Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

-----is that it has actually allowed male-born prisoners to be put in women's prisons in this State. It is an incredible situation that we have had individuals who were jailed for horrific sexual offences being located in women's prisons. Barbie Kardashian was found guilty of threatening to kill, rape and torture his mother. Kardashian was granted a gender recognition certificate by the Department of Social Protection and he was put in a women's prison, an absolute dereliction of duty by this Government.

The Government's policy on gender affirmation is ignoring the potential comorbidities that can often exist with children and lead them to question their gender. Gender affirmation puts children on a path that can lead to chemicals, puberty blockers and irreversible surgeries and it never deals with the other comorbidities they may be dealing with. They can destroy a person's fertility and cause serious health damage, in some cases leading to children de-transitioning afterwards.

Ireland remains wedded to this policy despite the fact that most other western countries are reversing from this ideological approach. The debate in Ireland is actually stuck in the past in this regard. Most of the rest of the world is moving on. The International Olympic Committee is moving to a ban on transgender athletes competing in female Olympic events because it is deeply unfair to women. The NHS in Britain has significantly changed its approach, particularly for minors, by ending gender-affirmative care models in youth in England. The US, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have all left WPATH because WPATH is not a clinical protocol. The two most experienced clinicians involved in transgender healthcare in Ireland, Professor O'Shea and Dr. Moran, have made a formal complaint to HIQA about the HSE treatment of children with gender identity issues. They say the HSE has been directing children to potentially damaging overseas affirming services. They have been given leave to carry out a judicial review into HIQA. Logic would dictate that we would listen to that judicial review so that we can understand the best way to approach healthcare in this space.

What does it say about the echo chamber of this Dáil that practically every single other party in this Dáil will swap science and healthcare for gender ideology? What does it say when every single adult in this Dáil, other than a handful, is putting the healthcare of children at risk to follow an ideological approach? We need to make sure that science is at the heart of everything we do in terms of healthcare.

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