Why we cannot let the trans bullies silence us
THE rise of the era of gender fluidity has been quite extraordinary. Only a few years ago I was so bewildered about a teenage girl I know wanting to be called David that I put it down to her being starved of attention. How little I knew. Now I hardly bat an eyelid when a friend tells me her nephew is becoming a niece, or that the physiotherapist at the local medical centre is now a she and wants to be referred to as ‘they’.
Bruce Jenner’s coming out as Caitlyn seems to have been the watershed, the catalyst that made it socially acceptable to express our true ‘gender identity’.
Gender dysphoria – the belief that there is mismatch between the sex you are born as and your gender, or rather the distress caused by feeling that your body is the wrong sex – is fashionable, no longer a rare condition.
We know this, because instead of devoting itself to Garda whistleblowers or housing shortages, RTÉ’s Prime Time made a documentary about such as ‘self identification’ which allows youngsters change the sex on their birth certificates without parental approval, paving the way for their potentially getting medical treatment abroad.
BUT while gender ideology has gone mainstream, it is far from uncontroversial, as the picket by trans activists outside RTÉ against the inclusion of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan showed. As a vocal supporter of the campaign to repeal the eighth amendment and a genius purveyor of anti-clerical humour, Linehan might appear to be, if not a natural bedfellow of the right-on transgender movement, then certainly a potential ally.
But far from it. Linehan may as well have been preaching all his life about chaining women to the kitchen sink, so ardent is their wish to see him silenced, along with anyone else who has raised a dissenting voice about ‘gender identity’.
To be fair, Linehan is not the movement’s number one fan either. He vehemently opposes, as he puts it, the ‘seriously held belief that trans women are literally women’.
He was cautioned by UK police after a transgender activist reported him for ‘transphobia’ during a Twitter war of words. He has also warned about how transgender rights could undermine women’s rights, with trans women gaining admission to female bathrooms, changing rooms and competing against born women in female sports.
He’s not alone in his convictions. Nor is everyone is on board with the idea of allowing teenagers ‘transition’ before adulthood. Adolescents are hormonal tornados and they should be protected from themselves, especially if it means undergoing treatments that may be irreversible, such as castration, breast removal and powerful hormone treatments.
TRANSFORMING from male to female, or the reverse, is so barbaric and painful that it stretches the definition of progress. Surely it would be more enlightened to collapse our gender stereotypes so men and women can dress and behave as they please without resorting to drastic surgery.
Gender confusion has become part of the zeitgeist. But the intolerance shown to Linehan by a radical movement that redefines what it means to be a man or woman shows that just like most politically correct liberal crusades, there will be no confusion about whose voice is heard.