Sir, – The Gender Recognition Act has been in place for six years. It followed years of campaigning and a long and very public legal battle by Lydia Foy with widespread grassroots support. All this was regularly in the news.
TENI, a high-profile trans advocacy organisation, has been operating for 15 years. Ireland was criticised for its failure to act on gender recognition by the UN Human Rights Committee and other human rights organisations in 2008. In 2009, the government established a working group to consider drafting legislation for gender recognition, and that report was published in 2011. More discussion followed.
Anyone claiming that the legislation was somehow “snuck in” would need to be living under a rock to have missed all this.
Transphobic groups in the UK absolutely hate the fact that their nearest neighbour has had trans rights legislation in place for so long, without incident and that no floodgates have opened. The recent noise about trans rights, setting them up as somehow in opposition to women’s rights, is pushed by people who did not bother to voice any of this outrage for at least six years, despite plenty of opportunity to do so.
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It also contains a hefty dose of colonialism, originating largely from the UK.
Ireland is a country that changed its Constitution in 2015 and 2018 to implement human rights for gay and pregnant people respectively.
I do not believe that Ireland is going to suddenly declare a trans emergency because a vocal group of UK hate mongers have made our equality legislation their target.
– Yours, etc,
DR CHRYSSA DISLIS
Cork.
Sir, – Eibhilin O’ Reardon (Letters, March 18th) claims that “terf” is “simply an acronym”.
A cursory glance online sees the proliferation of memes and cartoons such as “die terf” and much, much worse, with pictures of guns and weapons sent to (mostly) women who try to discuss aspects of trans activism. Not simply an acronym by any stretch of the imagination.
It is hardly “weaponising feminism” to not want fully intact males having access to women’s single-sex spaces, which the law currently allows with a downloadable A4 form, no transition required.
This absolutely does impact women, and so as feminists we should be able to talk about this without death threats.
And of course trans people have rights as they absolutely should, but so do women and it is not, and should not be deemed, “trans exclusionary” to say so. – Yours, etc,
JACKY STEWART,
Crumlin,
Dublin 12.