Happy Birthday to the Irish Gender Recognition Act 2015!

[BeeSouriante]

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2015/act/25/enacted/en/html

Ten years ago the GRA 2015 was enacted - self-ID legislation far more progressive than anything even proposed in the UK, allowing trans people to get legal recognition for their gender. The skies did not fall in and many other European states have followed suit*

Keep embarrassing the socially conservative Brits, Ireland..Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Portugal etc etc

Written by an Irishwoman 😁

Thank you @Waitwhat23 and @Greyskybluesky

Makes you wonder why she wrote it if everything is so great in Ireland!

Have to admit, as an Irishwoman, I’m very proud of Helen Joyce and Fiona McAnena for writing about and advocating on behalf of women’s rights.

They’re my generation of Irishwomen so they know what it’s like to grow up in a sexist and conservative country. Modern Ireland likes to think it has changed and become one of the trendy liberal European countries but the sexism and conservatism are still there and employed in the service of Genderism instead.

Ireland has a strong history of oppressing women, trampling all over women's rights and silencing women's voices. The GRA was just one more step in the relentless pursuit of destroying women and their rights.

‘Socially conservative’?
Women’s rights were hard come by and are damn well worth conserving. Socially conservationalist rather than this instance of Irelands social destructionalism?

Hello @AudHvamm
We have replied to both your reports. Could you please check.
MNHQ

A number of responses
Firstly - Oh Bee, Bee, Bee... you just can't help yourself, can you, making statements about things you don't understand just so you can get catchy titles in the list of threads on the Feminism: Sex and gender discussions board.
The skies have indeed fallen in for women's rights in Ireland, as the word 'sex' has been replaced by the word 'gender' in our equality legislation, so women now have no specific protection in law.

The GRA was waved through in the wake of the success [62%] of the Marriage Equality Referendum, which showed the widespread acceptance of lesbian and gay people's rights in Ireland.
The small but very vocal trans movement capitalised on this mood of openness to claim that they were the next 'oppressed' group in line and the Transgender Equality Network Ireland set themselves up as the go-to experts on all things transgender, thereby gaining unprecedented power in the areas of education, medicine, the media..
sorry, let me correct 'unprecedented power in the areas of education, medicine, the media..' - it was not unprecedented, there is a precedent for that kind of disproportionate power and influence over Irish society: the Catholic Church.
More men in frocks telling women what to think..

The position of lesbian and gay people in Ireland has been set back years by the tagging on of the 'T' for transgender, to a widely accepted lesbian and gay community in Ireland. Now the LGB part of the so-called 'LGBTQ++ community' in Ireland are responsible in the mind of the general public for all the offenses and excesses of the TQ++ add-ons.

That's it in a nutshell. We want to be a liberal poster boy now and forget all that churchy conservative stuff. Bonus point : we get to be smug and superior to the Brits. But we've fucked it up and nobody in office or opposition wants to be the one to say so . We need someone like Fiona or Helen to run for the Dail or the Presidency just to shine a light on this nonsense.

Oh dear. We'll tell her to have it pulped shall we?

Part of the putting behind us 'all that churchy conservative stuff' is a readiness to believe anything and everything at all about the evils of the catholic church - anything about the Magdalen Laundries or Mother and Baby Homes is believed, regardless of the evidence - in fact, I notice a lot of commentators seem to think that the Laundries and the Homes were the same thing. They weren't - different functions, different histories, and neither of them 'imprisoned women', as the records of women who left of their own accord show.

Then there's the '800 babies dumped in a septic tank in Tuam' story - some people actually believe the tabloid headline version of history that 800 babies were killed and dumped in a mass grave. By evil, criminal, murderous nuns.

If the catholic church was involved, who needs evidence?

It is a disservice to the actual history of how women and children were treated in the early decades of the Irish state to 'embroider' the facts; the verifiable facts are bad enough and can stand on their own.

Bingo…
🍎🍏

Socially conservative Brits? Get over yourself. A country that thought that it was ok to be a trans person but women still had to travel to England for an abortion.

Your priorities are skewed to say the least.

Hummm indeed and ....... men still dont get a right to abortions 'cas thats not living as a man right????

Can they even go to England or did the right to travel go whoosh for the lucky lads??

But Ireland will soon pass a "Bloody Peoples" Act.....

Northern Irish apparently. Irish but with nuances.

This was one argument of the SC in the UK. That 'certificated' sex denied rights to TiFs because they were male - living as a man cannot include maternity or abortion rights so access to these rights would be diminished/ended for TiFs - but no-one seems to have noticed this!

Yeah Bee, we're so delighted we gave a GRC to Barbie Khardashian.

That means we could put him in a woman's prison where he could yell sexual abuse to the women there, attack his female social worker and make threats to rape and murder his prison officer (and another inmate).

Who wouldn't be proud of that? So progressive, so modern, so pro women.

🙄🙄🙄

Sigh...Men are the benchmark ...always 🤨

The abortion law was 2018 so if the 2015 law is correct and the 2018 is correct any doctor or HCH is guilty along with the woman who got the abortion.

The GRA uses two words so sex as biology and gender as a lifestyle choice so two different things but both change.

And woman is defined as a female of any age in the 2018 Act.

And men cant have babies so they can be sacked etc while growing one.

And its rather important as the 2015 Act has a rapist with a GRC section but no clauses to say if one could not be charged the "exemption" attaches to a GRC

And no mention of post GRC births. From memory Married is not a problem as the husband has PR at birth. But a unmarried (preg or not) male has to be co-habiting with the woman/mother for 3 (?) months or more to get PR with no court order so how would one live in a sexual partnership and get oneself preggers?

Ireland introduced self ID in 2015, it's true. And the consequences for the most vulnerable of women are routinely ignored and smothered. In this, the GRA is an echo of the 8th Amendment - both are the products of ideology, both ignored repercussions, both were passed in an environment of stifled speech, both carried cruel costs to women, and both made Ireland feel virtuous.
The true costs of the Eighth Amendment were recognised and acknowledged only over decades. It will likely be the same with the GRA.
Britain introduced its GRA in 2004, so for eleven years the UK had GRCs and Ireland did not. One reason Britain has rejected self ID is, I think, that it has had years to witness the effect of the 2004 GRA. In practice Britain has had de facto Self ID for years, because of Stonewall and other purveyors of misinformation.

That would be An Irish Solution to an Irish Problem, whilst simultaneously being a GUBU! (Although technically it’s a GUBB because it is completely believable!)

So, @BeeSouriante what exactly do think should be celebrated?

I'm not sure a country where men got the right to be women before women got the right to an abortion is exactly a shining example of progressive politics TBH.

There is no right to abortion zero nada.

Every voter men included got the right to elect a TD who may or may not vote to pass law on abortion access rights.

One of the key reasons Self-ID legislation passed in Ireland is rooted in our national desire to distance ourselves from the oppressive, conservative Catholic Ireland of the past. For decades, our identity was shaped by rigid religious doctrine that stifled individual freedoms, particularly for women. In recent years, Ireland has worked hard to be seen as progressive, liberal, and inclusive — a modern European democracy.

Self-ID was embraced by the political class almost as a badge of honour, a way to signal how far we’d come. But in that rush to shed our past and prove our progressive credentials, there was little space for genuine debate or scrutiny. The potential consequences — especially for women and girls in areas like sport, prisons, and single-sex spaces — were largely ignored or dismissed as bigotry.
And now, if you speak to many in the so-called chattering classes — media, academia, politics — they’ll still tell you Self-ID is a good thing, more out of social signalling than engagement with the complex realities it creates. It’s a tragic irony: in our desperation to break free from a conservative past, we may have created a new kind of orthodoxy — one that again silences women’s concerns.

As an anecdote, a friend of mine had a friend whose daughter in Ireland wanted to identify as a boy. Aged about 7. Parents fully onboard. On waiting list for Tavistock. (No equivalent in Ireland) In the time she was waiting, maybe 6 months in, guess what happened. Said child decided she was “no longer a boy”. Said child is fairly “gender non conforming”. Never was I more pleased to hear of long NHS waiting lists. That child would almost certainly have been started on puberty blockers. 🤷‍♀️