Irish Independent Letters Page

[greengoose21b]

This feels almost too good to be true. A full page of reader letters on the issue of women's rights and the Trans ideology.

twitter.com/ruftyntufty/status/1541116317826269185?s=21&t=_i2hUmqNCRwQoYakvZLPkw

This has cheered me up. I stumbled earlier on the Instagram page of an Irish ‘feminist’ group who had organised a March on the US embassy and even the abortion stuff was centred on trans rights. It was so depressing. Good to see some sense and that not all women in Ireland are in thrall to the gender nonsense.

instagram.com/rosa_socfem_ie?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Interesting, especially as I just saw this on Twitter.

Turns out wanting to avoid children making permanent adult decisions they may later regret makes you one of the worst people on the internet.

It feels like at long last we’re getting just a little sunlight on this in Ireland. It’s felt like a very lonely place to be GC for many years now. The tiniest ray of light yes, but it makes me a little less fatalistic about the future here. Maybe that’s naive.

What infuriated me in recent weeks was the inability to comment on ANY article related to the Joe Duffy discussions. All comments turned off. That spoke volumes in itself. It’s heartening to see this from the Indo.

Good. Well done to all the women (and men!) who wrote in. More power to the Irish vipers!

Is that today’s Independent? If so I may buy it.

the Eoghan Harris article test on inclusivity in sport was profoundly depressing.

Article yesterday

Turns out wanting to avoid children making permanent adult decisions they may later regret makes you one of the worst people on the internet.

There will be a time when they full import of what they've supported and agitated for will hit them. THey'll realise the consequences for the ideology they've supported and the consequences for children who've been sterilised in addition to longer-term implications for their health and wellbeing.

That will be a truly wretched moment for them. Especially when they have to acknowledge that they're not the ones living with the consequences of the decisions that they encouraged.

Well @EmbarrassingHadrosaurus I'm sure they will find some way to salve their collective conscience. We made them support this censorship by being Catholics / Protestant Evangelicals / Agents of British Imperialism. They simply had to oppose us because we are all fascists .Even old commies like me. Or black lesbians. Sterilised children are just collateral damage.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up. The Taoiseach made a speech to Pride and it was all about Trans rights. Ie - the additional rights to female spaces - not the right to exist as a trans person.

I used to wonder were they too stupid to understand or just hadn’t thought it true but would come around. However, a family member started working high up in the Civil service last year and told me it is the first one - they are all beyond stupid and therefore will follow any lobby group that shouts loudest.

if we look at how the US ended up where it is now, we can see how easily we lose what we took for granted. Feminism has not won - it has not even scratched the surface, men will not give up their thousands of years of advantage without a backlash. We were complacent and now we are all on the back foot.

when I look at how Repeal morphed into Trans equality, I despaired that 30 years of activism by me, and many many other women, since we were teenagers in University, had ended up being hijacked by men.

I agree Annasgirl, we still have a long way to go. It seems that whenever women take one step forward, they are pushed two steps back by something.
I am cautiously optimistic, and really glad this is FINALLY being addressed in the media here - but I also know that in Ireland we tend towards apathetic, which is not helpful as those with a clear agenda will shout and scream and get what they want, and others will just stay quiet.

We are already so far behind the UK in that we will have to repeal a law that's already in place. The narcissists will not be pleased and are likely to throw an almighty wobbly.

Even if, like EmbarrassingHadrosaurus points out, many young people will look back and cringe at what they supported in years to come, there are still many fully grown adult men who are not simply misguided youths, but instead people with sinister agenda to colonise women's spaces for their own validation and fetishes. They are not going to back down with a 'mea culpa', they have discovered the intoxication of victimhood privilege and they will hang onto it as long as they can.

It's plain old misogyny dressed up as some new fangled progressive bullshit.

Yes same for Scotland. We are rushin* head long into self id.

groups funded by SG are allowed to speak our government at a hugely bigger amount than womens groups

stonewall law is alive and advancing in Scotland

The letters page was in yesterday's Sunday Independent. The letters have been republished on Graham Linehan's Substack newsletter here.

The letters were in response to Eilis O'Hanlon's opinion column last week, Women must be free to speak without fear of trans backlash.

I didn't see an Eoghan Harris article (thought he had left the paper), but Eamonn Sweeney had a piece on the subject, Trans bans might be defended as unavoidable from the point of view of fairness. But for inclusion they’re a tragedy, which is fairly witless.

I give up on Millenial women. The ones who booted me from various FB pages were all Repeal campaign stalwarts. There's more hope for the kids tbh. They can sense when things are no longer cool. Like stuff teachers tell them to agree with. And FB itself come to that.

Also their mothers are probably quite skeptical. And their fathers. As for Micheál, he is a decent sort well out of his depth. No excuse for Leo , a gay man no longer a callow youth. But then look how long he dithered about Equal 💑 Marriage?

@Genesis1v27 apologies I said Eoghan Harris when I meant Eamon Sweeney. My defence is I have covid & a high temperature, a bit delirious.

I love the fact that they said the majority of letters were in support of the article. Cheered me up after what's her names puff piece supporting the they just want to pee crowd in the Irish Times last week.

And yet women's groups (the old fashioned ones that actually support real women and not the pretendy kind) are increasingly labelled as hate groups and de-platformed, and left out of any meaningful conversations at a political level.

So frustrating.

It's worth reading them on linehan's blog linked above. They are all typed out & easy to read! Absolutely oved this snippet:

"The attempt to collapse a wide range of concerns and problems into “questioning trans people’s right to exist” is transparent by daylight. The cat is out of the bag. You can call it a bad, transphobic cat, you can intimate that Putin would love a cat like that but rational people will start to wonder what’s your problem with cats.

Geraldine Halpin, Dublin 7"

We are going to need a whole new swathe of women's groups in Ireland when all this shakes out.

The ones that are currently going full bore along the "anyone who says they're a woman gets to strip in front of teenage girls" path will need to be set on fire and burned to ash.

What they have done in Ireland, where women have had to fight harder and longer for their rights than pretty much any other developed nation thanks to the church, is utterly despicable. Most of these women, particularly those in senior positions, were born when the laundries were still open and a woman had no right to divorce her abusive husband, for God's sakes.

It should never, ever be forgotten, and can never, ever be forgiven.

@FireFlyBoogaloo
The problem.is they are so desperate to put space between catholic Ireland and liberal Ireland they would support anything that they think differentiates them from the thinking of old. So willing to replace one group of women hating men in dresses with another.

Very well said ! Ireland is chock a block with these opaque NGOs. An alphabet soup of well funded , basically deadwood , groups that only boys and girls ' in the swing' know how to navigate. They should all be swept away. @Mandodari is spot on too. All any woke chancer on the make has to do is position themselves in opposition to the Church.

We are pathetically anxious about being seen as the liberal poster child of Europe. Except for boring stuff like housing the homeless...

Absolutely. And they're chock full of grifters, like so many of our out of control NGO sector. People of scant talent or education who would struggle to hold down a job in a rural post office heading up organisations with massive budgets.They're the new clergy, rattling the collection plate.

Those letters are the best thing I have read for months. So good to hear so many different angles but my favourite was the one that compared it from personal to ideological doctrine under communism. We are all diverse but some are more diverse that others.

Just place marking for the fantastic responses upthread.
I rarely read the Sindo, but would have happily paid for it last Sunday if I had known in time.

@Mandodari "Cheered me up after what's her names puff piece supporting the they just want to pee crowd in the Irish Times last week. "... I totally agree.
@Abhannmor (Shannonsider?) your comment about the NGOs is bang on- and so many of them seem to have a random American thrown in there, usually on the board or some such...

But, it's the GC crowd who are importing imperialist notions?

Gript had a good piece last week on the establishment NGOs operating in Ireland, being paid by us to lobby our "public servants" on behalf of their interests: The Countess fights the Inquisition.

The Irish Examiner's political correspondent reports some of Micheal Martin's recent comments here: Ireland doesn’t need or want toxic culture war ‘debate’ on trans people. There is no hope of this Taoiseach opening his eyes on this.