Trans-rights, neocolonialism & condemning transphobia

Fine Gael Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll-MacNeill spoke in the Dáil on December 3rd on the subject of transphobia, which she definitively and outspokenly condemned. Responding to a motion put forward by Labour TD Marie Sherlock on trans healthcare, the Minister stated:

The sheer nonsense of it, we all know that. That a man was going to dress up as a woman come into a changing room for the purposes of attacking me, as though, with all the conversations we’ve had about femicide in this room, we ever needed a man to dress up to attack a woman? Did you ever hear such nonsense ever?

And did you ever have examples of it from any of the time since the Gender Recognition Act was passed, until this different movement seeped in- somehow- in 2021, 2022 and changed the narrative and made it cruel, and made it cruel for trans people, and I never understood why.

In saying this, Carroll-MacNeill blamed “divisive debate that seemed to be seeping over from the United Kingdom,” which she “always regretted.”

It is exceptionally rare, in the current climate, to hear a politician call out transphobia for what it is: a bitter, toxic strain of social discourse which enacts cruel harms on people, and a ‘nonsense.’ It is also important that Carroll-MacNeill was prepared to cite the source of this discourse: the United Kingdom. Transphobia has saturated the political and media fields of the United Kingdom for the last five or more years. Backed by wealthy and ideologically-motivated individuals, anti-trans activists have used lawfare as well as discourse manipulation to spread their hate across the social sphere.

Ireland is not blameless in this, of course: some prominent anti-trans advocates are Irish people living in the UK. However, the United Kingdom – and in particular, England and Scotland – have been the breeding ground for this particular political movement. Why has this come to be? In my view, it has to do with the post-imperial nature of the British state. The UK is a binarised society, an us-and-them political milieu in which polarised dynamics are the order of the day. This has been intensified in the post-Brexit space, where differentiating the Other has become a political priority. Following the posited 2017 update of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 – an Act which has restrictive and prohibitive terms placed on applicants for the acquisition of a Gender Recognition Certificate – transphobia began to arise as a common Othering mechanism across British society. The reform of the GRA 2004 was eventually quashed by Liz Truss, in her equalities minister brief in 2020, but by then the harm was done. Anti-trans organisations had coalesced, using the new politics of division and a purported concern for the rights of cisgender women to gain ground with the public. Although these organisations remain the preserve of an isolated minority, their financial backing and sway with some key political players has led them to an outsize influence in the political sphere.

Ireland, on the other hand, has largely kept transphobic rhetoric to the margins. Some anti-trans organisations and politicians do exist, but Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act 2015 has been operating peacefully for ten years on a basis of self-identification. Ireland’s postcolonial status was key in the passage of the GRA 2015. In the Dáil and the Seanad, legislators celebrated that kindness and liberality toward trans people was a hallmark of “cherishing all the children of the nation equally.” John Lyons TD referred to Elizabeth O’Farrell, who was “airbrushed out of the picture depicting the moment of surrender” in the 1916 Rising, stating that “I cannot help but acknowledge this is landmark legislation. For this first time those who have been airbrushed out of society because they are transgender will be brought into society and recognised.”

It would be remiss not to note, however, that Ireland may be a world leader in legal gender recognition legislation, but that it continues to fail trans people in many ways. The healthcare system for trans people in Ireland has waiting lists lasting many years and has been derided by the trans community for its invasive and humiliating psychological questioning before a diagnosis of gender dysphoria – and therefore, appropriate gender-affirming healthcare – can be given. In introducing the December 3 motion in the Dáil, Sherlock stated that “vulnerable young trans people were having to wait more than four years for their first appointment, and some were “self-medicating on the black market” in the absence of adequate trans healthcare.” Likewise, even Ireland’s feted Gender Recognition Act does not allow for the legal recognition of non-binary people, nor young people under sixteen.

What is essential for Ireland, therefore, is to continue the fight for the rights and liberation of trans people, and not to bow to the post-imperial logics of our neighbours over the water. The Labour Party motion on trans healthcare was not opposed by the government, and the Minister for Health giving strident backing to its motivation is a good step in the right direction. However, the material conditions of life for trans people, including healthcare, need to be upheld on an equal basis with the cisgender population, if they are to have truly equal rights.

Transphobia may be “nonsense,” but it is a nonsense which manifests itself in reality and which has had deadly consequences. It is incumbent on the Irish government and the Irish public to fulfil the promise of the nation and to continue to fight any transphobic and neocolonial encroachment on Irish shores.