Why are politicians so incapable of answering basic questions about biology? Yesterday it was Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s turn. A journalist asked him a yes or no question: ‘Do you believe that Barbie Kardashian is a woman?’ Barbie Kardashian, whose birth name was Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile, is a violent man who identifies as a woman. Last week he was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail – a women’s jail – for threatening to torture, rape and murder his own mother. He is, as the journalist who cornered Varadkar put it, ‘a violent biological male with a penis’.
So what was Varadkar’s answer to this easiest of questions? This was a straightforward query as to whether a person who was born male and has male genitalia and who issues violent threats against women is, as he claims, a woman. It wasn’t ‘No’. It wasn’t ‘Yes’, either. The questions seems to have stumped Ireland’s leader, which is bizarre given he studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin. Varadkar
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