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 answered with a short, awkward silence followed by this statement: ‘Well, look, I, I, I, I don’t, I actually don’t know anything about the case yet, I saw, I first saw it reported at the weekend, erm, and, and, I’m going to have look into it.’

Look into it? All the facts were right there in front of him. The journalist laid them out. What’s more, if Varadkar had already heard about the case, at the weekend, that means he had plenty of time to come to the same conclusion that every other rational person in Ireland has come to: that this man is a man. That this biological male, who made vile threats against his own mum, is a bloke. And, furthermore, that he has absolutely no place in a women’s prison. Varadkar’s shirking of reason – presumably because he’s terrified of being targeted by hardline trans activists – was an embarrassment. He let down the women of Ireland. This is his Sturgeon moment.

To be fair to Varadkar, he did respond more sensibly to the follow-up question on whether he thinks violent biological men should be put in women’s prisons. ‘No, I don’t, quite frankly,’ he said. ‘If a situation that arose in Scotland has now arisen in Ireland,’ he said (referencing the notorious case of the female-identifying Scottish rapist Isla Bryson, who was initially put in a women’s prison before being moved to a male jail), ‘then we’re going to have to deal with it in a similar way.’ That’s promising. But huge questions still lurk. Including the question of why a clever, well-educated Taoiseach cannot say that an individual who threatened to use his penis to rape a woman is a man.

A man whose crime was to plot the atrocious torture and murder of a woman is being housed with women

The Barbie Kardashian case is deeply disturbing. Kardashian was convicted of seven counts of threatening to kill or cause serious harm to his mother. He hatched a plan to go to his mother’s house and overpower her with a knife, a screwdriver and boiling water. The judge described him as ‘unrepentant’ about his vile matricidal ideations. Perversely, Kardashian has been placed in the women’s section of Limerick prison. A man whose crime was to plot the atrocious torture and murder of a woman is being housed with women. This is a new low in the Irish state’s embrace of the transgender ideology.

It is nothing short of psychotic that someone like Kardashian has been put in a jail that will have many inmates who have experienced male violence. Gardai told Limerick Circuit Court that Kardashian poses a ‘significant threat’ to ‘the wider public’. One source told the Irish Mirror that Kardashian is considered ‘one of the most dangerous inmates in the system’. Prison authorities believe he is ‘far too dangerous’ to be allowed out to ‘interact with anyone else’, so he is currently in isolation. Apparently he’s taken out for one hour of exercise a day, during which he has to be ‘unlocked by several staff, as she [sic] poses that much of a threat’.

What madness is this? It’s like putting a fox in a henhouse and keeping a close eye on it to make sure it doesn’t attack the hens. Let’s be clear about what is happening here: the emotional and physical safety of female prisoners is being sacrificed to the narcissistic needs of a man who thinks he’s a woman. Kardashian’s desire to be treated as a woman is being elevated above the right of actual women not to be locked up with a violent man. The validation of this man’s gender identity is considered more important than the security of the women in Limerick’s prison estate. The reorganisation of the prison around flattering the identity of a dangerous man is a disgrace. It is state-endorsed misogyny.

Indeed, it is striking how much New Ireland – post-Catholic, politically correct – resembles Old Ireland. The religion might have changed – back then the state was beholden to old-world Catholicism, now it’s enamoured with the new religion of identity politics – but it is still women who lose out. In the past, the ruling ideology dictated that women should be incarcerated, in so-called laundries, if they committed sins of the flesh. Now the new ruling ideology, the furious insistence that every gender identity be respected and validated, dictates that women will sometimes have to be incarcerated with violent males, whether they like it or not. Then and now, ideological zealotry overpowers reason and subjugates the rights of women to the whims of men.

The Irish state and the Irish media need to get a grip. It is surely a type of delirium that media outlets are running with headlines like ‘Woman jailed for… threats to murder her mother’, and that so many in the Irish elite accept that Kardashian is literally a woman. Let us hope Kardashian is removed from Limerick Women’s prison with extreme urgency. But even then, Varadkar will have to answer the question that was put to him yesterday. Is Barbie Kardashian a woman: yes or no?