Ten years ago, my musician daughter asked me to deliver a parcel to a suburban address. Her dispatch note was precise: “Just say hello, this is a gift for Ronnie*, there’s a note inside, goodbye.” Ronnie, a young music fan, was transgender and going through an extremely tough time. The last thing that family needed was a journalist at the door in any guise.
The plan failed when the child’s mother recognised me as a journalist. Good manners obliged her to invite me in, though her anxiety remained painfully obvious as she called her mannerly child to come and thank me. My last memory is of mother and child standing tightly together at the door, and behind them a protective older sibling.
That memory of an ordinary family driven to constant fear and hypervigilance by the struggle to protect their child’s safety and sanity returns every time a chorus of voices echoes across multiple mainstream media channels, claiming to have been “terrified” into silence on the subject. It returns every time schoolteacher Enoch Burke rears his unfeasibly angry head to claim that addressing a schoolchild by their preferred pronouns offends against the teachings of Jesus Christ.
The late bishop Willie Walsh once told me amid people’s despair of the clerical abuse scandals that he too had struggled with his faith, to the point of wondering, “Well, could it [life] end with a hole in the ground?” To such a man, a faith without compassion, forgiveness, patience and kindness (not to be confused with a vacuous pleasantness), a faith without those costly daily acts of grace, was worthless.
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Last Sunday, when host Brendan O’Connor cut through a contentious radio discussion on transgender issues to wonder whether there might “have been room for a bit for kindness” in Burke’s approach to a schoolchild, and social media was blowing up over proposed NHS puberty blocker trials on British children (as recommended in the Cass report, for the purpose of developing evidence-based treatment), many people were reading a story published in The Sunday Independent by reporter John Greene about an under-12 girls’ football match in rural Cavan.
It began with a WhatsApp message describing events on an August night when, the poster alleged, the team that won “played a boy (who thinks he is a girl). Won the game on his/her own, chaos ensued”.
The child in question is a girl, a 12-year-old in sixth class with a passion for sport. Her father – a club official and coach stung into defending his daughter – told Greene, “She is a biological girl, was born a girl, identifies as a girl, has always done so, or any other phrase people wish to use. Her only ‘crime’ is she is a tomboy who likes to have short hair and has a sweet left foot.”
Most disturbing were the references to the 12-year-old as “it” throughout the game. Asked why he was still talking about the issue several months later, the father replied that he was still waiting for an investigation, adding: “It just seems that anyone can go to any football pitch anywhere in the country, abuse primary school kids based on their look, their religion, their race, their size, and as long as the referee doesn’t record their name, they are free to go and do it again tomorrow.”
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There is a wider context to this of course – the battles over trans women in women’s sport (which has been largely settled in favour of biological women); women’s right to women-only spaces (effectively about banning trans women from women’s toilets or dressingrooms); puberty blockers (effectively banned in the UK while the rage over the Cass recommendation reignites the debate. There is effectively no healthcare service at all for trans young people here).
These arguments often come with the overarching contention that there is a “continuum” of some kind between transitioning teenagers and trans women raping women in communal toilets and dressingrooms.
Notably the most notorious case of sexual assault in a dressingroom was against Donald Trump, who still owes $83.3 million to the victim in two related civil law suits. A civil lawsuit against Conor McGregor alleges sexual battery against a woman in a toilet at an American sports event. Last year the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre alone dealt with 22,700 calls to its 24-hour helpline, a 22 per cent increase on the number in 2023.
The notion that men in dresses who arm themselves with gender recognition certificates for the explicit purpose of harassing women are the ones to be feared is farcical, but it has been fertile territory for those prepared to exploit it. Trump’s most aired television ad in his last campaign proclaimed: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Yet the most remarkable aspect of all this is the tiny numbers involved. The 2023 Growing Up in Ireland study found 0.7 per cent of 17- to 18-year-olds identifying as transgender. Well under 1 per cent of the total population is transgender if Ireland follows UK and US demographic surveys. In the nine years from the passage of the 2015 Gender Recognition Act (enabling over-18s to self-declare their gender identity), just 1,881 people had received certificates.
There is a human being behind each number that makes it hard to see beyond the point made by the 12-year-old’s father about the weaponising of anyone’s look, size, religion or race.
The central question is: what kind of debate results in conceiving of any human being, let alone a child, as “it”?
*Ronnie is not the child’s real name.
