The Irish “success story” has been trotted out and swallowed down whole. Ireland was an early adopter of “self-ID”: since 2015 the state has allowed individuals to change their “gender”  — their legal sex, effectively — just because they want to. There are no background checks and no medical reports.

Let’s be clear, that is an affront to safeguarding. But that has not stopped activists claiming Ireland to be an example of “international best practice”, and framing it as a great model for Westminster and Holyrood. But while politicians may still be lapping up whatever activists tell them, recent polling suggests that the Irish public is not convinced.

It does not take a legal expert to see the dangers. If biological males can access women’s single-sex spaces including hospital wards and prisons simply by making a statutory declaration, it was only a matter of time before there was an outrage. In fact, there have been at least two in one prison.

Barbie Kardashian is a troubled teenager who was “born a male but identifies as female”, and has a history of particularly nasty physical and sexual violence towards women. Having previously torn the eyelids from a female care worker, Kardashian was jailed last year in the women’s wing of Limerick prison following threats of violence against two individuals. According to the court report, Kardashian was “very anxious she be detained in a prison facility for females, as she identifies as a female”.

Already there was a “pre-operative, pre-hormone therapy”, male-to-female transgender prisoner who had been convicted of ten counts of sexual assault and one count of cruelty against a child.

Whatever Irish politicians had been thinking when they waved through the 2015 Gender Recognition Act, there had not been any proper public debate to inform the new legislation. But that is not surprising; the law was changed swiftly and quietly, just the way the activists like it.

“Nobody spoke about the GRA,” says the Irish writer Stella O’Malley. It wasn’t even mentioned in the media: “We were all about the gay marriage referendum and the GRA just didn’t come up. I’ve always been interested in trans issues and I would have noticed if it had.”

This strategy is straight from an activists’ handbook, or to be precise the “Denton’s Document”. This guidance – officially titled, Only adults? Good practices in legal gender recognition for youth – was published two years ago. Backed by an unlikely triumvirate of Dentons (the world’s largest law firm by number of lawyers), Thomson Reuters Foundation and IGLYO – the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation – it was an instruction manual for lobbying groups who wanted to extend gender recognition to young people with or without their parents’ permission.

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The tactics are detailed in full within the handbook, including the instruction to “avoid excessive press coverage and exposure.” And specific reference was made to Ireland where, “activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum.”

O’Malley was right: the events of 2015 had been carefully managed.

“In Ireland, Denmark and Norway, changes to the law on legal gender recognition were put through at the same time as other more popular reforms such as marriage equality legislation. This provided a veil of protection, particularly in Ireland, where marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for.”

It’s only now, six years on from the Irish Gender Recognition Act, that the public has been consulted. Not by the government, even now, but by The Countess, an Irish campaign to restore the privacy, dignity and safety of women and children in schools, workplaces, sport, changing rooms, toilets, hospitals, prisons and refuges. Opinion polling carried out for them by Red C – found that respondents were not impressed.

Only 17% agreed with the 2015 law that allows someone to change their birth certificate as soon as they self-identify as the opposite sex. Rather more (34%) thought it should be permitted once a trans person has partially or fully transitioned through hormone treatment and/or genital surgery. But 28% felt that individuals should not be allowed to change the sex on their birth certificates at all.

Even younger people (aged 18-34) favoured no changes to birth certificates, as opposed to the laissez-faire approach that was pushed through parliament. Overall, men were more cautious than women —  perhaps because they better understand what men can be like.

Birth certificates are the last line of defence for service providers trying to maintain single-sex provision for women. If these can be changed on demand, then the safeguards become worthless. We can probably safely assume that few men would ever seek a Gender Recognition Certificate but mixed in with those suffering from gender dysphoria — a diagnosable medical condition — would be those who women need to worry about most. There’s little point of locking a door if a potential abuser can cut his own key.

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As the polls show, while Irish politicians were captured by the transgender activist lobbying, the Irish public understands the dangers. When asked about transgender people who had not been through gender reassignment surgery, more people than not opposed their inclusion in changing rooms, sports, refuges and prisons. Clearly, the naïve government policy that led to the outrage in Limerick women’s prison is not supported by the electorate.

Laoise Uí Aodha de Brún, founder of The Countess said, “This is the first time the public has been given a say on gender self-identification. When the government passed the Gender Recognition Act in 2015 it did so with little thought of the effect it would have on the wider community, let alone consultation with groups that would be most affected, particularly women.”

This does not mean that The Countess and the Irish public are transphobic. Rather they are pro-science, and supportive of the rights of women to defend their own boundaries. As a transgender person myself, I know transphobia when I see it and this is not it. It is not hateful to make factual claims such as “transwomen are not female and therefore not women”, nor is it transphobic to apply safeguarding procedures appropriate to an individual’s biological sex. That is necessary to protect everyone’s welfare. Accusations of transphobia are thrown around far too easily and they deflect attention from genuine hate.

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Unfortunately, though, the Irish self-identification “success story” has been misrepresented and disseminated by activists who are desperate to extend it far and wide. On this side of the Irish sea, the Westminster government has, to their credit, thrown out self-identification, despite the howls of protest from some quarters — but gender recognition is a devolved matter. North of the border, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government seems determined to make the same mistakes as the Irish one, despite the furore surrounding the debate. Scotland has already cited alignment with “international best practice” as a rationale for introducing self-identification, using Ireland as an example.

All these leaders have been hoodwinked by a narrow group of self-interested activists who have seized the agenda and are loath to let go. I’m a teacher and my pupils are taught to think critically. Some of our politicians need to learn a similar lesson. Instead of following blindly, then need to start asking themselves some hard questions. I suggest they kick off with “Who told us that self-ID was international best practice and why did we believe them?” Because this polling suggests that their electorates would like some answers.

When I sought legal representation to bring a claim against my ex-employer, two major law firms refused to take my case, with one dropping it just days before I was due to launch a crowdfunding appeal because of concern about “transphobia”. When I complained to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, it said that it was not a breach of professional standards to vet and reject clients.

In the meantime, I looked around for another job in the international development sector, but was told I was too controversial to employ. Then a person I had never met complained to The Scout Association that I had referred to them as “he” rather than non-binary “they” in a short exchange on Twitter,  reporting me as a “bigot” and “transphobe”. The Scouts launched a full investigation, concluding that I might not be fit to continue as a volunteer Scout Leader because I responded to the complaint by saying that, although my pronoun slip-up was an accident and I would generally try refer to people as they felt comfortable, if I came across someone male in the ladies’ showers at Scout Camp I would not worry about respecting their pronouns. The judge in my employment case also took this as a sign that my views should be condemned.

I asked the Fawcett Society, an organisation that dates back to the Suffragettes, if it would speak up about my case. It declined. Its former CEO, Sam Smethers, singled me out on the day she left the organisation as someone she wouldn’t miss. Stonewall and a host of LGBT organisations wrote saying it was a “kick in the teeth” when the Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened to argue in support of my right to freedom of belief. Amnesty International and the TUC have only commented on my case to emphasise the rights of transgender people.

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My experience, however, is far from unique. I have heard from hundreds of people who faced similar harassment, victimisation and discrimination because they have refused to fall into line with the new dogma of gender fluidity. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that our common, everyday view — despite being painted as controversial and dangerous — aligns with the law of the land.

That there are two sexes, and that people cannot literally change sex, are plain statements of fact that also align with British law. Sex is recognised as a matter of biology. Since 2004 the Gender Recognition Act has enabled people to change their legally deemed sex for certain purposes, but it also recognises that this doesn’t change their actual sex (for example in relation to motherhood or fatherhood, sport, religion and inheritance).

A powerful lobby group led by the charity Stonewall, which used to campaign for gay rights, has told organisations to go “above and beyond” the law. As a result, we now live in a society where articulating the law is deemed an offence for which powerful people and organisations will try to ruin your life, while others look away.

And so I sued my ex-employer for discrimination and victimisation. Victimisation has a specific legal meaning: being treated badly because you have taken action to protect your rights under the Equality Act. My “protected act” was to highlight what the law says about the sexes — that men are male and women are female.

My legal team argued that as well as this being the law, I was also protected against belief discrimination. People who hold the opposite belief — that only gender identity matters, that “trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary people are valid” — are also protected. This is as it should be in an open, pluralist society.

But the Center for Global Development, my ex-employer, argued that only one belief system — one that rejects the UK legal definition of sex — should be tolerated, and that those who share my belief (and agree with the current law) are bigots who should have no protection against being harassed by colleagues for their views and having their livelihood destroyed.

Shockingly, the employment tribunal agreed with this, judging my belief “unworthy of respect in a democratic society” and thus excluded from the protection that is given to other beliefs (or lack of beliefs) such as in the doctrine of the Trinity, transubstantiation, ethical veganism, stoicism and Scottish nationalism.

Last month the Employment Appeal Tribunal reversed the employment tribunal’s decision. The presiding judge, Mr Justice Choudhury, remarked that “where a belief or a major tenet of it appears to be in accordance with the law of the land, then it is all the more jarring that it should be declared as one not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The idea that the law is out of date and can be ignored is widely embedded in organisations’ diversity policies that confuse and conflate sex and “gender identity”. A key reason is that many are signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Scheme, which, according to Stonewall itself, covers a quarter of the UK workforce. Members include Whitehall departments, universities, NHS trusts and police forces, as well as large swathes of the corporate and voluntary sectors.

Gender-identity lobby groups even train the media and the judiciary. Views similar to Stonewall’s, for instance, are echoed repeatedly in the “Equal Treatment Bench Book” — the guidance written by judges, for judges, on how to treat people fairly in the justice system. The Bench Book says that the language used in the Equality Act 2010 is “now widely considered to be out-of-date and stigmatising”. It tells judges that “man” and “woman” are genders, not sexes, that there are “people who identify with no particular gender or who are gender-fluid”. The gender landscape, it says, “is rapidly changing, as is the terminology in the field”.

That government departments, public bodies, professional regulators and the judiciary are disregarding the law in favour of rapidly changing terminology controlled by a lobby group should be alarming to all. It undermines democracy, justice, freedom of speech and the integrity of organisations. Most importantly, by confusing adults and children about sex, it undermines safeguarding.

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Only last month, for example, the employment tribunal heard another case of a woman punished for speaking up; Sonia Appleby, the safeguarding lead at the NHS Tavistock Clinic. In 2019 she raised concerns about the treatment of young people suffering from a feeling of disassociation from their sexed body, saying that safeguarding failures were a “Jimmy Savile waiting to happen”. The Tribunal heard that instead of responding to her concerns, management put a letter in her personnel file and told clinical staff not to talk to her.

It’s cases like these — and many other that we have heard — that led me, together with a team of lawyers and academics, to establish a new human-rights organisation, Sex Matters, earlier this year. It campaigns for clarity about sex in law and policy, seeking to help other organisations wake up from this nightmare.

One way is do this is by using freedom of information requests to shine light on the influence of gender-identity lobby groups. We are also calling on employers to leave the Stonewall scheme. The Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, Ofsted and the Equality and Human Rights Commission are among the 40 organisations we know have left. But 800 or so are hanging on. The Government Legal Department (which advises other departments on what the law says) remains an enthusiastic member, as do the Home Office and the Scottish Government.

Interestingly, Stonewall has responded to criticism by changing its public story. After years of telling employers that the law is outdated, it now claims its advice is in line with the law it has derided, as set out in the Statutory Codes of Practice for employers and service providers.

Yet as analysis published by Sex Matters today reveals, in our report “Understanding the Risk of Following Stonewall Advice” there is an alarming gap between Stonewall’s advice and the Statutory Code of Practice for employers. Stonewall’s approach ignores the rights of other employees, focusing only on advancing gender ideology. In particular, Stonewall’s advice, replaces the Equality Act’s protected characteristics characteristics of sex (being male or female) and “gender reassignment” with a single characteristic, “gender identity” — so that women and trans women are said to have the same “gender identity”. It also states that employers must allow people to choose which toilets and other facilities to use based on their gender identity — and that challenging or denying them access amounts to harassment.

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So what can be done? Well, we will plan to send our report to every Stonewall Champion and to every minister, MP, peer and member of a devolved legislative assembly. Concerned readers can also write to their MPs and representatives, and to organisations they have links with, asking them to leave the Stonewall scheme and return to following the law that protects all their employees.

We are also today sending an open letter with over ten thousand signatures to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. We are calling for a public inquiry into how so many public bodies could have abandoned the Nolan principles of acting in the public interest with integrity, objectivity and accountability, and instead adopted policies that make people afraid of complying with the law, or even of saying what it is.

Such behaviour is not worthy of respect in our democratic institutions. I have already experienced first-hand what can happen when we allow the law to be misinterpreted. And if we don’t wake up to the way it’s being distorted, I certainly won’t be the last.