A gender issue battleground

County View
John Healy

The first clash in what promises to be the mother of all culture wars takes place in Killarney next month, when two ideologically opposed conferences on the vexed subject of gender identity will both be taking place in the Kerry town.
On one side is the Epath, the Europe-wide body of medical specialists who offer gender-affirming medical treatment to those who wish to change from their biological gender. The other conference is being held by Genspect, an organisation that cautions against the dangers of what it views as too-early medical transition from one gender to the other without other options being given first consideration.
Gender issues and gender identity are set to be among the most controversial topics of the coming decade, globally and nationally, and the stakes are high.
Gender recognition brought an end to the political career of Nicola Sturgeon, when the Scottish First Minister forced through the easing of gender self-identification, causing a deep split within her ruling SNP. Her fate was sealed when, in the wake of the new law, she dithered catastrophically in media interviews as whether she agreed that a convicted rapist, who subsequently identified as female, should be committed to a women’s prison.
The case was that of Isla Bryson, who had been convicted of raping two women before herself transitioning to being a woman, and who was taken into custody in a female prison. Following a huge public outcry, Bryson was moved to a male prison; but it all came too late to save Sturgeon’s career.
The debacle was enough to prompt speedy action at Westminster, where UK Justice Secretary Dominic Raab ordered that any trans woman convicted of sexual or violent crime at an earlier stage in their life would not be allowed into a women’s prison. Spelling out the import of the new rules, which came into effect three weeks ago, Mr Raab put things as delicately as he could. “Any trans offender, with male genitalia intact, convicted of sexual or violent offences, will not be allowed into a women’s prison, in order to protect other female prisoners,” he said.
Meanwhile, nearer home, the teaching of gender issues in schools is shaping up to a full on conflict between parent groups and policymakers. The proposed new school curriculum has been challenged by the Catholic Primary Schools Managers’ Association, which has expressed its concern at being ‘required to teach something about which there is neither a scientific or social consensus, to highly impressionable young people’.
In the United States, few issues are as divisive as that of appropriate medical care for children with gender dysphoria. For every state legislature that sees such treatment as life saving there is another that rails against what it terms child abuse.
An impending lawsuit may be the watershed decider on who is right and who is wrong. Chloe Cole is a young woman who, when barely a teenager, decided she was a boy and went through painful surgery before changing her mind and detransitioning back to being a male. She is now filing a lawsuit for medical negligence against Kaiser, the medical provider that looked after her initial transition.
Ms Cole argues that neither she nor her parents were given the option of less-severe intervention, such as psychiatric counselling and care. Her parents, she claims, were presented with the option of having a suicidal daughter or a trans son.
The medics argue they did no more than comply with the informed decision of the patient and her family, and that it provided gender-affirming treatment consistent with the highest standards of medical care.
The general consensus is that the eventual verdict will fall in favour of the medics. But those familiar with the conservative leanings of the US Supreme Court are not so sure.