President Catherine Connolly. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain. The role of the President of Ireland is supposed to be gloriously vague. Catherine Connolly should cut ribbons, plant trees and release bland statements that offend nobody. The whole point of the office is that it hovers serenely above the daily madness of Irish political life like a constitutional swan. Which is precisely why it feels so jarring for the President to suddenly swerve into extreme controversy by deciding to act as patron of Belong To, an organisation sitting right in the middle of one of the most bitter flashpoints of our age.
I almost forgave the Maria Steen debacle when Catherine Connolly pledged to be “an inclusive president”, “a president who listens to people and reflects”; a president for all. She isn’t though. Not anymore. The moment she chose to become patron of Belong To, presumably in some sort of desperate bid to look cool and edgy, Catherine Connolly stopped speaking for the vast majority of the citizens of Ireland.
I do not want some over-eager twenty-something youth worker deciding what information should be withheld from me about my own child, and nor should you”
Who is Belong To, you might wonder? They are an extremely well-funded charity that actively promotes the medicalisation of gender nonconforming children. They run groups for teenagers and young adults who believe they have been born in the wrong body. They provide training to schools, workplaces, organisations and institutions across Ireland. In that training, adults who work with children – teachers, youth workers and others – are encouraged to keep secrets from parents.
This advice is in direct opposition to the safeguarding culture that Ireland painfully developed following the child sex abuse scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. We spent decades teaching adults that secrecy around children is dangerous. Now respected institutions are being told by Belong To – and endorsed by Catherine Connolly – that secrets between adults and children are appropriate. They aren’t.
Parents should be involved in all major disclosures concerning their children. I do not want some over-eager twenty-something youth worker deciding what information should be withheld from me about my own child, and nor should you. The only time parents should be left in the dark is when there are serious concerns about the child’s safety – and if that is the case, Tusla should immediately be informed so that appropriate safeguarding measures can be put in place.
Questions
If a child discloses to a concerned adult that they believe they are transgender, certain protective questions should arise. Is the child autistic? Same-sex attracted? Socially isolated? Experiencing mental health difficulties? Vulnerable to online influence or predatory communities? We know from thousands of cases that these risk factors commonly overlap with trans identification. But how can parents protect their child if Belong To encourages involved adults to withhold this information from them?
Belong To presents “gender affirmation” as the only appropriate response to a gender-distressed child. Yet all systematic reviews carried out on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and so-called gender-affirming care have found that there is no robust evidence showing long-term psychological benefit of this approach.
Our sex is the body we are born with. Human beings are born male or female. A very small number of people are born with disorders of sexual development, sometimes called intersex conditions, but these conditions do not abolish the reality of sex. Every person born with an intersex condition is still either male or female. Their sex characteristics may not develop typically or fully, but they are still born as one sex or the other. Some people are born without a fully formed limb. Some are born with atypical sexual development. Neither alters the basic reality of the human body.
Meanwhile, as a rule of thumb, gender is our inner sense of masculinity or femininity. Some boys are feminine. Some girls are masculine. There have always been feminine men and masculine women. So what? Some people develop gender dysphoria, a distress linked to wanting to be the opposite sex. In my view, compassionate psychological support is the most humane way to help people manage this distress. I believe that it is harmful to pretend to a gender-distressed individual that they literally are the opposite sex.
A boy can wear eyeliner. A girl can hate dresses. Children can behave however they wish without being placed onto a pathway involving puberty blockers, hormones, surgeries and lifelong medicalisation. We are in the twenty-first century. We do not need to medically convert gender nonconforming children into approximations of the opposite sex.
If Catherine Connolly is happy to work with the minority groups represented by Belong To, would she also be willing to support the minority within that minority – the detransitioners?”
Yet, according to Belong To, transwomen are women. That means the President of Ireland is now patron of an organisation which believes that a man with fully intact genitalia literally becomes female simply by asserting it. This is not an exaggeration. Belong To maintains that any adult or child, no matter what age, becomes the opposite sex once they declare themselves to be so. They can also apparently become any one of the hundreds of recently invented gender identities simply by stating it. This is not metaphorical. It is the explicit position of Belong To and it is now endorsed by the office of the President.
Yet there is one inconvenient minority that organisations like Belong To prefer not to mention – the people who said they were trans and then came to regret it. If Catherine Connolly is happy to work with the minority groups represented by Belong To, would she also be willing to support the minority within that minority – the detransitioners?
Genspect
In Genspect, the organisation I founded in 2021, we have already supported more than 600 detransitioners – people who medically transitioned and later tried to reverse this process. Many feel they cannot fully undo what happened to them and now live in a kind of medical and psychological no-man’s-land. We would be very happy to introduce Catherine Connolly to Irish detransitioners if she genuinely wishes to be a president for all.
I urge the President to listen to the doctors who understand biology, the psychotherapists informed by child development, the teachers who understand children’s tendency towards magical thinking, and the ordinary Irish people who know that we are born male or female.
Otherwise, if she continues indulging in this kind of down-with-the-kids virtue-signalling, the President of Ireland will start looking more like the president of the student union.