A friend of mine has a daughter who just started her first year of secondary school. At 12, she’s enamored with Taylor Swift and glued to TikTok, all while still holding her mother in the highest regard.

Not long ago, she returned from school, leaving her backpack in the entryway, her face a picture of puzzlement as she approached her mom.

“Mum,” she said, “my teacher mentioned that you can choose any gender you want to be.”

Her mother paused in her dishwashing, soap bubbles cascading from her hands. While she wasn’t upset, she was definitely perplexed. Her daughter mirrored the same confusion—an expression born from hearing something that seemed incomplete or misunderstood.

Many of us who attended school in Ireland during the 1980s and 1990s recall the unique style of sex education we received. A teacher, visibly flustered and wrapped in a cardigan, would stumble through an explanation with the help of a diagram, often accompanied by an ancient video in a classroom colder than the prefab it was housed in.

If luck was not on your side, you might have encountered Angela, a gentle soul adorned in a Laura Ashley dress, who commenced with a prayer, and delicately talked about reproduction. She’d assure a room full of giggling teens that the act between a husband and wife was a beautiful manifestation of divine love.

It was inadequate, frequently embarrassing and almost entirely biological.

What is being taught in Irish secondary schools today is unrecognisable from that, and most parents have absolutely no idea.

The curriculum documents are not secret. The SPHE course – Social, Personal and Health Education – is on the Department of Education website, available to anyone willing to look. The Junior Cycle version has been in Irish classrooms since September 2023 and the first children to study it are sitting their Junior Cert this year. The Senior Cycle version was published in July 2024 and is being rolled out in schools now. Sitting alongside both is a resource toolkit that most Irish parents have never seen and were never told about.

I spent days going through that material – the lesson plans, the training videos, the classroom handouts, the worksheets handed to children.

In the first-year RSE lessons for children aged 12 and 13, a dedicated class called Activity 3: Gender Identity sets out to introduce ideas that, until recently, most children of that age would never have encountered.

The teacher’s notes are explicit about what the class is for: children are told that a person’s gender identity may differ from the sex they were born with, and they are shown the experiences of young people who identify as transgender.

As part of this lesson, teachers are told to show two videos from Belong To, Ireland’s national LGBTQ+ youth organisation, whose materials underpin much of what is now being used in schools,from its YouTube channel ‘What Is Transgender?’ and ‘Name and Pronoun’. These videos are then used as the basis for classroom discussion.

Children are given a handout with a glossary of terms. It defines transgender as someone whose gender identity differs from their sex at birth, cisgender as someone whose identity aligns with it and non-binary as an identity outside the categories of male or female.

Alongside these definitions, the handout introduces pronouns – they/them, she/her and he/him – illustrated in a straightforward format.

There is more. In the SPHE My Wellbeing Journey textbook used by second-year students aged 13 and 14, the authors state on the first line of page 118: ‘Even babies and young children know it feels good to touch their own genitals.’

The textbook presents this as part of a biological reward system built into the human body. But more about that later.

All of this is delivered to twelve-year-olds not as an open question to be explored, but as established fact — handed down in the language of definitions, with no room left for debate.

Also embedded in the official toolkit is a resource produced by the University of Limerick in partnership with TENI, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, called Gender Identity and Gender Expression in Schools. This workbook is used to train secondary school teachers in how to affirm students’ gender identities at school. Among its worksheets: a bathroom access form asking whether the school gives trans and gender diverse students access to the toilets that match their gender identity; a coming-out worksheet that explicitly states a teacher should not immediately contact the student’s parents, because outing a trans or gender diverse student against their will is defined as a form of transphobia; a bullying worksheet confirming that repeatedly questioning a person’s gender identity is offensive and hurtful.

And then there is the video.

In a training resource produced by the University of Limerick in partnership with TENI, and included in Department-sanctioned SPHE materials, Hannah Foley, TENI’s Family Support and Education Officer, is asked a stark question: do parents need to be told if their child transitions at school?

Her answer is strikingly clear. ‘I think in a post-primary school, the only people who need to be told are the students who are going to be in direct contact with the student who’s transitioning,’ she says. ‘No, I don’t think it’s necessary to tell parents, and I certainly don’t think it’s necessary to tell other students in the school who are in other years, who may not even come into contact with students.’

The implication for Irish families is as dramatic as it is unsettling. A twelve- or thirteen-year-old could change their name, adopt new pronouns across official school records, begin using toilets and embark on a formal transition plan — all within the school setting — without their parents ever being informed. The guidance, as presented in this Department-approved material, places the child, not the parent, at the centre of decision-making, even on matters of significant personal and social consequence.

When asked about this, Hannah Foley of TENI said the training encourages schools, students, and parents to work together to discuss a young person’s needs and agree on appropriate supports. She also emphasised that schools must not share a student’s private information with other students’ parents without explicit consent, in accordance with data protection law.

But notably, this response sidesteps the central issue. It does not address the specific advice given in the training video — that parents do not need to be told about their own child’s transition at school.

How did we get here?

It is a question now being asked in genuine bewilderment by parents across the country — people who sent their children to school in good faith, with little idea of what they might now be taught. If being transgender is presented as part of everyday life in schools, it is only natural for parents to assume it must be relatively common — yet the figures tell a radically different story.

According to the 2023 Growing Up in Ireland study by the ESRI, just over one per cent of 17- and 18-year-olds identify as transgender or non-binary — fewer than one child in a typical class of thirty. And that figure reflects self-description, not medical diagnosis. The condition at the centre of all this, gender dysphoria, is rarer still: before the recent surge in referrals, it was diagnosed in fewer than one in 7,000 young people.

So what changed?

Referrals to Ireland’s National Gender Service have exploded — from just five in 2005 to 610 in 2024. Last year alone saw 652 new cases. The waiting list has now topped 2,500, and the service has been forced to close to new patients because it simply cannot cope.

This surge did not happen in a vacuum. It has unfolded alongside the quiet rollout of this curriculum in schools. That may be presented as coincidence — but many parents will struggle to see it that way.

What the curriculum does not tell students — and this is crucial — is that adolescence is, by its nature, a time of uncertainty and experimentation. Young people have always tried on different identities: the girl who cuts her hair short for a summer, the sensitive boy who drifts away from the rugby pitch, the friend working out what fits and what does not. These are ordinary, messy experiences of growing up — not, in themselves, medical conditions.

Many teenagers will question aspects of identity, including gender, without that leading to a fixed or lifelong outcome. For some, those feelings pass. For others, they evolve in different ways. Yet this wider context is largely absent.

The term gender dysphoria — a specific and relatively rare medical diagnosis — does not appear. Nor is there any clear distinction drawn between that condition and the far more common experience of adolescent uncertainty. Instead, the impression can be one of a single, linear path — when the reality is often far more complex.And that distinction matters. Because strip it away, and you are left with a startling implication: that what was once seen as individuality or rebellion is now, increasingly, framed as something clinical.

There have always been men who played with the boundaries of masculinity — the dandies of the 1920s, the glam rockers of the 1970s, the flamboyant pop stars of the 1980s. David Bowie wore dresses, full makeup, and platform heels, and the world loved him for it. Prince dazzled in high heels and purple satin, extraordinary, otherworldly, entirely his own creation. Neither was considered a medical case, and nobody referred them to a gender clinic. They were artists who understood that masculinity was something fluid, to be played with.

Generations of teenage boys watched them and, perhaps for the first time, felt there was room in the world for them too. Walk through any Irish town in the 1980s, and you would have found teenage boys in eyeliner, in their sisters’ jumpers, in whatever strange and brilliant thing they had decided to be that week. I was a gothic girl at the time, and I remember finding them — all of them, without exception — utterly, insanely attractive.

Most of them grew up, settled down, and are now perfectly happy men with partners and children. They were not transgender. They were simply young and figuring themselves out — and they were given the space to do so.

That space seems to have narrowed. Today, the language of gender identity, with its formal categories and clinical labels, has in some ways made the conversation about who we are more rigid, not less. A label has replaced a phase. A clinic visit has replaced a teenage bedroom and a black eyeliner pencil. And for a growing number of young people, what follows that clinic visit has permanent, irreversible consequences.

What is less often said out loud is where that road can lead. We are not just talking about a new name on a school roll. At its most serious, we are talking about the removal of healthy breast tissue in teenage girls and genital surgery in young men — operations with consequences that last a lifetime and cannot be undone.

Dr Paul Moran, an Irish psychiatrist with years of experience treating young people exploring their gender, was part of the Cass Review — the most thorough investigation into paediatric gender medicine to date. After it was published, he warned that the Department of Health needed to rethink the heavily affirmative teaching materials being sent to schools and to reconsider the outsized influence of activist groups. On schools specifically, he was clear: they should not be taking the lead in the social transitioning of children, a role that requires careful clinical oversight.

Belong To, the national LGBTQ+ youth organisation whose videos are shown in first-year RSE classes, received €295,601 in state funding in 2024, and a further €100,000 from the Government’s LGBTIQ+ Community Services Fund as recently as November 2025. TENI, which produced the teacher training video advising schools that parents need not be informed about their children’s social transitions, continues to receive regular state grants from the HSE and the Department of Children, totalling around €200,000 in restricted funding in the first seven months of 2025, according to its most recent accounts.

At the same time, families of children with disabilities or special needs often face lengthy delays, sometimes waiting months or even years for basic assessments and school support, highlighting questions about the allocation of resources and priorities.

Mary Creedon, a veteran teacher with 33 years in Irish secondary schools and most recently SPHE coordinator at CBS Portlaoise, has emerged as a whistleblower over the new curriculum.

In 2023, she enrolled in a prestigious DCU postgraduate programme designed to train teachers on Ireland’s revised SPHE/RSE course. The programme cost €6,000 per teacher, with 78 staff funded by taxpayers — a confirmed total of €468,000, excluding substitution cover. What she encountered during the training horrified her. Deeply concerned about the content and its suitability for 12- to 15-year-olds, Mary withdrew from the course and resigned from her teaching role.

She went public in a powerful YouTube interview sharing her experiences. The video quickly went viral, racking up roughly 450,000–500,000 views by 2026. Parents, teachers, and politicians were left stunned — sparking nationwide debate. The video’s impact was unmistakable, bringing to light discussions that had long simmered quietly in classrooms.

‘It’s a great subject,’ she says of SPHE. ‘It’s just that they’ve ruined it with certain aspects — with certain learning outcomes they’ve brought in.’ From the very start, Creedon says, the affirmative approach was the only approach allowed. ‘It was taken that everybody agreed with transgender identity ideology. You could not have a gender opinion. Could not.’

She recounts a moment when a lecturer referred to the group as cis women and to women as ‘people with vulvas,’ a term she challenged. What struck her most, she says, was the contrast with other sensitive topics. ‘They would have had loads of opportunities to discuss healthy eating and how that could impact children with anorexia. We looked at alcohol, we looked at substance use — but there was never a discussion allowed on gender identity. It was assumed that everybody agreed with it.’

Creedon describes the teaching toolkit as going far further than most parents realise. On page 16, pupils are given a story called Cinderfella, explicitly designed, she says, to smash gender stereotypes. On page 17, 12- and 13-year-olds are introduced to definitions including drag queen, cross-dresser, gender identity, and non-binary. On page 18, a girl featured in the materials says of being transgender: ‘It’s wonderful because I’m truly who I am. I’m at ease, I’m comfortable, I’m happy, and that’s all that matters.’ There is nothing about the growing number of people who later come to regret transition, nothing on gender dysphoria, and nothing about the possibility that a child’s feelings might pass.

The final straw came at her own school. A facilitator from OIDE, the state agency training teachers, instructed staff that, when greeting students for the first time, they should announce their name and their pronouns. Creedon went home that day and wrote her resignation letter. Her conclusion, after more than three decades in the classroom, is stark: ‘We are actually going to be socially engineering a new type of being. And I don’t think it’s fair on children to be taught that.’

She thinks of her own youngest daughter, now fourteen, a dedicated sportswoman. ‘She’s a real tomboy and she loves her sport. For somebody to come along and say — you’re very tomboyish, maybe you might be in the wrong body. You just don’t know. This madness has to stop.’

Fianna Fáil TD Seán Fleming, who watched Creedon’s video, confirmed he stands by his description of some of the material as a disgrace and said no material of that nature should ever be shown or discussed in schools. Independent TD Carol Nolan went further: ‘The very term gender identity is a highly contested concept that bears no relation to anything but the most subjective understanding of human self-understanding,’ she said. ‘It has been used time and again as an ideological trojan horse within which extreme views on sexual identity and child development are presented as accepted norms. The curriculum absolutely does not represent the wishes of the majority of parents I speak to.’ Her conclusion is blunt: ‘The NCCA and the Department of Education are institutionally captured by gender identity zealots who profess to speak for the majority but who in reality are fringe groups with fringe ideas.’

And the impact isn’t just theoretical — it’s deeply personal, as one Irish young person’s journey from affirmation to regret shows.

Aisling O’Reilly Kane, 28, is originally from Dublin and now lives in Wicklow. She was introduced to me by Genspect, the international organisation founded by Birr-based psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, which supports people experiencing gender distress and advocates for care grounded in evidence rather than ideology.

On March 12, Aisling flew to Washington DC for a landmark event: the first-ever Detrans Awareness Day. Roughly seventy detransitioners from around the world gathered, their voices amplified in a space designed solely for them. The event, hosted by Genspect and attended by doctors, researchers, lawyers, and policymakers, was historic — a global platform giving young people the chance to tell their stories openly for the first time. Among the attendees were five Irish young people who had transitioned and later regretted it. Aisling was one of them.

She told me she came because she needed to speak away from home, away from family, in secret. And she shared something she had never spoken about publicly before: she had wanted to detransition in 2024, during her first year teaching, but felt she could not do so in front of her students. ‘I didn’t feel it was right to expose my first-year students to gender ideology and my gender issues by me detransitioning,’ she said. The Washington event, she explained, gave her the rare chance to be fully honest and unguarded — to finally speak her truth.

She tells me that she was a happy child — just uncomfortable. A tomboy from as young as five or six, she managed her feelings quietly and told nobody. At thirteen, when her mother’s friend had a mastectomy, the idea of having her own breasts removed lodged in her mind. She wasn’t looking for trans content — she found breast cancer clinics and began binding her chest. In 2015, through a school connection, she socially transitioned and legally changed her name. The day after her Leaving Cert, at eighteen, she had a double mastectomy. Ten days later, she started testosterone. By the age of twenty-one, she was put on puberty blockers. ‘I wish I had never found transgenderism,’ she told me. ‘I really do.’

She says she was failed at every turn — by her school, her medical team, and by Belong To. The organisation, she says, coached young people on what to say to doctors and assessors to get gender reassignment surgery approved. She also raises a safeguarding concern she has never made public before: she has epilepsy, and when she asked Belong To how they would contact her parents if she had a seizure at one of their events, she was told that once she left the building, it was the end of their duty of care. ‘I could have been a Jane Doe lying in a hospital bed at fifteen or sixteen,’ she said. ‘That’s terrifying.’

After her transition she felt temporary relief — the comfort of moving through the world unquestioned. But practical and legal questions piled up. Nobody could tell her whether she retained the right to access female spaces later in life or to see a female gynaecologist. The HSE has her listed under her male name, which she fears could be dangerous if she ever loses consciousness and needs emergency care. ‘I’m in a complete legal no man’s land,’ she said. ‘And I’m completely on my own with it.’

She believes that being exposed to gender ideology at school did not ease her distress — it made it worse. In her single-sex school, she could cut her hair short and wear trousers and nobody thought twice about it. When she moved to a mixed school and first encountered the language of transition, the pressure to go further grew. ‘I only ever wanted the double mastectomy originally,’ she said. ‘It was being in that mixed school environment that made me want testosterone as well.’ Her conclusion is one that the Department of Education might usefully sit with: ‘I think I dealt very well with my gender dysphoria until I found gender ideology. I wish I was just able to grow up and see what happens and deal with it.’

Across Europe, the direction of travel has shifted. The Cass Review, published in April 2024 after four years of work, found that the evidence for gender-affirming care in children was remarkably weak. England’s NHS stopped giving puberty blockers to under-18s. Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all carried out their own investigations and moved to restrict or ban these treatments. The UK Department of Education issued guidance making clear that the contested idea that gender is simply a feeling or a choice will not be taught in schools, and that parents must be shown all classroom materials. In Northern Ireland, guidance on supporting transgender pupils has been removed.

And Ireland? It has stood still — leaving young people like Aisling to navigate a system that offers no safeguards, no guidance, and no clarity, while the rest of Europe has already acted.

No one disputes that LGBTQ+ students deserve support, understanding, and visibility in schools. In response to questions I put to them, TENI said research shows including LGBTQ+ topics in the curriculum helps students feel accepted and more likely to stay in school. Belong To told me its videos are designed to build empathy and prevent bullying, that the NCCA chose the materials, and that the curriculum does not cover medical transition. The NCCA emphasized that SPHE is a school subject, not a medical one, so it does not include diagnoses or treatment details, and that teachers are instructed to refer complex medical questions to medical professionals.

These are reasonable points. The question is not whether LGBTQ+ young people deserve to be seen. They do. The question is whether twelve-year-olds are being given the full picture — and whether their parents have any right to know what is being said to them.