Leo Varadkar Times article - Our gender recognition law is not perfect but it's right

[Underthinker]

https://www.thetimes.com/article/1f895d94-eb13-4d6d-a88c-17b71ff34a7f?shareToken=b9a85f64620c28cb4388ddb376c29002

Stumbled on this in the Times where it was a bit hidden away. Apologies if it's already been discussed. Sorry don't think I can do share tokens.

He doesn't mention that no one in Ireland would know of trans women crimes because of course they are just recorded as female crimes. He doesn't mention that women have been asking sporting bodies to exclude men and been completely ignored. He doesn't mention how anyone who objects is subject to abuse and cancellation. Nothing on the dangers of puberty blockers.

Saying that gay men don't like bunches of women in gay clubs but failing to understand that we don't like men in our toilets is really something!!

It's the Irish for his and her that apparently make it queer. The word "a" means both his and her. However, it is not gender blind as it modifies the noun following it depending on whether it is his/her. So "a cara" is her friend and "a chara" is his friend which means it's perfectly simple to distinguish the meaning.

The other pronouns are different for male/female so definitely not a queer language.

"Opponents spout myths on sport and single-sex spaces". Then he goes on to say that single-sex spaces exist for a reason...so not a myth then. This is very poorly "reasoned". He does not seem to even be able to support his own arguments!

How would it be enforced? Genital inspections would be totally unacceptable and DNA tests impracticale.

It doesn't have to be enforced, we could simply go back to it being a socially acceptable norm, as part of the collective culture, that men don't go into women's spaces and vice versa. Even men who claim to be women can get the hang of such a simple system.

You can't say that certain men aren't a threat or a problem to women one minute, then suggest spaces just for women and girls for our safety, privacy and dignity aren't workable the next because the same men can't be expected to take no for an answer and will violate them anyway.

Fantastically put.
How can people who presumably have basic understanding of logic not realise this?

"Genital inspections" is a phrase I've only ever seen used by thinking that this is a good argument - "trans people will lie about it anyway so what's the point?"

It’s not always as simple or straightforward as that because some letters (l, r, n) don’t take a séimhiú. They, along with m and s don’t take an urú either. So it’s harder to distinguish between, for example, his, her or their book (leabhar) in Irish, especially written Irish.

I think that’s what he means by ‘Admittedly, it can change the word that follows but not always or consistently’.

There are workarounds though. Some are discussed in this thread on the Irish Language Forum.
irishlanguageforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=3273&sid=e560a7559551fef4589bb6a50eee9dd9&start=20

Some new definition of "right" not previously familiar to me.

Unless it's the old "it's what I want to be right so I'm going to believe it's right despite all the mountains of evidence to the contrary". Which is very familiar to me - the answer to "are we the baddies" is never going to be "yes" is it?

Those arguments are so dated I feel as if I've been in a time machine.

Irish does love an exception😀I thought it best not to get in to that.

But yeah, his claim that Irish is a queer language is nonsense and is purely based on one of many pronouns that has some exceptions that result in a level of ambiguity.

Just another man who doesn't value women or think they are worthy of respect.

Fuck off.

In a nutshell.

Fuck off Leo, you misogynistic thicko.

Maybe we should start drinking games, or bingo.

I really wish people who choose to wade into this, especially politicians etc, would bother to do some research first. As pp’s have said, these arguments are so out of date - catch up Leo!

Or perhaps, aged like fine milk

They are so incredibly arrogant they don't feel the need to. They are sure they are right. 🙄

It's actually incredible, in the truest sense, that he is happy to accept that gender is a social construct but sex is a real thing, then just ignore sex for the rest of the article.

Why is he suddenly seeking attention? Does he think the presidential farce election is going to collapse and that he'll be asked to step in as a disunity candidate?

You make the mistake of assuming he is applying rational thought here.

Instead he is quacking out whatever nonsense the NGOs are telling him to say.

Female and male-only spaces are another dilemma. Lots of men don’t particularly like the fact that women often come into the gents bathroom to avoid a long queue at their own. Many gay men do not like the fact that our clubs are sometimes frequented by groups of women.

I understand that the issue of males in women’s spaces had an added dimension of safety. Males are stronger than females. Women’s concerns should not be dismissed. I do not see an easy solution, however. The lazy anti-woke solution would be to introduce bathroom laws or single-sex space laws limiting access to one sex.

Just spit balling here, but how about a civil law that makes it possible to ask people of the opposite sex to leave a space?

To be fair, he does say

"Gender and sex both exist; why should they not both exist in our laws?"

So he acknowledges that sex should be recognised in law. He just doesn't acknowledge that women in the UK had to go to court to establish this.

He has no argument against feminists on the substantive points (if maybe not on the importance of gender) - he just doesn't like it.

He's got a book out

What a disappointment he turned out to be! he had 'the makings of' an interestingly different public figure in Ireland, but no..😒

We are going to have a presidential election shortly - the presidency is a largely ceremonial role, but there has been a recent trend towards a more opinionated/activist presidency.

The candidate who is leading the opinion polls by a mile - Catherine Connolly - is somebody who is on the same page as Varadkar - she is full-on TWAW, believes that people should be able to identify how they want, the GRA is fine, etc...

It's puzzling how Varadkar can be so despised for his opinions on gender, but Connolly, with the same commitment to gender ideology, is likely to win the presidential election by a large majority.
Obviously women's rights don't figure in the decision-making process of the electorate.

And yet, in March 2024, a proposal to amend the constitution in a way which reduced the references to women was defeated by a majority of 67%, and was hailed as a victory for women's position in Irish society, and maybe a hint that the tide was about to turn on the extreme manifestations of 'genderwoo' in Ireland, e.g. self-ID, and the removal of 'sex' as a protected category and its replacement with 'gender' in all equality and discrimination legislation.

We could never have a High Court ruling like your Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of 'sex', and single-sex spaces, because only 'gender' is protected.

It goes to show that we can never take anything for granted - it looks like we are about to get a President who is completely committed to gender ideology and who supported the constitutional amendment that 67% of the electorate rejected.

But by prioritising gender over sex he has destroyed recognition of sex in law. 🙈 It’s either or. You can’t have single sex spaces if you allow self declared gender to have priority.

Leo and other politicians were involved in the review of the Act and pushed to have the age lowered

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20450656.html

To my knowledge, there is no evidence that any person with a gender recognition certificate in Ireland has carried out an attack in a bathroom, harmed a child or stolen a medal from a female athlete. Yet there are people who, hand on heart, believe this is happening and it is coming to a town near you.

Leo the lie is obvious.

Fuck right off if you think the public would believe you did not fucking check to see if you approve the sex offenders Fuckin GRC

The first male in the Womens Prison was a child sex abuser of a 5 year old (who likely targeted the childs mother for access). The male got the GRC from the Minister. Two extra prison staff at 60k+ each and he was free to mix with the female population because the Irish prison system is not allowed to torture its prison population.

In fact Joan Burton (2011 to 2016) or Leo (2016 to 2017) or Regina Doherty was the relevant Minister approved the GRC.

Leo was the Taoiseach (PM) when that that Sex Offender was convicted and sent to the Womens Prison (which has the only Mother and Baby unit). There is no way in hell that that did not hit a briefsheet.

But yup Leo lets run with your staff were shit at doing their job. In the 10 years of rolling out a political pet project nobody mentioned the three violent men who were being housed in the Womens Prison. Good thing you dont have a history of telling lies about stuff you later admit to doing ........ ah errr.... right lets skip that

The Prison Officers were openingly breaking the law by having a male team do any stripsearch of his "bottom" half. Thankfully for Leo there was no legal challange even though prisioners end up in the High Court on a regular basis to challange yard time or work details.

Opponents of the act cling to extreme and exceptional examples like that of Barbie Kardashian, a Brazilian male and violent criminal who secured a gender recognition certificate and was accommodated in a women’s prison, albeit in separate quarters.

Well me oh my!
Where is my shocked face?!
Othering?
Then the "non-citizen" child who had been in the care of the Irish State since he was 10 should have been deported once he hit 18 (well after finished his prison term for assault). He had a criminal record, no family ties and was not studying but went to the Irish High Court to seek protection not to the Brazilian Embassy for a passport? Why did the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) allow him out if he could have been issued with a deportion order in prison?

This is known as “self-determination” and in essence it accepts the idea that gender is a social construct. Women’s and men’s first names, pronouns, clothes, speech, hairstyles and mannerisms do not exist in nature, biology or science; they are human inventions that developed over time and vary from culture to culture.

He has exactly no idea of how the law will work but he has legislated to make gender a legal construct.

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2015/act/25/section/18/enacted/en/html#sec18

18. (1) Where a gender recognition certificate is issued to a person the person’s gender shall from the date of that issue become for all purposes the preferred gender so that if the preferred gender is the male gender the person’s sex becomes that of a man, and if it is the female gender the person’s sex becomes that of a woman.

And it will not be until a GRC / the Act or other acts ends up in the High Court / Supreme Court as sex was replaced by the word gender in a lot of the Womens protection legislation and the Equal Status Act

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2000/act/8/section/3/enacted/en/html#sec3

3 (2) As between any two persons, the discriminatory grounds (and the descriptions of those grounds for the purposes of this Act) are:
(a) that one is male and the other is female (the “gender ground”),

But I will bet money on Dr Leo not being willing to risk prison by being involved in an abortion for a woman with a GRC.

Sex, on the other hand, is biological and relates to our chromosomes, organs and related characteristics. For all the fuss about pronouns, how many people know that hundreds of millions of people speak languages in which there are no pronouns or that in the Irish language, the words for “him”, “her” and “they” are the same? Admittedly, it can change the word that follows but not always or consistently. Gaeilge is kind of queer!

Irish is sexed to the hilt (like French) objects are male or female and the spelling and sounds all indicate male or female. Even family names Ní means daughter of and Ó means son of so Leo dont bullshit about the Irish language.

Speaking of othering and language

One of the advantages of being gay [male] or lesbian [female so not his personal advantage] is that most people [not I or We ] know at least one gay [male] or lesbian [female] person. They [not We] know intuitively that the homophobic tropes used against them [not Us] don’t stack up. Because trans people are such a small minority, most people have never met a trans woman [male] or a trans man [female] and are even less likely to know one. They are therefore more likely to believe the harmful content they see online, created by people who want to portray trans people in a negative way — as dangerous, as aggressive, as a threat. I have had the privilege to get to know some trans people in the past year [distance from the SO and BK and his Minister role ] and I know this is not who they are.

Seriously Leo you know the "nice" ones while you advocate to remove womens rights.

The not so nice ones
1 direct child sex offences
1 sex offence against mother
1 violents against 3 male persons

1/500 3/1500 of your "safe" population are not safe to be around.

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He's a misogynist prat.