Two independent Senators have sought clarification from Minister for Justice Simon Harris about the definition of gender in the new hate speech legislation.

The Bill says ‘Gender’ means the person’s preferred gender or that “with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female…”

Senator and former attorney general Michael McDowell asked why it is different from the Gender Recognition Act, which he says has a binary definition of gender as either male or female.

“The purpose of this letter is, in advance of the second stage debate in the Seanad, to obtain absolute clarity as to what you as proposer of the Bill intend these terms to mean. In particular, I must ask the following questions: a) Is transgender a gender for the purposes of Irish law? And b) Can you specify what is meant, in addition to transgender, by ‘any gender other than those of male and female’?”, he wrote.

Meanwhile, Independent Senator Ronan Mullen accused the Government of “smuggling a radical new definition of gender into an already controversial hate speech law”.