Barbie Kardashian is in a women's prison. Taoiseach's response to questions on this are here..

Statements such as the above which has been thanked by 56 fine upstanding posters.

I could find dozens more all along the lines of equating all trans individuals with this single disturbed person

I wasn't making any point about trans-identifying males and paedophilia. You've misread my post. I suspect purposely.

I don't know why I unmute you, but it's always an error.

Peace, Jack.

No, I don’t realise that, because I know that nobody is required to produce a GRC in the first place, and they would be digging an even bigger hole for themselves if they tried to claim they were being discriminated against on the grounds of gender, not only because Irish law already permits exceptions in cases such as domestic violence shelters for women, but because they would be shining a spotlight on themselves and facing even more questions and challenges as to what they hoped to accomplish with what they were at.

Apart from that, domestic violence shelters were never safe places for women and their children anyway because of the behaviour of the other residents in them, which is why I would never recommend a woman experiencing domestic violence would go anywhere near them in the first place.

I know you weren’t, that’s exactly what I was pointing out - that you weren’t comparing like with like. Instead you made a point about “male patterns of criminality” when the point was about drawing an analogy between the hysteria driven arguments about this issue, and the hysteria driven arguments about gay men that weren’t based on any kind of legitimate evidence or reason, but rather on portraying a stereotype of them as being deviants and more likely to engage in criminal behaviour.

It stands to reason that gay men were more likely to be engaged in criminal behaviour when homosexual acts were a criminal offence!

To be clear, my position is that transwomen are male and their access to female spaces should be heavily curtailed in line with the rest of the male population. Most transwomen are men who identify as women and that's as far as it goes. Perhaps they dress in what they think of as "women's clothing", but more often than not there are no hormones taken and (much) more often than not there are no surgeries performed. So if you remove whatever collection of pink-and-flowy the person believes means they are presenting as a woman, you are left with a man with a penis. I do not believe that women should be obliged to accept men into their toilets, changing rooms, domestic violence services, prisons, and so on. It is not my opinion that a fully intact, forty-year-old male should be able to get naked beside a 12-year-old girl in a changing room. It is not my opinion that a severely disabled women who requires daily intimate care, including help with incontinence and periods, should be unable to object to a male care worker performing those actions because that male care worker wears a wig and says he has a feeling in his head. It is not my opinion that it is acceptable for lesbian women to be called "sexual racists" (as they were by Nancy Kelley, Stonewall's CEO) for refusing to consider males as sexual partners. Perhaps you think those are extreme examples, as well? Or you're in favour of them?

This has in fact been an ongoing discussion fore some years now in Ireland and elsewhere. The reason you only see the 'extreme' examples is because the issues raised by women's groups are largely ignored by media and politicians and we are told things like this will never - nay, could never - happen. So when things that could never happen do in fact happen, the discussion ends up being more wide-ranging because the rest of the time it's suppressed.

In any event, and whichever way you look at it, and with all arguments about risk assessment and so on aside, BK is only in a women's prison because of Irish laws around gender identity.

Those laws need to be changed to accommodate the dignity, privacy and safety of women. You can't just discard any consideration for one group of people because a cooler, more in-vogue issue came along, and this is the government's chance to recognise that fact before more harm is done.

Disorders of sexual development are not related to this issue, but in any case are all caused by mutations that are sex-specific. There are male intersex people and female intersex people, and while each may carry some sex characteristics more in line with the opposite sex, their sex is nonetheless discernible through testing. There are two mammalian sexes, and no mammals are sequentially hermaphroditic.

So you agree then that "most of these people" have mental health issues?

This is the type of attitude that in the first half of the last century ended up with large swathes of the population institutionalised because they didn't conform to what society considered the norm at the time

I understand the point you're making about the initial post, but this isn't a winning way to tackle it. In every study I've seen on trans mental health, more than half have diagnosed psychiatric conditions, ranging from depression to bipolar, etc.

The cause isn't know and I've seen different people give different opinions on it, but trans people are much more likely than their non-trans peers to have mental health issues. I don't think minimising that is a good idea, since the resources required to help them won't be put in place without awareness (not that mental health services here are worth a damn right now, really, for anyone).

The uneasy obsession with trans people continues on boards.

Freud would have an absolute field day.

That's one post, do you think that everyone objecting to BK being in a woman's prison believes that all transpeople are mentally unwell and pose a risk to women?

Some aspects of our current era are going to be viewed by historians with amusement/bafflement. This is one of them.