We’ve had relentless pressure to accept anti-women and children legislation from female politicians personally invested in normalising the rental of poorer women’s bodies and the conception of babies for purchase. And we’ve had endless promotion of the baby sale industry in the media, on behalf of men, single and in couples, who demand the right to use the bodies of women in poorer countries and to buy their babies and traffic them into the country. But sure look, the lads have a lovely kitchen and a marvellous outdoor seating area. Can the poor, drone-dodging Ukrainian woman the fellas had pumped full of hormones and foetuses give the resulting babies all that? Can she feck.

Then we had the removal of our rights to single sex spaces, and the attempted erasure of women from the constitution, legislation and essential women’s healthcare literature. And the grooming of girls and young women into the belief that it’s prudish and un-modern to hope for much more than getting ridden by some coked-up, porn-wrecked fella from Carlow, with added slapping and some spitting and name-calling, of a Saturday night. No condom, of course. We don’t bother with safe-sex health information anymore in Ireland. Condoms are cheap and PrEP is very profitable.

Young women and girls get to chug the hormonal contraception their mothers and grandmothers fought so hard to have access to, without any information about the possible health consequences down the line. If all else fails, they can have an abortion, now without even so much as a three-day reflection period. Don’t worry about the warts or the discharge, girls. Be grand. Work all the hours the Goddess sends, take your subsidised quinoa meals and your recreation on site: you’ve got a slide, yoga classes and a beer fridge, why would you want to go home? If you could afford a home, that is. The company will, very helpfully, pay for you to extract and freeze a bunch of your eggs, so you can start trying to have a baby at 45. That’s if you haven’t had them all sucked out of you in your early twenties, to sell to some wealthy people, so you could pay your rent. Unhappy with any of this? Get some anti-depressants or anti-anxiety meds into you, love! And then you won’t give a shite about anything. These come with the added bonus of a much higher chance of dementia for women in later life too. Win-win.

Ireland is now a place where a very young girl can arrive in the country, be sent into the care of the state, disappear within a couple of hours of arrival and turn up, fourteen months later, in a brothel. And only a couple of our politicians deem discussion of this horror worthy of their presence in our parliament. Online, the algorithm presents nothing but Insta-friendly sloganeering about fighting the patriarchy, while bombarding them with calls to paralyse their faces lest they feel or express any emotion, or end up, Goddess forbid, ageing.

It’s definitely very unkind (literally the worst thing a girl or woman can be) to not want that teenage fella who says he’s a lesbian in your changing room or on your Gaelic football team. Woe betide the young woman who speaks up about it. All this kindness and freedom is so much fun that girls are self-harming in various ways, in ever increasing numbers. In the words of one of the greats, Nell Mc Cafferty, was it for this that she and so many other women in Irish history fought?

The Irish government passed radical extremist legislation in 2015 that allows any man in Ireland to fill out an A4 form, for free, and by signing his name at the end of it, to become ‘for all purposes’ a woman. Just like that, by filling out a form, countless men have been granted access to women-only intimate spaces, women’s prisons, women’s refuges, women’s sports. The most striking thing, in the years since its passage through the Oireachtas (the Irish houses of parliament) is how few people in Ireland actually know about this law. Fewer still know about its real-life consequences. This was a deliberate strategy to obscure ridiculous and dangerous legislation from public view. The normies don’t like this shit when they get wind of it but it’s a case of boiling frogs. Most people don’t notice what’s happened until there’s a hulking man getting his lad out beside their teenage daughters. By then, it’s too late because the teenage daughters are too afraid to say anything for fear of being accused and ostracised online for being phobic.

Over the last ten years, I’ve seen things some people wouldn’t believe. Not in an attack ships off the shoulder of Orion sort of way. More in a men filming themselves wanking in a women’s rape refuge, ejaculating all over women’s clothes in a department store, threatening to rape and murder women, by various methods, way. Choking on their lady-cocks is a favourite, although hanging and decapitation are also popular. Of course, many of these incidents happened outside of Ireland. But the man beating the shit out of a woman in a women’s refuge hostel incident happened just down the road in Rathmines, Dublin. He received a suspended sentence. Although, he did time for some of his other crimes in prisons in Limerick and Dublin. Women’s prisons. Naturally.

I’ve seen elected politicians Richard Boyd Barrett and Bríd Smith stand with a mob of men dressed up as women and animals, who screamed ‘Nazi’ at actual women and held up signs calling for these women to do such things as suck their trans balls, on a Dublin street. I’ve seen prospective Irish Labour Party politician Bernie Linnane stand with an even angrier mob of mostly young men who wanted to stop women speaking publicly in Belfast. In her defence, she may not have noticed that some of them were vigorously air-jizzing at middle-aged women who were trying to talk about surviving cancer. But she most certainly noticed the hundreds of PSNI officers that had to be deployed to stop the men she was with tearing women apart. A couple of decades ago this would have been immediate resigning behaviour from elected representatives, had they not heled their hands up and said that they’d made a dire mistake and hadn’t meant to join a mob of baying men trying to silence women.

These things bend your mind, if you’re not careful. But some of us just can’t look away or turn a blind eye when really dodgy shit is happening. Individuals, families, communities and whole societies turning a blind eye allows people to live beside a concentration camp or a Magdalene laundry and pass no remarks nor ever enquire about the human contents of these places and what’s happening to them. It allows child abuse to continue long after it should have been stopped. It allows millions of young girls around the world to be hauled into filthy huts and clean ‘doctor’s’ surgeries to have their genitals grossly mutilated every year. It allows Ireland’s cricket team to play a series of matches against Afghanistan while the Afghan government beats, imprisons, tortures, rapes and murders the female half of its own population.

Women and girls, through various forms of #BeKind, have always been groomed to override their instincts. The kind of instincts that have kept women alive for millennia. It’s just that this grooming has gone into overdrive in the past decade. Women override their instincts when, leaving work late, they force themselves to step into a lift already occupied by a man who makes them feel uncomfortable, because they might seem impolite if they waited for the next one. The girl child overrides her instincts when the old man, a stranger, selling medals inside the church door says step closer to give him a wee kiss on his cheek, because it wouldn’t be nice or kind to say no. It’s clear that girls’ instincts have all but disappeared when they are aghast and offended on behalf of their male school mates when it’s suggested that there could be any kind of risk to their safety if single sex toilet provision is removed from them at school.

We all knew, when we’d seen bits on the telly, in the ‘70s and 80s, about transvestic men, that there was something sexual and creepy about it all. In fairness, back then, most of them kept it to themselves. They had their little clubs and private parties where they all sat around admiring themselves and each other, got the horn, imagined everyone in the world, male and female, fancied the arses off them, and then headed home to their poor wives at some point. There was a tacitly agreed boundary around this obvious sexual fetish, as there used to be around all sexual fetishes: what you did behind closed doors with consenting adults, as long as you weren’t harming anyone, was, and should be, your own business. No one took their whole selves to work and no one who looked like Eddie Izzard expected it go unremarked if he toddled around Dunnes Stores’ bra section in a pair of high heels and a wig, calling himself by his dead girlfriend’s name.

In a free society we must be entitled to hold fanciful beliefs such as ‘everyone fancies the arse off me’ or ‘I’m in possession of an unmeasurable and invisible thing called a gender identity’. Men should be free to wear a miniskirt (if this does not breach uniform or decency norms) and call themselves Trixie, but actual women must then be free to identify these men as men and exclude them, as desired, from women’s spaces, services and sports. Wholly faith-based beliefs, especially when they are rooted in a male sexual fetish, cannot trump reality-based beliefs and the safeguarding measures that flow from them. At least not in a functioning society.

Somewhere along the way, some people and organisations decided that a new world order should come into play and the old safeguarding and decency boundaries between public and private, adult and child, male and female, were to be done away with. We have reached a stage in the western world where vast numbers of people are so deliberately distracted that naked men, ball gags held in place by a scintilla of PVC, having a mid-afternoon splash around in a paddling pool full of other men’s piss on a US city street, or drag queens on the telly parodying women having abortions and squirting fake milk (or was it intended to look like cum?) from enormous prosthetic breasts, raise nary an eyebrow.

And in Ireland, we have proudly come so far from our dark history of institutional and sexual abuse of women and children that a man who previously published an article called ‘Inducing Lactation for Kinksters’, a man who gives talks at Frolicon (an annual sexual fetish convention in the US), a man who published a book about helping men to have newborns suck cack from their nipples, a man who is neither parent, midwife nor doctor, will address a conference run by the Association of Lactation Consultants in Galway (ALCI). This fact doesn’t even warrant a mention in the mainstream media in Ireland.*

Perhaps the most gross and shocking of all the disgusting things I’ve been exposed to over the past decade is this: the sight of men pretending to be women, fetishistically colonising motherhood, propped upon pillows, their nipples forced into the mouths of the newborns they’ve fathered, feeding these tiny babies chemically induced man-gunk, with a recognisable type of smirk on their faces. It is the smirk of the flasher, it is the smirk of the man on the podium stealing a gold medal in women’s sports, and it is the smirk of the flabby-faced old man in that church porch in Dundalk who turned his head at the last second and forced his probing tongue into my nine-year old mouth. It is the smirk of total control and sexual domination.

Organisations like La Leche League in the UK and the ALCI in Ireland, set up by women, for women, to support them in breastfeeding the babies they have just grown inside themselves for the best part of a year, are now supporting men with blatant perversions, as they bolster their boners while cod acting as mothers. We may hope that this is the final degradation of women, children and motherhood, the final frontier of deviance. We may hope that someone with the power to do so will stop this and start to put in place some rules that protect the most vulnerable and restore healthy societal norms. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

In the face of all this, you might think that women, young and old, would have all but given up. You’d be wrong. There are plenty of young women who, realising they’re being played, are not falling for any of this (quite literally) old bollocks. And there are the older women who dance and laugh, strip off their tops and sit drinking pints in their bras when they’re told they won’t be served in a pub because they have the dictionary definition of the word ‘woman’ written across their chests. Women are shouting about this stuff from the rooftops and in overly long Substack essays. We are still hopeful that someone in power will listen.

*Mainstream media may be ignoring this matter but Catherine Monaghan has written an excellent article about this for the Genspect website. https://genspect.org/where-does-male-lactation-fit-in-breastfeeding-support-networks/