National Women's Council Criticised for Signing Trans Activist Letter

 National Women’s Council criticised for signing trans activist letter

National Women’s Council and Amnesty condemned for backing call to deplatform ‘pseudo feminists’ on transgender issues

A parade in Dublin shows support for trans rights, but some fear calls to mute those with different views threatens freedom of speech

LEAH FARRELL

Justine McCarthy

Sunday November 29 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

The National Women’s Council (NWC) has been criticised for signing a letter exhorting politicians and the media not to give a platform to “pseudo feminists” on transgender issues. The letter, published in Gay Community News, claims that “far-right” activists are disseminating false information on “fringe” social media accounts with the aim of causing “damaging discrimination”.


“The vitriol and disinformation these accounts and people share does not represent the beliefs of the legitimate organisations and signers of this letter and, together, we repudiate their beliefs and call for an end in giving airtime to their despicable brand of harassment,” states the letter, which was also signed by Amnesty International and the Abortion Rights Campaign. The lead signatory was the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (Teni).


It added: “We call on media and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation for those that share bigoted beliefs that are aligned with far-right ideologies and seek nothing but harm and division.”


Laoise Hayes, a Dublin-based opponent of gender self-identification, said she believed the letter was referring to an online campaign she organised, styled The Countess Didn’t Fight for This. It has objected to two transgender women (male to female) being held in the women’s wing of Limerick prison and to CervicalCheck’s use of the term “anyone with a cervix” in its literature.


Hayes, who describes herself as a feminist “but not a liberal feminist”, posted a response to the letter on Twitter last Tuesday under the slogan #We Will Be Heard.


“The reaction has been amazing,” she said. “We’ve had messages from Africa, Brazil, Canada. Within four hours, it was trending in the UK and that evening in the US. Regardless of how you feel about this, there must be freedom of speech. This is a democracy and we have to have a grown-up conversation about this. There is a conflict of rights here.”


“It goes beyond feminism. This is for all of society to work out,” added Hayes, who also goes by the last name Uí Aodha de Brún.


At its 2018 annual meeting, the National Women’s Council agreed to “lead the way and model the inclusion of transgender women in the feminist movement”. Orla O’Connor, the NWC director, said the passing of that resolution had given the organisation a mandate to sign the letter.


She claimed its call for politicians and media not to “platform” certain people had been misinterpreted. “When read in the proper context it is clear that what is being asked of our public representatives and media organisations is to ensure that anti-trans activism and voices who seek to deny the existence, rights and wellbeing of this highly vulnerable community are not amplified.”


She said the NWC and Teni met the HSE’s national cancer screening service last week and recommended an amendment to its electronic information so that “sentences that refer to people who have a cervix would read ‘women, transgender men, intersex and non-binary people with a cervix’”.


Amnesty International has also been criticised for signing the letter. Iseult White, a granddaughter of Seán McBride, one of the human rights body’s co- founders, said it “seeks to deny legitimate representation to people and conscience [and] has a chilling effect on society”.


“I am a member of the LGBTI family, and in 2015 I supported legislation that gave trans people the right to self-identity without medical gatekeeping,” White said in a letter published in The Irish Times.


She pointed out she had witnessed the distress suffered by trans people, adding: “Nonetheless, the convictions I hold around the importance of freedom of speech and the necessity of affording people of different views and beliefs legitimate representation, dictates that I could never have signed or supported this letter.”

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