Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Okay. What I would encourage people to do is read a really excellent article which was put up online yesterday or the day before an incredible activist called Izzy Kamikaze. It is on the Beacon website. Izzy investigated what happened and wrote this revealing piece about the background to the particular witch hunt on that programme against trans people. She shows quite clearly how pretty much everything that the transphobes were allowed to say on the show was simply untrue.

Lie number one was that they were excluded from the National Women's Council of Ireland annual general meeting for wanting to ask questions about the council's position on the supposed removal of the word "women" from maternity legislation. What actually happened was that they, the transphobes, put out a press release the day before announcing that they were going to disrupt the AGM in order to stop a trans woman from being democratically elected to the National Women's Council of Ireland board by its membership. That is what is in the press statement they put out themselves. They are not members of the National Women's Council of Ireland because they obviously have no track record on women's rights and exist purely to foment hate against trans people.

The second lie they peddled was that the National Women's Council of Ireland supports erasing women from the new maternity legislation. In fact the National Women's Council of Ireland position is to use inclusive language to broaden those included, including, of course, women, but also trans men and non-binary people.

Lie number three was the idea that is kind of out there now that the Gender Recognition Act was somehow sneaked in without a proper debate when, in fact, it was extensively debated both inside and outside the Dáil. More than 240 articles were published about it at the time. The problem for the transphobes, of course, is that we have the Gender Recognition Act and, clearly, the sun and the sky did not fall. It was not something that was quietly lobbied for by elites in the corridors of power. It was actually fought for from below by people struggling, particularly personified by the heroic Lydia Foy.

Thankfully, these transphobic ideas do not have much public support at all in this country. However, it is not just the national broadcaster doing its best to change that but much of the rest of the mainstream media as well. Jenny Maguire, a trans woman who is the gender equality officer for Trinity College Students Union, responded on Twitter:

We have seen Irish media getting ever more open about their transphobia, we have to call it out wherever we see it. There is no “balance” in platforming those that wished I didn’t exist as a trans person. So upsetting and troubling to see.

I agree. Many people have already cancelled their subscriptions or terminated working relationships with The Irish Timesdue to its repeatedly publishing transphobic content. I will not name them, but we have a coterie of newspaper columnists who are really bent on aping their British transphobic counterparts, who love nothing more than to whine about their freedom of speech being threatened when any regular person takes exception to the views they have put forward or when any regular person without the benefit of a national newspaper column disagrees with how they have chosen to use their freedom of speech. In reality, it is transphobic clickbait, a global phenomenon. Wealthy media organisations are toying with trans people's lives for the sake of advertising revenue.

The case of the former CEO of Transgender Equality Network Ireland, TENI, Eirenne Carroll, who was subjected to what the Garda told her was a credible death threat and subsequently left the country, shows just how serious this is for trans people. It is not some abstract, academic, interesting debate. It is about people's lives. Two gay men were brutally murdered in Sligo in April. A non-binary person was recently attacked on the streets of Dublin. We have to speak about the reality of the oppression and discrimination that trans people face. They have mortality rates worldwide that are twice those of cis people because of suicide, violent attacks and murder.

More than 50% of trans and non-binary young people in the US have said that they have considered suicide. We know from the “Speaking from the Margins” report from TENI that 76% of respondents here had self-harmed prior to transition and that 81% had considered doing so. The later is the consequence of a society that debates and then denies their existence and reality.

The situation with RTÉ also illustrates the problems for activists with relying on corporations for sponsorship. Dublin Pride has become very reliant on corporate sponsorship, including, until recently, with RTÉ, as well as a host of multinational corporations that would have had nothing to do with it when homosexuality was illegal and homophobia was rampant and normalised. Included in that regard are companies with terrible track records on workers' rights and human rights, such as Amazon and Nestlé, numerous banks and financial companies and even an oil company. The hypocrisy of these companies is very striking.

I would like to urge everybody to support the recently launched campaign for trans rights, namely, Trans Equality Together. I intended to be at the launch, but Covid struck me down. I call on the Government to immediately take action in respect of all of the demands Trans Equality Together has made. They include for gender identity and expression to be explicitly included as protected grounds in the Equality Act, for the gender recognition process to be opened up to include under-18s, for increased funding for the National Gender Service, which currently has an outrageous waiting time of five years, and for the immediate reintroduction of health services for trans children and adolescents.

There is also an urgent need to have full separation of church and State in order to ensure that trans healthcare can be provided wherever it is needed and not be subjected to the archaic prejudices of the Catholic Church, which still controls so much of our health service. We need to have, and we have been pushing and campaigning for, progressive, objective LGBTQI+ inclusive relationships and sexuality education universally provided in schools, regardless of the religious ethos of those schools. In reality, we think we should have full separation and therefore should not have religious schools. That is necessary to cut across the homophobic and transphobic bullying that still exists. Unfortunately, transphobic bullying is particularly prevalent in schools. You need education to deal with these things. It is not the only way to deal with them, but it is a vital way of dealing with them. At the moment, the whole issue of religious ethos is an obstacle to that. We need to protect the mental health and lives of our LGBTQI+ young people and kick the church out of our education system.

I just want to encourage everybody to attend pride events across the country. I look forward to attending Dublin Pride on Saturday. I encourage people to get out, campaign, fight, remember that Pride is a protest and express solidarity with the LGBTQI+ community. This includes, and I particularly reference, Trans and Intersex Pride, which is taking place in Dublin on 16 July, because it is particularly important this year.

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