Séamas O'Reilly: Trans people have spent a decade being attacked in a moral panic

Séamas O'Reilly: "Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public." Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan.

Any father of young kids will have some experience of women’s toilets. In 2025, dads are still forced — with deadening regularity — to knock on the door of a female toilet and say, apologetically, that their child needs the facilities. 

This is because, even here in London, one of the most modern and accessible cities on the planet, thousands of cafes, pubs, restaurants, and cinemas still put baby change or child-accessible toilet facilities exclusively in the women’s loos.

In Ireland, this situation is markedly more pronounced.

The poor provision of unisex children’s facilities— which reinforces gender stereotypes and inconveniences women and men both — was, incidentally, an issue I remember being quite talked-about a decade or so ago, before all women’s bathroom discourse in Britain started centring on, well, something else entirely.

I’ve been thinking about these trips with my kids a lot since Britain’s Supreme Court removed legal protections for trans people last week. The ruling covered a wide swath of discrimination law but, as always, the discourse trended toward the toilet — both literally and figuratively.

I speak of the near-constant refrain that devious men will enter these spaces and pretend to be trans women, in order to spy on, or assault, their occupants. It obviously appals me that our trans friends are constantly cited as monsters, ubiquitously mentioned in the same breath as cisgendered male predators.

But I also wonder why this hypothetical predator would bother pretending to be trans. They could just pretend to be me; the sheepish dad minding an unseen child. Or a janitor, a plumber, or a toilet attendant. 

All such thought experiments are null and void, of course, when one considers that the legal ability for trans women to use female toilets has been in place for a decade without seeing any examples of such behaviour at all.

The distress this ruling will cause for trans people is abhorrent, and would be even if its stated aim of protecting women was being achieved. However, it’s very obviously not.

Many who oppose it have claimed that it legally enshrines a situation in which thousands of trans men — sporting beards and moustaches and every other “masculine” descriptor you care to name — will now be legally obliged to use those female-only facilities.

This is, in fact, a misreading of the ruling, which is worse than this suggests, and clearly implies that trans men should be barred from using male or female toilets both. Because, in a battle between cruelty and logic, the cruelty must always win.

With 8,000 holders of gender recognition certificates now unsure if they’re barred from peeing once they leave the house, some have argued that the provision of millions of unisex toilets might be the answer. Considering these would be the same unisex toilets they never got round to building for Britain’s 4m pre-school age kids — and their awkward dads — we can dismiss this stalling tactic with the contempt it deserves.

We might also consider what this means for the millions of cis women who do not fit the standard, sexist notion of “femininity” which logic dictates they must be checked against to enforce this ruling. 

Too tall, perhaps, too strong-jawed, or short-haired — anything that one patron, one witness, one supermarket or leisure centre security guard might consider cause to question their femininity. And how might they prove their “real” gender?

How would you? Perhaps my conception of feminism has been mis-calibrated all this time, and true freedom for women is mandating that they carry their birth certificates around with them all day, so they can be checked by citizen genital inspectors, male and female, encouraged to presume you’re a predator first, and work backwards from there.

What conceivable application of this ruling, you might ask, could possibly result in less distress and harassment, even for the cis women it purports to protect?

Let us speak as adults. Despite being around 0.5% of the population, trans people have spent the past decade being attacked in one of the most flagrant moral panics ever perpetrated on the British public.

Spread in the name of a “feminism” centred on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority, instead of addressing the multiple overlapping crises that face the British public, and in which they are directly complicit.

The only way any of the absurdities of this ruling make sense, is if its aims are exactly what they appear to be: A punitive attack on the rights and dignity of trans people divorced from any real-world concern about safety or women’s rights, designed to demoralise and punish them simply for the crime of existing.

This, despite the abundant and obvious evidence that it will lead to more harm and distress for all British women, cis or trans, as a consequence. We must surmise that the pain and humiliation of all people is worth it, so long as trans people feel it most fiercely. 

This is the world view of the people popping champagne outside the courts, or cackling with glee on their superyachts, rejoicing as Keir Starmer says “trans women are men” while demanding he roll back trans rights even further, and apologise for ever advocating for them in the first place.

The same people who’ve so thoroughly debased this debate that sensible moderates can profess nothing but mealy-mouthed agreement alongside quiet calls for “calm” and “dignity”, without realising this is offering us a choice between those who light cigars as they legislate trans people out of the public square, and those who say they’re awfully sorry while they do the same.

The same people now brigading our own airwaves in the hopes of bringing their very British bigotry to Ireland. The same people hoping we’re too callous or complacent to fight them tooth and nail. The same people that, now, it is on all of us to prove wrong.