning sex within the legislation) makes it messy. "The gender ground" in equality always meant sex ... until maybe it doesn't.

As another poster commented - really rubbish output from the legislators.

The term 'gender' was always used as a polite way to refer to a person's sex. But the grounds listed in the EA was always SEX, religion, disability etc. When our EA was amended in 2020 sex was replaced with the word gender even though there is no legal definition of gender yet as far as I'm aware. This in effect means that women are no longer protected under the EA because men can self-identify as women and gender can mean anything... It's a mess alright 🙄 But as Laoise de Brún has said, there needs to be a test case taken in order for any changes to happen.

Interesting, I missed that.
I think it's the grc where sex & gender are a complete word salad where one turns into the other like magic

The use of the word gender is very confusing even in day to day life. I know lots of people who use the word gender but they definitely 100% mean sex. Since the whole 'gender identity' ideology exploded, people have been really confused as gender now has a completely different meaning. So many people (of all ages) don't actually understand what the words transman and transwoman mean. Nor do they understand what self-ID actually means, and the effect this has on what were previously sex-based rights. It's a bloody nightmare. I wish they'd coined a completely new and different word/phrase other than gender 😩

This is a great speech from Helen Joyce, and I love the bit at the end where she talks about the implications of the Hate Speech laws that are coming down the line in Ireland:

Even if you don't feel the same urgency as I do on this particular subject, I hope you will support me, because my free speech is your free speech; you don't know what unpopular thing you may one day feel a moral imperative to say...

https://gript.ie/into-conference-hears-calls-from-delegates-to-disaffiliate-from-nwci/?fbclid=IwAR3JxFzhVctIVn3Qt3e7hyPK232O9AG0lPdJUMwk3X82m2Xh8BZBySFEsvw

Well done to these teachers speaking out against the National Women's Council