Catherine Fitzsimons-Belgaid

Dublin Zoo houses thousands of animals that need daily feeding, care, and monitoring by vets. It also employs over 100 full-time staff whose wages add significantly to costs. These bills are covered by visitors who come to the zoo. For about three months, however, no visitors have been able to visit due to bad weather. Consequently, I believe the zoo decided it needed an effective advertising campaign to attract visitors back. They hired a colourful personality, James Patrice, to lead that campaign and draw attention to it. James does not claim to be a woman, nor to be trans; in fact, I don't think he's even publicly commented on trans issues or men using women’s spaces. He's clearly a man and doesn't hide it, but based on the reaction to this ad, you'd think he wanted to kill everyone’s firstborn. He's an actor, writer and performer, and Malahide Woman is a character he wrote. I think she's an amalgamation of many of those upwardly mobile women who think it's where you're from rather than who you are that's important. I think people in larger and larger numbers oppose the idea that men can identify as women, use women’s spaces and make demands of lesbians, etc., and they rightly see their opposition as being common sense. And people like yourself, JK Rowling, and James Dreyfus were/are great at fighting against and highlighting the absurdity and lack of common sense in the trans women are women agenda. You, J K, and James D. focused on the important issues, while those opposed to you began to lose their common sense and fixate on trivial matters, trying to make them important. Ergo, they are haemorrhaging support. The reaction to this Dublin Zoo ad is a bit like that, I think. It's an ad campaign to try to get people back to the Zoo in their droves. Nothing deeper or more sinister. I can see the temptation to find a bogeyman under every stone but that's just doing the same thing the trans right crowd did that lost them support for their cause. .