What to make of the news that People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy and his partner are raising their child gender-neutral and refer to the newborn as “they”?
t could be that the best policy is to say nothing at all. A politician’s private life is entirely their own. That argument becomes even more compelling when children are involved.
And yet it remains the case that the only reason we know Paul Murphy and his partner are raising their child gender-neutral is because Paul Murphy himself said so publicly.
Most of us would never have known a thing about it otherwise, just as we know next to nothing, and care even less, about the private lives of the vast majority of members of the Dáil.
Murphy, by contrast, has chosen to make his child a matter of public interest by giving an interview to the Irish Times in which he discussed his approach to raising “it” (his word). For a couple of days, it was the most read story on the newspaper’s website, as well as generating thousands of comments on social media.
If everybody was talking about Murphy’s child, whose fault was that?
One solution would be for TDs and ministers to stop oversharing details of their lives, on social media in particular. There is no need for the Taoiseach to share photos on Instagram of he and partner Matt having a date night at home, or for acting Justice Minister Simon Harris to post recipes to his 90,000 followers on TikTok.
It seems, no matter how successful they are in one field, no one is satisfied any more with their given role. TV personalities like Gary Lineker want to be political commentators. Politicians want to be celebrities. Social media has given them the means to indulge role-playing fantasies
It could be that Murphy was simply naive to imagine he could talk so publicly about his child without getting some pushback from people who believe the gender neutrality of which he speaks is a misguided, even dangerous, path.
Alternatively, Murphy may have known exactly what he was doing, and actively wanted his family’s private business to become part of a broader narrative that questions traditional notions of sex and gender.
It’s impossible to know which it is without discussing these issues openly. So are we allowed to ask questions?
The truth is that certain incidents bring phenomena that were hitherto under the radar to greater public consciousness, for good and ill.
Before last week, warning people about the march through the institutions of so-called “gender identity theory” — chiefly the belief that being a man or woman is merely a matter of personal choice with no basis in biology — was likely to either make their eyes glaze over with boredom or have them backing away as if you were some crazy far-right extremist.
Then something like this happens, and they suddenly realise this is not a drill. It’s actually happening, and influential people really do believe it.
Ireland currently has what is called a centrist government, but, with sympathetic ministers in key positions, it has already moved a long way to officially embedding these radical ideas.
How much more extreme will the government become when it is made up of Sinn Féin with the support of far-left representatives like Murphy?
That’s where the Dublin TD’s own decisions as to how he raises his child become a matter for public concern.
Murphy insists he and his partner are only making this decision for themselves, and that he passes no judgment on anyone else’s parenting choices. But this is to play down the social impact of personal actions.
Left-wing activists are adept at using what Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point calls “a small but precisely targeted push” to promote ideas which would have once been considered outlandish, and have them “spread like wildfire”.
The concept of gender neutrality is one such push, even though its adherents cannot explain it except in the vaguest, contradictory terms.
Murphy’s partner, Jess Spear, an “ecosocialist and socialist feminist”, explained their thinking on Twitter: “We are trying to create a home environment which doesn’t place limits or expectations on what [our child] is interested in or who they will become.”
That’s nothing if not admirable. But what do they think other parents are doing? Plenty of people have managed to raise children who don’t buy into harmful gender stereotypes, and are encouraged to be their best selves regardless of sex and gender, without also denying basic biological reality.
The idea that differences between boys and girls and men and women can be explained away glibly by socialisation ignores the exhilarating, liberating fact that we are animals living in a physical environment, with two million years of evolution fizzing through every cell of our bodies.
To ignore all that is to reduce the ancient “nature v nurture” debate to an absurd banality. Not least because, if social norms are so all-powerful, how can you ever escape them?
In his public interview, Murphy said he and his partner intend to let their child decide their own gender at the age of three, ready as parents to declare: “If you say you’re a boy, then great, you’re a boy. Or if you say you’re a girl, then great, you’re a girl.”
He further added that the child would be free to “change your gender identity in the future if you want”.
That is far too much pressure to put on a child who cannot possibly possess the emotional or intellectual maturity to process such decisions. It’s also impossible for any child to know what it is to be a boy or a girl without imposing on them a range of pre-loaded expectations of what it is to be a boy or a girl in the first place, creating a vicious circle.
All their ideas of what being a boy or a girl means will come from you. And you will have got them from traditional definitions of sex roles.
That’s why girls who like rough and tumble rather than playing with dolls, or who hate being dressed in pretty pink frocks, or who, later on, are freaked out by their own bodies, are now being encouraged to think they might actually be boys instead.
Far from challenging gender stereotypes, these toxic notions end up monstrously reinforcing them.
Questioning this ideology cannot stop now just because Paul Murphy has chosen, arguably unwisely, to personify the debate in the identifiable and named form of his own child.
The physical and mental health implications for all the other children across Ireland who may be potentially affected by the promulgation of these ideas are too disturbing to ignore.
