‘Men do not need to dress as women in order to attack them’ - Minister clashes with Senator in gender row

A Fine Gael Minister has clashed with a Senator during a debate on gender identity after the Government was accused of having a “radical agenda” and “tampering with the meaning of gender”.

Independent Senator Rónán Mullen raised the issue of the planned referendum on gender equality – likely to take place in the new year – and said he was concerned that public consultations on the plans “may be disregarded”.

He called for the contents of the public consultation, which has now closed and is currently under review, to be published and said: “I believe the Government’s understanding and attitude to gender and its meaning is emerging as a risk issue for Irish people, to be frank.”

“The Government has tried to pull the wool over people’s eyes with a circular explanation of gender in the hate speech and hate crimes Bill.”

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He said that “gender expression and gender identity are subjective ideas and as such they are the person’s own business with no necessary external manifestation in society. In the context of these forthcoming gender referendums where the definition of gender will be crucial, it is troubling that the Government wants us to believe that gender-sex and gender identity are the same,” he said.

Fine Gael Minister of State in the Department of Finance Jennifer Carroll MacNeill said she found his approach “curious” and that there was “no question of not having had public consultation”.

She also said he was “conflating” issues.

In his second contribution on the matter on Thursday morning in the Seanad, Mr Mullen said the HSE was “pretending that men can have babies and breast-feed”.

“It leads to the erasure of women, as men with dysphoria lay claim to women’s spaces. In our playschools and schools, the normal securing of children’s certainty of their personal identity at an early age could be turned upside down,” he said.

He said the Government is “on board with a radical agenda” and “has not been upfront with the Irish people”.

The Minister said she has worked for women’s protection on a range of issues, including gender violence and domestic violence. “I have read into the records of the Dáil, Seanad and committees the names of every woman murdered since 1997 in different circumstances. I assure the Senator that since the gender recognition change in 2015, neither I nor any woman with whom I am personally acquainted has raised the spectre or fact of men coming into women’s places in order to attack them.”

She said that “in any circumstances where a man actually wishes to attack a woman, he does not need to dress up as a woman to do that. Men are perfectly capable of doing it, as is evidenced by the number of women who have been killed in their own homes by men they know in these circumstances.”

Constitutional change was recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly on gender equality in 2021 and by a special joint Oireachtas committee last year to remove or replace Articles 40.1, 41.1, 41.3 and 41.2.

Article 40.1 states: “All citizens shall, as human people, [will be] be held equal before the law”. It does not refer explicitly to gender equality or non-discrimination.”

Articles 41.1 and 41.3 define the family as “the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society”, and says “marriage” is the institution “on which the family is founded”.

Article 41.2 contains a recognition that “by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” and that the State shall therefore “endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.

The Government is currently working on the proposed wording for the referendums needed to change these clauses.

Separately, proposed new hate speech laws – which would toughen incitement to hatred laws and make certain offences “hate crimes” – are working their way through the Oireachtas.

The Bill extends protection to people with “protected characteristics”, including race, colour, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin (including membership of the Traveller community), descent, gender (including gender expression or identity), sex characteristics, sexual orientation and disability.

Senator and former attorney general Michael McDowell has previously questioned the definition of gender in the Bill, asking why it has been expanded from the definitions included in previous legislation.

The definition of gender in the proposed hate crime Bill states: “‘Gender’ means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female ...”

Mr McDowell queried why this definition was different from the Gender Recognition Act, which he said had a binary definition of gender in that it “provides that a gender recognition certificate has effect that if the preferred gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man, and if the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman”.