The next sexual politics issues: gender identity and the rights of single people

There was no sex in Ireland before The Late Late Show, so the saying goes, yet it seems that as a society we have always been intensely interested in sexuality, propriety, morality and the legal limits of acceptable sexual behaviour, particularly since gaining independence in 1922.

It may seem that the public discussion of bodies, sex and reproduction is a side effect of the modern era, brought dazzlingly to life on Gaybo’s couch, but these issues have always been with us. And there has always been debate about whether they should remain private or be discussed publicly.

But is the Constitution the right place to enshrine or debate such matters?

If 20th-century history, particularly Irish history, has taught us anything it is that societal mores and values change. Sometimes they change slowly and painfully, after much hardship and pain for people who have failed to meet society’s moral expectations, and sometimes they change rapidly, after watershed moments that reveal a side of ourselves that we neither like nor recognise.

Although enshrining rights, such as those that protect the family, are vital in debates about equality, the Constitution allows little scope for flexibility or redefinition as times change.

In the future will we be debating the rights of unmarried couples, or perhaps single people, to constitutional protection?

What of those who do not neatly fit binaries of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual? We must have room for nuance in order not to repeat our past mistakes of silencing, prescribing and punishing those who do not conform to the “norm”, whatever that may be.

Surveying sexual practices, behaviours, attitudes and identities over the 19th and 20th centuries tells us that underage sex, illegitimacy, prostitution, sexual relations outside marriage, contraception, reproductive knowledge and abuse all featured in parliamentary debates, government inquiries, newspapers and sermons from the earliest years of the State.

We have lived in a patriarchal, androcentric, heteronormative society. Independence further intensified some of these tendencies rather than heralding the egalitarian, socialist and feminist republic envisioned by James Connolly, among others.

The suppression, repression and punishment of those, such as unmarried mothers, who “disgraced” their families make up one of the problematic and shameful aspects of our past that we must face today.

Women’s sexual behaviour has been posited as problematic in a number of contexts: within lesbian relationships (when visible, such as among convicts); as emigrants, vulnerable to sexual advances or prone to sexual misbehaviour away from prying eyes; and in terms of the thorny issue of reproductive control and access to abortion.

But this is not simply a narrative of victims through the ages. Women in Irish society exerted power in many forms. From the assertive and rebellious behaviour of convicts in the 19th century to the courtship rituals and control exerted by upper-class women at the turn of the 20th, this is a narrative of independence, of skirting the limits of sexual norms and behaviours throughout the centuries.

Historians of modern Ireland have continuously questioned the relationship between the Catholic Church and the State, most particularly in the actions of successive governments in ceding control of “deviant” citizens. The sexual double standards that castigated women for sexual relationships outside of marriage but were silent about men’s culpability have been revealed as not just prevalent but dominant.

The little explored and difficult to research aspect of this issue of sexual mores is the fate of gay Irish men and women and a tacit recognition that, although we do not have adequate histories of “the love that dare not speak its name”, it is foolish and ahistorical to assert that homosexuality is a modern phenomenon or “value”.

We have always had gay citizens who have been marginalised and silenced and are undoubtedly part of the emigrant diaspora, refugees from an oppressive heterosexist culture that not only forbade them to freely express themselves but also denied them a language or a space in which to do so.

As we turn at the moment to commemorate the founding of our modern nation, it is essential to revisit questions related to children, citizens and families. It seems clear that a more historically accurate picture of the past reveals that there have always been many shades of sexual and gender identity, and this is not extraordinary. For the most part we have been ordinary people, sometimes living in extraordinary times.

Jennifer Redmond is the president of the Women's History Association of Ireland and an editor of Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland