“There’s a sense that the culture wars from America and the UK have been successfully imported into the mainstream here,” writes Dónal Lynch in the Sunday Independent [28 May 2023] Imported? We had to import these issues? They couldn’t arise organically in Ireland by virtue of the fact that we inhabit the same cultural space as the USA and the UK and have done so for many years? “Ireland had long been considered a forerunner (sic) of trans rights,” writes Lynch. He appears to be proud of the fact that “Our Gender Recognition Act, passed in 2015, allowed anyone over the age of 18 to legally change their gender without intervention; at the time only two other countries in Europe had such a progressive law on the books.” In fact, the mistitled Gender Recognition Act purports to allow people to change their sex: “Where a gender recognition certificate is issued to a person the person’s gender shall from the date of that issue become for all purposes the preferred gender so that if the preferred gender is the male gender the person’s sex becomes that of a man, and if it is the female gender the person’s sex becomes that of a woman” [Gender Recognition Act, s.18 (1), emphasis added] It takes a special kind of mind to regard this spectacular example of legislative legerdemain as progressive. It calls to mind the supposed motto of the US Army Corps of Engineers which ran, “The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.” Our Irish legislators would have us believe that in 2015 they went one better than the Engineers by doing, or attempting to do, the impossible in a mere 60 magical words. independent.ie/life/juno-daws…
@Casey5122dark The people decrying the ‘culture wars’ in Ireland tend, in my opinion, to be ideologues who simply want everyone to agree with them. If we all agreed, there would be no ‘war’. And the agreement they want is rooted in belief - we must all believe. The emperor is wearing clothes.
@ColetteColfer @Casey5122dark And of course the UK was one of the first countries to implement legislation regarding trans demands so it's not surprising that they're the first to realise the problems it causes.
@ColetteColfer @Casey5122dark Gas though, we are so sniffy about being morally superior to the bad Brits but we've no problem shipping our kids off to the Tavistock.