The phrase “third rail” was originally coined to describe the electrified line that runs alongside train tracks, deadly to the touch. In politics and public discourse, it has come to signify any subject deemed too dangerous, too radioactive, too fraught to approach.
And while journalism in a liberal democracy is, in theory, about touching all the rails – especially the live ones – theory and practice often diverge.
Last week, the New York Times published all six episodes of The Protocol, a podcast series that represents a significant moment in the polarised US debate around youth transgender healthcare. The series explores how the standardised medical approach to gender transition in minors was developed in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Known as the “Dutch protocol”, the model recommends the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for carefully assessed adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria.
That protocol was later exported, adapted – and contested – elsewhere, including in the United Kingdom and United States, where culture war battle lines have long since been drawn. The New York Times podcast tells a story of shifting medical consensus, political pressure, and institutional confusion. But it also carries a subtext about journalism itself – how hard it can be for newsrooms to report accurately and fairly on an issue that cuts so close to the cultural bone.
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It’s worth noting that the New York Times has not emerged from this process unscathed. Over the past few years, its coverage of trans issues has prompted significant internal dissent. A 2022 feature by journalist Emily Bazelon questioning aspects of the prevailing medical model and an article by Katie Baker in 2023 titled, When Students Change Gender Identity and Parents Don’t Know sparked public protests, petitions signed by some of the paper’s reporters, and an open letter from celebrities and activists accusing the newspaper of platforming “anti-trans bigotry”. Senior editors responded with unusually sharp criticism of their staff, insisting that journalism “cannot exist in service of any cause”.
The Protocol feels, in part, like an attempt to reset. Bazelon is credited as an adviser on the podcast. The editorial tone is serious, sober, and almost anxious in its caution. There are no polemics. But the very act of producing it – at scale, with resources and rigour – feels like a line being drawn: a claim that this subject, however charged, can and should be reported on without fear or favour.
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Which brings us to this side of the Atlantic.
In the same week The Protocol dropped, Irish psychotherapist Stella O’Malley published a blog post recounting her own experience with Irish media. O’Malley, a founder of the organisation Genspect, is sharply critical in the post and in an interview on the State of Us podcast, of what she describes as the effective blacklisting of dissenting voices on the issue of youth transition by Irish media, including The Irish Times. “In Ireland,” she writes, “cancel culture doesn’t burn you at the stake – it quietly leaves you out in the cold”.
O’Malley is particularly scathing about RTÉ, where, until 2021, she had been a regular contributor to national discussions on youth mental health. Since then, she says, her media invitations have dried up. She cites the Irish media’s lack of coverage on key developments abroad, such as the closure of the Tavistock gender clinic in London following the Cass Review, or the recent UK Supreme Court ruling that sex, not gender identity, should be the basis of protections under equality law, as evidence of what she characterises as a systemic avoidance of uncomfortable facts.
Of course, O’Malley is now an activist with a clear ideological stance, and reasonable people can disagree with her conclusions or question her affiliations. But if activism were a barrier to participation in Irish current affairs programmes, there would be an awful lot of silence on our airwaves. What seems harder to deny is that, in her case and others, views that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy on gender identity are seen as beyond the pale.
This may explain a striking media gap. The Cass Review in the UK, a years-long, evidence-based review of youth gender services led by a respected paediatrician, concluded that the medical model developed in the Netherlands and exported widely was, in many cases, being applied without sufficient clinical oversight.
It led directly to the suspension of all routine prescription of puberty blockers to under-18s in the National Health Service. The Irish media coverage of this was scant, scattered and mostly relegated to the opinion pages, even though it had a direct impact on the treatment of Irish children, or that the largest political party on the island, Sinn Féin, was forced into policy contortions on either side of the Border as a result.
Why the reticence? There is a commonly heard view that to even enter this debate is to engage in a “toxic” discourse imported from Britain and the US – best avoided in a mature, progressive society. But this is an odd position, especially in a media culture that otherwise shows little hesitation in following every twist and turn of UK and US affairs, from the post-Brexit travails of the Conservative party to the power struggles within the Trump White House.
The truth may be simpler and more uncomfortable. Irish journalism, like Irish society, is small. The circles are tight. The cost of stepping on the wrong third rail – socially, professionally, reputationally – is high. Better, perhaps, to look away.
And yet the issues are not going away. Ireland, like every other country, is grappling with questions of medical ethics, consent, identity, and law. Young people experiencing gender distress deserve compassionate, evidence-based care. But they also deserve a society willing to discuss that care honestly. And journalists, if they are doing their jobs, have to be part of that conversation, even when it’s difficult.
