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Any male who identifies as a woman can use the female bathrooms and changing rooms in any ESB office.
And some women employees of this major semi-State organisation are so worried about men coming in while they’re showering – especially in the ESB headquarters in Dublin where the female facilities are in a locked basement – that they won’t use them at all.
In the name of ‘inclusivity’, then, women are being excluded from their safe spaces.
These women have told their employer they do not feel safe in their workplace.
They’ve tried to speak to their management and union to point out that, in failing to provide single-sex spaces for female employees, the company is at odds with UN advice on protecting women and girls against male violence.
They’ve asked that their right to believe in biology – which is a bit like asserting your right to believe that the earth is round – should be respected, along with their privacy and dignity, by their employers.
In response, according to a major investigation by our sister paper, the Irish Mail on Sunday, they’ve been told: ‘We don’t care.’
As far as the ESB is concerned, the feelings of trans-identified males trump the safety of women.
That’s what they meant when they said, in a 2024 policy document, that management ‘must support the right of all employees to access shower, toilet and changing facilities which match their gender identity’.
Not their biological sex. Not their physical reality.
Basically, any fully intact man who decides he’s a woman can walk into the women’s showers in the ESB’s Fitzwilliam Square HQ, take off his clothes and watch women as they wash and undress.
And what was once termed indecent exposure or voyeurism must now be endured by those women, because his right to do so takes precedence over the rights of his female colleagues to their privacy, dignity and peace of mind.
How on earth did we get to a point where this blatant misogyny, this sexist bullying, this casual contempt for women’s rights, this clear endangerment of female employees, has come to be seen as progressive?
How is it that women who stand up for their basic rights and physical safety are chided for their unkindness and denounced as bigots?
And why do so many men feel a glow of liberal self-righteousness when they command us to show ‘compassion’?
Or, to put it another way, how can it be that the most oppressed, the most victimised, the most vulnerable women in the world are now men in dresses? Dammit, do they have to best us at every single thing?
The #MeToo movement started when women came forward to accuse Harvey Weinstein of decades of abuse, harassment, coercion and even rape
Exactly two decades ago, in 2006, women’s rights activists founded the #MeToo movement to support female victims of sexual and gender-based violence.
For too long, they argued, women were ignored when they tried to report or complain about sexual harassment and assault, particularly by powerful men.
The movement went viral and global in 2017 after a number of women – dubbed ‘the silence-breakers’ when Time magazine made them its People of the Year – came forward to accuse Harvey Weinstein of decades of abuse, harassment, coercion and even rape.
As more victims emerged to accuse more top executives and celebrities, liberal men congratulated themselves on their new sensitivity towards women’s concerns.
They acknowledged how they may have unwittingly made women feel unsafe in the past, and boasted of the steps they were taking to address any unease or discomfort.
They’d cross the street rather than walk behind a woman late at night; they’d watch their language or demeanour in the workplace; they’d refrain from off-colour jokes or personal comments, even compliments, because their eyes had been opened to the many ways that unthinking male behaviour alarmed, discomfited or belittled women.
The movement went global in 2017 when Time magazine made them its People of the Year
Well, that didn’t last long, did it? Who knew our entitlement to be protected from menacing, predatory males, especially those hell-bent on getting into spaces where women and children were vulnerable, depended on whether they wore shirts and trousers or frocks and fake boobs?
Because these are now the same men championing ‘trans rights’ at the expense of women’s rights, as a way of signalling their virtue and indulging their luxury beliefs.
And haranguing women to ‘be kind’ to men in dresses is the ultimate male luxury belief, because no man is ever going to feel unsafe when a woman enters a male changing room, now is he?
And to date, there is no record of any trans-identified female taking a male sporting trophy.
However, in March 2024, the UN confirmed 900 female sporting titles had been taken by males and as of last August, according to US site He Cheated, that had risen to 2,000 worldwide.
Ten years ago, it was cool to feign sympathy with women and to pretend to listen when we recounted our experiences of casual endangerment, discrimination, threat and contempt.
The ESB's headquarters on Fitzwilliam St in Dublin where the controversial policy is in full effect
At last, it seemed, after generations of second-class citizenship in this country, Irish women’s right to be respected, protected and paid on a par with men had finally been established.
But it turns out that this progress was illusory, and existed entirely at the whim of men, to be gifted and withdrawn as they chose.
Because now a cooler cohort has come along and we’re witnessing the phenomenon known as ‘purity spiralling’, where the liberal elite in the media and politics compete to embrace the next trendy crusade.
And hard luck, women, but you’ve been ousted as the fashionable victims du jour, and #MeToo has become #HimFirst: now the sophisticated, most progressive, most ‘inclusive’ employers have decided ‘transwomen’ are the new cause célèbre.
And boring, ordinary, old-fashioned women ‘must’, as the ESB decrees, get the hell out of their way.
But all is not lost. As the ESB is arguably failing to protect the legal rights, personal beliefs and bodily integrity of its female staff, this could be the test case that blows this insane, deranged and misogynistic hive-mind right open once and for all.
Rest assured you haven’t heard the last of the ESB women. The real ones, that is.
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