ARTICLE – Women’s Space Ireland
17 NOVEMBER 2022 – REPUBLICATION OF HELEN JOYCE – JOYCE ACTIVATED ISSUE 27
I’ve recently returned from a trip to Dublin for “Women’s Space to Speak”, an event arranged by campaign group Women’s Space Ireland and inspired by the highly successful events in the UK run under by Woman’s Place UK and by Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker. With room for 200 people, it was a sell-out—and a huge success. You can view the programme here, and read write-ups in the Sunday Times and Irish Law Gazette.
Most of the audience, and all of the speakers, were women. But among the men in the audience were Paddy O’Gorman, a veteran radio broadcaster who recently produced a podcast from outside Limerick women’s prison, where three men with gender-recognition certificates stating their sex as female are being held, and Cathal Mac Coille, who writes for Irish-language news service Tuairisc Nuacht. Eilis O’Hanlon, a columnist for the Irish Sunday Independent, was there too, and Colette Colfer, an academic who writes occasional pieces of journalism about religion, was among the speakers. It felt like an important milestone in Ireland’s progress towards the sort of united feminist resurgence that will be needed to push back against the encroachments of gender self-ID.
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I was one of two people to talk about the impact of gender-identity ideology in schools. I billed my talk as a message from the future—ie, the UK, where schools have been indoctrinating children, and creating and promoting gender distress, for close to ten years. The result is visible in a veritable epidemic of trans identification among young people. This is what’s in store for Ireland, I said, unless it stops schools from adopting a similar ideological approach.
The other speaker on schools was the Rev. Professor Anne Lodge, an academic, former teacher and Church of Ireland priest. Her fascinating talk was about the extremely strong rights the Irish Constitution gives to parents, in particular concerning the moral, intellectual and ideological formation of their children. Irish parents, she said, have the power to stop schools indoctrinating their children—as long as they realise that, and fearlessly use it.
I’ve been pondering ever since: if I could choose, would I prefer to have full gender self-ID combined with strong parental rights, as in Ireland—or the UK’s much tighter gender-recognition regime combined with schools that increasingly seem to view parents as bigoted obstacles to indoctrinating children, and are willing and able to act in ways they know that parents would hate? I think I might choose the Irish combination. As I started my talk by saying, schools are the single most important production site for the next generation of gender ideologues. If you sort out schools you’re a good part of the way towards sorting the problem out generally. If you don’t, you won’t be able to sort it out at all.
The rest of this week’s issue is a somewhat expanded and tidied-up version of my speaking notes, which I’ll be sharing with the organisers of the Irish event for circulation to attendees.
The first thing I want to say is that both gender theory and gender distress are a social contagion. That doesn’t mean they’re “not real”; it means that they’re part-created and part-shaped by the culture we live in.
One of the questions I’m most often asked, even by people who accept the social-contagion hypothesis, is: how many people are “really” trans, rather than caught up in a craze? I answer that I don’t think anyone is “really trans”, in the sense these people mean: there isn’t some tiny number of people who “truly are” members of the opposite sex inside—no one is actually a member of the opposite sex; that statement makes no sense.
Trans is an umbrella term for a whole bunch of different things that are linked only by the notion that there is a reasonable way to use sexed terms—man, woman, male, female, boy, girl—that doesn’t simply refer to our evolved mammalian biology. What do these different groups have in common: middle-aged men who’ve been cross-dressing since adolescence for erotic purposes and now want to do so full-time? Self-hating, self-harming teenage girls? Highly effeminate little boys destined to grow up gay? Abused children who have dissociated from their bodies? Autistic children who misinterpret their non-conformity and sensory issues as alienation from their sexed bodies?
Nothing, except that all are unusually susceptible to believing the claim that that it is possible to be a physiologically normal boy or girl, but in some more real, more true sense be a member of the opposite sex. And that’s far from a full taxonomy of the groups we’ve seen identify as trans over the past decade or two.
The thought “I’m not really a man/woman” does seem to have occurred spontaneously to occasional people in different places and times. Those rare people didn’t interpret that thought literally—or expect everyone else to go along with it. But now it has been packaged up into an overarching theory—that what makes everyone who they are, in particular when it comes to which sex category they fit into—is inside the head, not written on the body.
This thought is an example of what Richard Dawkins called a meme—an idea that spreads from mind to mind, evolving as it goes. And it’s a really successful one.
Just why is an interesting question. One reason is that we live such dematerialised lives now, sat in front of our computers all day, and rarely going out. Many young people spend a great deal of their time identifying with avatars that can change sex (and other characteristics, even race or species) at the click of a mouse. Delayed child-rearing and smaller families mean longer periods living as adults before procreation drives home the irreducible differences between the two sexes. Another consequence is that many more adults are deeply ignorant about children, and unaware of how willingly they take on trust whatever authority figures tell them.
This meme has also been given velocity by inaccurate comparisons. The right to self-identify your sex and force everyone else to play along is presented as a civil-rights battle, the latest in a long line running from the ending of slavery through women’s suffrage to the black civil-rights movement in America and most recently the legalisation of gay marriage. If you don’t look too closely, “trans rights” appears to be another instance of Martin Luther King’s famous aphorism: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
So people are primed to think of opposition to trans ideology as yet another in a long line of prejudices, when a much more accurate comparison would be with eating disorders. Gender distress is a societally created disease that ends up overtaking a person’s thought processes. We know such diseases exist: they’re called “culture-bound syndromes”. We know they can be elicited and moulded; we know that they are contagious.
In other words, they can be taught. People learn everywhere, all the time, but in schools learning is the entire aim. It’s my contention that in roughly the past ten years in the UK, anti-bullying, anti-prejudice, equality and human rights policies and approaches, and above all relationships and sex education (RSE), have been hijacked to teach trans ideology.
In the UK RSE is now compulsory, and there is official guidance but no official curriculum. The result has been wholesale capture by lobby groups, who produce material that they sell (sometimes literally—plenty are commercial operators) as progressive, inclusive and in line with government demands. Some also put free lesson plans and videos online for teachers to pick and choose from.
Among them are Stonewall, the Kite Trust, the Proud Trust, Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, Pop’n’Olly—all, in my opinion, as bad as each other. You can read some detailed analyses on the websites of Safe Schools Alliance and Transgender Trend (here and here). As these analyses demonstrate, much of the material now used in UK schools is scientifically inaccurate, ideologically biased and often blithely oblivious to any consideration of child safeguarding.
Some of it is aimed at little children, and seems specifically intended to prevent children from ever reaching an important developmental milestone: the acquisition of what is called “gender constancy” (though sex constancy would be more accurate). Before this stage, a child thinks the difference between boys and girls is about hairstyle, clothing and other aspects of self-presentation, and that by changing these, a boy can become a girl and vice versa. After it the child understands that sex is fixed and determined by the body, no matter what people wear or do. I cannot be sure that activists are consciously seeking to disrupt this developmental process, but it certainly looks like it.
I’ve written about one of the very worst external providers, Pop’n’Olly, for the Daily Express. And in issue 5 of this newsletter, I wrote about a particularly awful video produced by Ireland’s largest teaching union, INTO, entitled “Facilitating a Social Transition”. After significant criticism, that video appears to have been stealthily taken down, and journalists who have asked why have got no answer.*…