On Tuesday night, RTE’s Prime Time programme examined the “exponential growth” in the number of young people seeking to change gender, and the implications of the proposed new law allowing them to do so without their parents’ consent from age 16 on.
Psychotherapist Stella O’Malley expressed concern about the huge increase in the number of young people who say they are transgender. While she affirmed that transgender children exist, she questioned whether authorities are being too quick to accept a young person’s claim to be transgender, and thereby putting them on a medical path with lifelong consequences.
Producer Sallyanne Godson described how plans in the UK to introduce self-identification legislation for the first time sparked a bitter row between some feminists and transgender activists.
Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan has been vociferous in his support for abortion and same-sex marriage. Yet, he told the programme, “the day after the [abortion] referendum Amnesty put out a statement saying it was a great victory for pregnant people, and that got me going as it was a huge betrayal of Irish women. You don’t identify your way into having a uterus.”
Linehan said he is not happy with men who identify as women playing women’s sports, and is especially concerned that dangerous men who claim trans-women status but who haven’t had surgery can access private women’s spaces such as prisons and refuges.
