Leo Varadkar claims Ireland’s gender self-ID law ‘a success’

Former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has hailed Ireland’s gender self-identification law as a “success”.

Writing in The Sunday Times, Varadkar welcomed the tenth anniversary of the Gender Recognition Act, which allows 16-year-olds to change legal sex based solely on their choice. Although he admitted the legislation “is not perfect”, he lauded its promotion of “the idea that gender is a social construct”.

When Varadkar resigned as Taoiseach and Fine Gael party leader last year, the self-described homosexual placed ‘LGBT and abortion rights’ among his proudest achievements.

‘Erasing women’

Varadkar accused “nationalist and religious fundamentalist actors” of ‘demonising and scapegoating’ gender-confused people and dismissed concerns over the impact of gender ideology on children.

But in the Seanad recently, Aontú Senator Sarah O’Reilly criticised politicians for focusing on pro-trans legislation while biological women suffering from conditions such as endometriosis have long waits for treatment.

Responding to comments about expanding free hormone replacement therapy to men who identify as women, O’Reilly said: “This push goes hand in hand with the replacement of terms like ‘breastfeeding’ with ‘chestfeeding’ and ‘mothers’ with “pregnant people”.

“We are told again and again that this is inclusion. In truth, however, it is a total erasure of women, of who we are and of what we are as women.”

Activists

In August, activist group Gender Rebels urged the Health Minister to disregard the Cass Review commissioned by NHS England and provide ‘affirming healthcare’ for trans people.

The group’s letter to Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, which was written to coincide with the anniversary of the Gender Recognition Act, claimed “the promise of dignity for transgender people in Ireland remains profoundly unfulfilled”.

It accused the Government of using the landmark 2024 Cass Review as a “pretext for paralysis”, pointing instead to a Transgender Equality Network Ireland report from 2013 that backed the contested claim that ‘gender affirming care’ decreases the risk of suicide.