The following article was written by Patrick J. Roche, President of North Down TUV branch
The Alliance Party is fully committed to the ideology of transgenderism. The Alliance leader, Naomi Long, in a Twitter exchange on 5 May 2023 declined to answer the question: ‘what is a woman? She has also defended a ‘drag queen story time’ reading of books in the Belfast MAC theatre on 31 July 2022 – the content of the books read amounted to a straightforward transgender indoctrination of children some of which were infants (News Letter, 5 August 2022). The Alliance MLA, Connie Eagan has announced that she plans to bring a bill to the Assembly to legislate for compulsory relationship and sex education specifically orientated to teaching about transgenderism. The teaching of transgenderism to children backed by legal compulsion would of course mean that the content of what is taught would be out of the control of parents. The Alliance deputy leader is a vociferous supporter of transgenderism. In a link to the LGBTQ+ Pink News Stephen Farry tweeted his unqualified support for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill when it was passed in the Scottish parliament on 22 December 2022: ‘Well done Scotland. Now the rest of the UK, including Northern Ireland needs to follow’.
The substance of the Bill was that a person from the age of sixteen could obtain a ‘gender recognition certificate’ on the basis of self-identification as male or female regardless of their biological sex. The Bill gave legal status to the core of transgenderism which is the claim that gender (being ‘female’ or ‘male’) is determined not by genetics but by individual choice or ‘self-identification’. The Bill gave legal status to ‘self-identification’ without the requirement of medical validation of gender dysphoria or, in the case of sixteen-year-old children, parental consultation or approval. The import of these considerations is that unqualified commitment to the Scottish legislation presupposes unqualified commitment to transgender ideology. That is precisely the position of Mr Farry.
There is a fundamental problem with the transgenderism to which Mr Farry is committed – it involves beliefs that are demonstrably false. Contrary to the transgender ideology, being male or female is rooted in the genetics of sexual differentiation. This is not an opinion or conjecture but a scientific fact. The ideology of transgenderism is rooted in extreme irrationality which defies not only science but common sense. That raises an interesting question: how did transgender activists manage to secure the current influence of the transgender lobby despite the extreme irrationality of transgenderism and the fact that the incidence of gender dysphoria in the US and Western Europe (including Ireland) is in the range of 0.001-0.002% of the population? The activists have employed at least four tactics to support the assertion of their beliefs by celebrities and media personalities and academics and politicians such as Mr Farry.
First, they resort to the totalitarian tactic of ‘cancelling’ those who disagree with them. ‘Cancelling’ involves the categorisation of opponents as individuals whose beliefs are in various ways claimed to be ill-founded and harmful and thus worthy of being fully suppressed as ‘hate speech’. This is a tactic employed by Mr Farry – he uses abusive terms such as ‘nonsense’, ‘transphobic ideology’ and ‘mistruths’ as a substitute for reasoned argument to characterise the views of those who oppose transgender ideology. ‘Cancellation’ is precisely what happened to the leading feminist writer Germaine Greer after a 2015 Newsnight interview in which she stated that ‘transgender women are not women’. The Harry Potter novelist J. K. Rowling has been subjected to a tsunami of verbal abuse and threat because of her rejection of the transgender claim that ‘femaleness’ or womanhood (the state or condition of being a woman) is entirely divorced from sexual identity. The central objection of these leading feminists to the transgender ideology is that it is essentially misogynist because the claim that a man can ‘transition’ to being a woman simply by claiming to be a woman drains the understanding of what is involved in being a woman of significant content.
Second, transgender demands are categorised by transgender activists as the pursuit of ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’. The tactic here is that since ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ are commendable then so must be the demands of the transgender activists. This is also a tactic employed by Mr Farry. For example, in objecting to the Westminster veto on 17 January 2023 of the Scottish legislation he claimed that the legislation ‘would have seen Scotland leading the way on social justice in the UK’. But there are very good reasons to deny the demands of transgender activists in order to protect female privacy and safety – for example, the demand that so-called ‘trans women’ should be allowed to use female toilets or other female facilities or be imprisoned in female jails is opposed by feminist groups in the UK such as Fair Play for Women. The protection of female privacy is not a denial of ‘equality’ or ‘social justice’ to so-called ‘trans women’ but an absolutely legitimate assertion of rights to privacy that are essential to the protection of what is involved in the dignity and safety of being a woman.
Third, the transgender ideologues demand radical linguistic change. The objective is to impose a transgender language that will accommodate the core transgender belief that people can have multiple gender identities summarised by the acronym LGBTQ+ extending to such designations as bi-gender, cisgender, demigender, gender fluid, gender neutral, intersex, non-binary, polygender, queer, transgender – not an exhaustive list. Transgender activists demand the replacement of words that carry the connotation of the exclusive male/female distinction such as ‘he’ and ‘she’ by a so-called ‘gender neutral’ language involving the substitution of a proliferation of meaningless ‘sounds’ such as ze, zir, xe, xem to replace gender specific words. Why is the attempt to rigorously impose a new ‘gender neutral’ language important for the transgender activists? Language structures how we think and embeds our moral distinctions. Basically, the drive towards a ‘gender neutral’ language is intended to linguistically replace the exclusive or binary woman/man gender distinction with an open-ended range of ‘gender options’ and to displace traditional moral norms relating to sexuality considered by the ‘thought police’ of transgenderism to be incompatible with transgender ideology and practice.
The ‘woke totalitarians’ tolerate no dissent. The history and German teacher Enoch Burke was dismissed from Wilson’s Hospital School – a Church of Ireland co-educational school in County Westmeath – on 20 January 2023 but not before spending 108 days from September 2022 in Mountjoy Prison. Burke had refused to use the gender neutral pronoun ‘they’ and a new preferred name demanded by a pupil claiming to be in the process of ‘gender transition’. Burke refused on the basis that the use of transgender language such as ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ and the new preferred name of the pupil would have meant accepting the fantasy that a boy can actually become a girl and should be legally recognised as a girl.
Fourth, transgender activists and support organisations are pushing the indoctrination of children to secure the cultural grounding of their world view – that is, to embed the transgender worldview in the minds of children from a very early age. This is arguably the most reprehensible activity of the transgender lobby. This activity was well exemplified by a BBC Teach video dealing with gender identity in which primary school children aged 9 to 11 were told that there are ‘100 if not more gender identities’. The video was withdrawn by the BBC in 2021 after a high level of complaint. This was a BBC exercise in targeting the very young with the propaganda of transgenderism and in the process sowing in the minds of pre-puberty children the seeds of gender confusion – it was in fact a form of child abuse. The next step for those most susceptible to this sort of indoctrination was referral to organisations/institutions such as Mermaids and the NHS Tavistock clinic which for the thousands referred was a fast track to a reckless prescription of puberty blockers to children as young as ten. This was a situation where medical intervention was dictated not by evidence and scientific medical practice but by a domineering transgender ideology and activism disclosed by the 2022 Cass Report into the treatment of children referred to the Tavistock clinic.
The Tavistock clinic was shut down in 2022 and an enquiry into Mermaids was opened by the Charities Commission on 28 November 2022 to examine the ‘administration, governance and management of the charity’ and ‘whether there has been any misconduct and/or mismanagement by the trustees’. The Commission investigation developed out of concerns about Mermaids’ approach to safeguarding young people specifically relating to the supply of chest-binding devices without parental consent and without sufficient consideration of the potential harm that these devices could cause. The closing of Tavistock and the Charities Commission investigation of Mermaids may hopefully mark a ‘turning of the tide’ in the transgender debate but not before immeasurable harm to thousands of children.
The Alliance deputy leader with his unqualified support for the extension of the transgenderism of the Scottish Gender Reform Bill to Northern Ireland seems to be unaware of the extent of opposition to the Scottish legislation within the SNP itself. Nine of the 64 SNP members of the Scottish parliament defied the party whip to vote against the Bill including a former government minister, Ash Regan. The Bill was opposed by leading Scottish feminist groups such as For Women Scotland and Women and Girls in Scotland. Opposition to the Bill extended to the Scottish electorate. A YouGov poll published on 15 December 2022 showed that 66% of respondents opposed the lowering of the minimum age for a gender recognition certificate from 18 to 16 (with 21% in favour) and 60% opposed ‘self-identification’ of gender without medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria with 20% in favour. What about England and Wales? The Spectator magazine commissioned a poll for voters in England and Wales published in mid-January 2023 which found that 38% of respondents opposed (with 28% supporting) ‘self-identification’ without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and 54% opposed the reduction of the minimum age for legal recognition of ‘gender change’ to 16 with 22% supporting. The poll also found that 50% of respondents supported the Westminster veto on the Bill with 13% opposing. These poll findings show very considerable opposition to the major ‘pillars’ of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill throughout Great Britain and particularly in Scotland.
The deputy leader of the Alliance Party has made clear his commitment to foisting transgender ‘self-identification’ legislation on Northern Ireland supported by nothing more sophisticated than verbal abuse (‘transphobic’) of those who happen to disagree with him which amounts to a majority of the electorate of Great Britain and would certainly include the electorate of North Down where he is the Westminster MP. These considerations raise the crucial political issue of the extent to which Mr Farry’s political identification is representative of the North Down electorate. That is an important question because Mr Farry is the sole Alliance MP in Westminster since his election on 12 December 2019. But since his election he has displayed an overt identification with Irish nationalism which represents a pronounced shift within the Alliance Party. His identification with Irish nationalism is apparent from his support for the Protocol which destroys the constitutional and economic integrity of the Union and his support for the 2022 Irish Language Act. This identification with Irish nationalism is matched by unqualified support for legislation to implement a transgender ideology based on the absurd claim that gender (being a woman or a man) is unrelated to sexual identity. These considerations mean that Mr Farry’s politics, involving a combination of nationalism and ‘woke’ ideology, is beyond doubt now out of line with the political dispositions of the majority of the North Down electorate.