Inclusion in all things
Well, we all know how this is going to go.
Shaping the Century: 25 brilliant Irish women in 2025
Ireland has no shortage of brilliant women: decision-makers, entrepreneurs, sports people, artists and activists who have inspired others and served to change lives.
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2007: Lydia Foy
Often it is individuals who make a large contribution to changing legal history in Ireland. In 1993, transgender Kildare woman Lydia Foy sought a new birth certificate with her female gender. She was refused, and brought High Court proceedings in 1997. While her claim was rejected in 2002, in 2007 the case was brought back to court and the judge found that her rights under the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated. This significant result was initially appealed, and in the end it took until 2014 for Foy to settle her action against the State, which pledged to introduce a Gender Recognition Act. This was enacted into Irish law in 2015 and meant that such an onerous legal journey would no longer be necessary for other Irish trans people.
And that no article about women would fail to inclood a man.
Once again I am left wondering – where are all the good men standing up against this? It isn’t a fight women can win on their own, and it isn’t a fight women should have to fight alone.
As men we might not think it affects us, but it does; we have mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, and lovers. We have female colleagues. Some of us even have female friends of the platonic kind. We cheer on sportswomen like Libby Trickett, the Williams sisters, and Naomi Oksaka, while we see the next generation being turned away because, just like the Olympic Games motto, men are Faster, Higher, Stronger, regardless of a passport entry or a cunning name change.
Transgenderism is the old misogyny in a skirt and lipstick.
Women are the ones most immediately affected by it, but we all have a role to play, not to “protect” women, but to ensure that all women and girls can compete against similarly skilled opponents, not mediocre men who with nothing more than a head tilt and a nod to the officials suddenly become unbeatable, champion, “women”.
It’s falsification of an official record. There is no such fundamental right as a right to lie about your sex on official records. Which provision of the European Convention on Human Rights was violated? None is supposed to be based upon dishonesty.