Trans women are being 'demonised', Cork Work With Pride conference hears
Trans women are being demonised as a threat to other women in places like female-only bathrooms to create fear and division, a Cork Pride conference heard.
Speaking at the Work With Pride event at Cork City Hall, trans advocate Saoirse Mackin said that figures show that Republican Congressmen in the US, a cohort known to peddle this fear, are in fact many times more likely to assault someone in a bathroom.
Between three and seven Republican congressmen have been accused of bathroom sexual assaults while that figure is zero for trans women, she said.
“There is misinformation from right wing media and politicians on the rise, about the ‘danger’ of trans people. They create a discourse that cisgender women are not safe in the bathroom with trans women."
Quoting an article by feminist historian Rebecca Solnit, Ms Mackin said trans women often need a place of refuge in female-only places as much as cis women.
Trans women pose no threat to cis women, she added, but cis women pose a threat to trans women if they make them outcasts.
Although a third gender may seem like a new concept to many, civilisations across the world have “recognised more than two genders for as long as they’ve existed," Ms Mackin said.
Native American, Indian, Mexican, and Filipino cultures have all embraced a third or fluid gender for many years, she said:
“Many tell us that our struggle is new, our fight is new, we just need to be patient. But history shows us we are not new, our struggle was just forgotten. We never went extinct, we were always there, but we were suppressed in our lives.”
And in 2022, trans rights are still being repressed, she said.
“Growing up in a small, Catholic, conservative village like mine, if you were any bit different to the traditional farming culchie, you were an outcast. So help you if you were gay, never mind trans.
“There is a lack of education around what being transgender is. If you experience gender dysphoria [discomfort or distress because there's a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity] you generally know at a young age that something is different about you.
"Growing up with that gender dysphoria is difficult, but you can’t just go on hormones overnight and begin a medical transition.
"You have to convince a number of medical professionals that you are trans. You need confirmation from two psychologists that they believe you’re transgender. Usually that involves hours of sessions, speaking in deep detail and being asked a myriad of sexual questions to decide if you are who you say you are.
"And there will almost always be three to ten years before you ever get your hands on a bottle of oestrogen, or testosterone for trans men.
“Here in Ireland, there’s a wait list of five years or more for endocrinology, and there are two endocrinologists in the country who can deal with trans people through the public system.”
Taoiseach Micheál Martin, speaking in a recorded message at the conference, said that Ireland must continually strive to foster a society that cherishes all its people equally.
“As a nation we have made great strides over recent decades to embrace and promote equality. The growth of Pride celebrations here in Cork and around the country is testament to our growing diversity in communities and people’s respect for that diversity. I am very clear that this diversity is something that should be celebrated. Ireland is a better nation for it."
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said that despite great strides towards equality in Ireland, much more progress was needed to attain equality of opportunity, not just equality before the law.
Pride is a celebration but also a protest, he said.
“A protest for further progress and equality and a protest in solidarity with members of the community around the world who still face criminalisation and have to live their lives in secret."
Feminist activist and academic Ailbhe Smyth said that she was afraid when she first came out as lesbian in 1980s Ireland.
"I really experienced fear that I was going to lose my job, lose the support of my friends and family," she said.
Although things have improved in Ireland, there is still a powerful world of hate and intolerance which must to be challenged in places like Afghanistan, Turkey, Poland and Hungary where people are still at risk because of their sexuality or gender identity.
“There’s a whole world out there where there’s an extreme right-wing movement which is bearing down on us, as women, with abortion, and is bearing down on all of us, as lesbian, gay, bisexual, non-conforming, trans, intersex," Ms Smyth said.
"It is coming for us and we have to be there and stand up, whether we’re in a company, a university, whether we’re our own little selves out there on the street," she said.
"We have to stand up and say ‘no, you don’t, no further.’ And absolutely not surrender to that.”
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