\n<\/p>\n
Soon after Ireland passed its Gender Recognition Act in 2015, Kevin Humphreys, a Labour politician, visited a residential home for senior citizens \u2013 where an older woman thanked him for the new law.<\/p>\n
It was Humphreys who, as the minister of state for social protection 10 years ago, guided through the legislation that has meant transgender people in Ireland can apply to have their lived gender legally recognised by the state through a simple self-certification process.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was around 80,\u201d Humphreys recalls, \u201cand for the first time she was able to tell her friends and family she was transgender. She told me the relief she felt to be accepted by her own community, and by the state, in the last few years of her life.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were very fortunate in Ireland that we were able to do the legislation in an era of openness and progressive discussion,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In stark contrast with Scotland, where attempts by the Holyrood parliament to introduce a similar model prompted an explosion of grassroots opposition, the Irish process was relatively smooth.<\/p>\n
The bill passed a matter of months after the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly to legalise same-sex marriage, which created \u201ca whole moment socially around LGBT+ equality\u201d says Daire Dempsey, the executive director of the Transgender Equality Network Ireland. <\/strong>This reflected a broader public desire to \u201cmove away from this vision of Ireland as a repressive, deeply Catholic place\u201d and towards \u201ca new sense of ourselves as a nation with modern, European values\u201d, they add.<\/p>\n In recent years, however, a handful of women\u2019s groups have started to question the \u201cunintended consequences\u201d of the act, reflecting the rise in gender-critical campaigning across the UK. In the recent Irish presidential election campaign, candidates were challenged with the \u201cwhat is a woman?\u201d question that dominated last year\u2019s UK general election.<\/p>\n Thanks to the notorious case of Barbie Kardashian, a violent offender who changed their name by deed poll and obtained a gender recognition certificate in 2020, and was transferred from a women\u2019s prison to a male one during their sentence, custody is now a focus of emerging gender-critical concerns. An amendment to the GRA, which would limit its scope so the certificate no longer changes sex for the purposes of imprisonment, has passed its first stage.<\/p>\n Barrister Laoise de Brun, who drafted the amendment, describes UK campaigners like the Sex Matters founder, Maya Forstater, as \u201can inspiration\u201d who \u201ccreated the framework for the fightback\u201d.<\/p>\n De Brun, who runs The Countess, a non-profit advocating for women, children and families, wants to see all female-only spaces excluded from the act. \u201cCurrently the state\u2019s hands are tied in so many areas and this would unlatch the rules for places like domestic violence refuges and toilets.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLobbyists achieved what they hoped to with the passing of the act, and the public felt they were shaking off the dark Catholic past and marching forwards to a new progressive paradigm. But we\u2019re marching off the edge of a cliff if the end result is that fundamental societal norms are to be junked.\u201d<\/p>\n Dempsey and Humphreys frame the recent shift in different terms. \u201cThe rollback of rights and spread of misinformation about what a trans person is, which is happening globally,\u201d says Dempsey, \u201cwe\u2019re seeing some of that discourse starting to creep in here, though it hasn\u2019t taken hold in the way that it has in the UK and in the US.\u201d<\/p>\n Dempsey and Humphreys emphasise the \u201chuge\u201d amount of consultation undertaken before 2015, achieving an all-party consensus. The \u201cvery few\u201d concerns Humphreys says were raised at the time about the impact on women-only spaces were met by building in a yearly review of the law.<\/p>\n <\/span>Dublin\u2019s Pride march in 2015, the same year a vote passed overwhelmingly to legalise same-sex marriage.<\/span> Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Una Mullally, the author of In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland, argues that <\/strong>mainstream Irish feminism has historically been more inclusive.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a core of solidarity in Irish culture more generally that cuts across those lines of class and gender and doesn\u2019t find itself entrenched in them as much as it does in Britain,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Mullally attended Dublin\u2019s first Dyke March in more than 25 years earlier this year. \u201cIt was fully trans inclusive and there was this great sense of pride that cohesion and solidarity is being maintained,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n Over the decade, the numbers undertaking the process have been modest. A total of 1,881 certificates were granted up to the end of last year, with 17 applications refused, no revocations and annual applications levelling out in the low 300s. Over the years those changing gender from male to female have very slightly outnumbered those female to male.<\/p>\n The act also set out a separate process for 16- and 17-year-olds requiring parental consent and supporting documents from a doctor and psychiatrist, which has granted 24 certificates over the decade.<\/p>\n \u201cIt validates who I am,\u201d says Ann, who received her Irish GRC in 2023 and describes the \u201csimplicity\u201d of posting her witnessed documents on a Monday and getting the certificate back on the Wednesday. \u201cThe big thing for me is having official documentation like a passport with the correct gender, which is comforting.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn terms of public perception of the act, I think most Irish people don\u2019t care. They\u2019re happy to let trans people get on with it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Soon after Ireland passed its Gender Recognition Act in 2015, Kevin Humphreys, a Labour politician, visited a residential home for senior citizens \u2013 where an older woman thanked him for the new law. It was Humphreys who, as the minister of state for social protection 10 years ago, guided through the legislation that has meant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2312,4170,17898,364,6343,286,570],"class_list":{"0":"post-39022","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-decade","9":"tag-gender","10":"tag-irelands","11":"tag-people","12":"tag-recognition","13":"tag-time","14":"tag-transgender"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}