Whatever the media decides is news, is news. This is one of the most significant revelations I’ve had as an adult trying to understand the world, and I’m embarrassed to say it came to me later than it should have.
I can’t even remember what I thought news was back before I had this earth-shattering epiphany. Did I imagine there was some kind of mineral-rich spring of Things That Happened, a bubbling geothermal pool of eternally-replenishing events and developments, into which editors and journalists daily lowered their buckets? There’s no point in everyone turning up at the courts, the car accidents, or the scenes of the sexual crimes and standing around asking W questions about it. The media fetches all the things that happened, and serve them up to us fresh so we can go about our daily lives. Don’t they?
As I was belatedly to learn, barring major events like tsunamis, deaths of celebrities, or elections, what’s ‘news’ is the decision of the people who work in a given news company. If there’s a gang-rape at a Galway train station, a reporter is just as likely to come back from a trip to the news well with a bucket full of story about an Irish language dispute concerning the same station, while side-stepping the arguably more important headline story. But what about the gang-rape!? cry the eyewitnesses and the locals and the independent politicians and the comments sections and the stubborn, swivel-eyed loons shouting on Twitter and YouTube street corners.
But those people are not official newsbringers. You can safely ignore them. We open the paper or zap on the Six O’Clock news on the day of the train station gang-rape and Lo! it didn’t happen. Phew, that’s a relief.
The absence of the story in the official newsbringer channels, sites, and pages does more than just keep people ignorant of a thing having happened, it does something far more insidious: surely… surely… if something so momentous, so consequential, so indicative of a larger societal issue had taken place, it would have been served to us? The fact that it hasn’t been reported says something about the people who are claiming it did happen, or claiming that it matters. It says either that the people bleating on about it are wrong, or that they are trying to make news of something that isn’t news. Either option points to a nefarious agenda on the part of the stubborn town criers insisting it’s important.
Millions of us lumber along under this cloud of received naïveté. I was only snapped out of it because something that I knew to be news happened, and then it happened again, and then it happened over and over and over again, and the media decided it didn’t happen. And only after much, much cajoling, they acknowledged begrudgingly that ok, maybe it happened, but it wasn’t news enough for it to qualify as having happened-happened.
In that sense, the recent running media coverage in Northern Ireland surrounding the scrubbing of the Women’s Rights Northern Ireland event from an annual cultural festival programme was incredible. It was treated as the newsworthy event that it was.
Northern Ireland’s media class (though not its political class) seems to have accepted and acknowledged that there is a conflict of rights between an existing policy (women can keep men away from us, sometimes) and a newer, more fashionable policy (women cannot keep men away from us because men are sometimes actually women themselves).
And though the NI media establishment has been just as conveniently craven as their counterparts in other jurisdictions, it may be harder to ignore the erasure of sex in law there, for a few different reasons.
First of all, Northern Ireland is affected by the UK Supreme Court pronouncement that woman has a biological meaning in law, so news editors can’t be accused of “obsessing over trans people” by reporting on it (a common trope on the activist side to deflect attention from their insane demands). The fact that there is a squabble brewing over which jurisdiction's laws apply in the courts in the context of male access to women’s spaces and services — the UK’s, the EU’s, or some domestically-derived third thing — has pushed the entire trans issue further into the ‘mentionable’ category of current affairs.
Secondly, the size of Northern Ireland, and the concentrated nature of its mainstream media offering, helps focus everyone’s attention more or less on the same time thing at the same time. Thanks to previous reporting on the issue, including some straight-reporting on Sara Morrison’s workplace tribunal dispute, the general public had a decent level of prior knowledge on the topic. Thirdly, there’s the fact that the BBC (which has a Northern Ireland channel) was embarrassed about revelations about its one-sided transactivist content last year. Editorial policy change might more quickly be felt on such a small terrain.
Also, as anyone who followed last week’s events will know, ur-TERF JK Rowling jumped into the fray, adding to the newsiness of the affair. And of course there’s always the sneaking suspicion that there’s a secret TERF working on the news desk.
All of this meant that the incident(s) got pretty good coverage overall. And coverage is pretty much all anyone ever expected or wanted: acknowledgement that a policy or legal development clashes with an already existing policy or law, and acknowledgement that the effort to sort it all out is leading to some drama. This allows the public to make up their own minds on the issue, which they are now free to do, despite some outlets’ best efforts to steer opinion in their preferred direction: Sex Matters have done a detailed autopsy of the local reporting of the incident and found a lot of it to be bad, biased, or incomplete. But one thing they cannot fault the media for is the fact that the coverage happened at all. And that, for TERFs, is major news in itself.
Nora Calder, one of the women behind Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland, who acted as spokeswoman during a number of media spots during the drama, told me that the establishment has perhaps underestimated the degree to which people in Northern Ireland have been knowin about this issue, and have come to their own conclusions about its newsworthiness. By continuing to ignore or downplay it, media companies risk further shitting all over their own credibility — something that (as I have been told by a number of journalists) editors in other countries are very much fretting about, but are unsure about how to resolve.
It’s a bit like the tax bill you thought would go away if you shoved it deep enough under the pile of instruction manuals for electrical appliances in the kitchen mess drawer (true story). This stubborn not-news about trans activism versus women’s rights just will not fuck off. The media is slowly and sourly putting their finger under the seal of the envelope and ripping it open.
The cultural sector did not get get the memo, of course. The utterly mortifying grovelling of the Féile festival oragnisers to appease the online activist mob felt almost retro; their hastily-drafted Instagram knee-bend in which they announced that no TERF would darken their stage harked back to an earlier, sillier time. Those days are clearly over; requests to join Women’s Rights Network are through the roof, Nora told me.
Enjoy the interview.
Send me your stories, I’m all (t)ears: roisinmichaux@gmail.com. I’m also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/RoisinMichaux
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Show notes (AI generated)
In this episode of Peaked, Róisín Michaux speaks with Nora Calder, one of the women involved in running the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland, about the extraordinary events surrounding the cancellation of the organisation’s planned panel at Féile an Phobail in Belfast.
The conversation traces the story from the original application for a panel on women’s rights, sex-based rights, single-sex spaces and women’s sport, through the panel’s acceptance, the subsequent social-media controversy, the cancellation by Féile, and the legal and political fallout that followed.
Nora explains what happened behind the scenes as the Women’s Rights Network sought to have the event reinstated, including the organisation’s attempts to engage with Féile, the legal process, the support that came from women around the world, and the decision ultimately to organise an alternative event.
The discussion then moves beyond Féile to the wider political situation in Northern Ireland, including the Equality Commission’s judicial review, the UK Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, Sarah Morrison’s case, BBC coverage of the controversy, engagement with Justice Minister Naomi Long, and the forthcoming Northern Ireland election.
Featured Topics
Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland
Féile an Phobail
The cancelled “Respect, Rights & Reality” panel
The original Féile application
Sex-based rights
Single-sex spaces
Women’s sport
The UK Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling
The online campaign surrounding the Féile panel
The cancellation of the event
J.K. Rowling’s offer of legal support
The legal challenge against Féile
The alternative event in Belfast
Sex Matters
Fiona McAnena
Athena Forum
Gaels for Fair Play
Women’s rights activism in Northern Ireland
The political divisions of Northern Ireland
The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland
Article 2 of the Windsor Framework
Sarah Morrison
BBC Spotlight
Nolan Investigates
Stonewall
Naomi Long
The Alliance Party
Northern Ireland’s prisons and women’s services
The March 2027 Northern Ireland election
The 2025 Féile event was titled “Whose Victory Is It Anyway? Why the UK Supreme Court Ruling Is Not a Victory for the Feminist Movement” and was organised by Féile’s Debates and Discussions Committee. The event argued that the Supreme Court ruling was regressive for feminism. (Féile an Phobail)
Féile 2025: Whose Victory Is It Anyway?
The Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland
The Women’s Rights Network is a UK-wide organisation campaigning around the rights and interests of women and girls.
Nora discusses the work of the Northern Ireland branch, including political engagement, campaigning, Freedom of Information requests, judicial reviews and public events. She explains that the Northern Ireland branch works both independently and with the wider WRN network, sharing information and research between regional groups.
Women’s Rights Network on YouTube
Women’s Rights Network YouTube channel
The Planned Panel
The planned event was titled:
Respect, Rights & Reality: Women’s Voices from Ireland and Europe
The panel was intended to bring together women from Northern Ireland, Ireland and Europe to discuss sex-based rights and the legal and political questions surrounding them.
Among the organisations and speakers discussed were:
Women’s Rights Network
Athena Forum
Gaels for Fair Play
Sex Matters
Fiona McAnena from Sex Matters subsequently agreed to participate. Nora describes the excitement among the organisers after the event was accepted and speakers began agreeing to take part.
The Cancellation
On 21 July 2026, Féile an Phobail cancelled the WRN Northern Ireland event.
Féile said it had been unaware from the initial submission that the event would “promote campaigns against rights for the Transgender community” and said the event was being withdrawn from the programme.
WRN Northern Ireland responded that the event was explicitly a discussion about women’s sex-based rights and that this had been made clear in the original application. The organisation said it was shocked and disappointed by the cancellation. (Belfast Media Group)
The cancellation became the central controversy around the festival, with media coverage, political debate and an increasingly intense online response.
Gript: Rights group says ‘women will not be silenced’ as Féile cancels
BBC News NI: Organisation ‘shocked’ after Féile cancels event
J.K. Rowling & The Legal Challenge
BBC Coverage of the Controversy
BBC Radio Ulster / BBC Audio coverage
Sex Matters: BBC Northern Ireland’s coverage of the cancellation of WRN NI’s panel
The Legal Dispute and the Alternative Event
Newsletter: Women’s Rights Network event goes ahead in Belfast after Féile cancellation
Video
A video connected with the Féile controversy and WRN Northern Ireland:
Women’s Rights Network & The Broader Political Picture
The conversation moves from the Féile controversy to the wider political landscape in Northern Ireland.
Nora discusses attempts to engage senior politicians and her meeting with Naomi Long, the Justice Minister and leader of the Alliance Party.
She describes repeatedly asking Long to meet with WRN before eventually securing a meeting, where they discussed prisons, policing, intimate searches and women’s services.
Further Reading & Listening
Féile Cancellation
Gript: Rights group says ‘women will not be silenced’ as Féile cancels
BBC News NI: Organisation ‘shocked’ after Féile cancels event
Sex Matters: BBC Northern Ireland’s coverage of the cancellation of WRN NI’s panel
The Replacement Event
Newsletter: Women’s Rights Network event goes ahead in Belfast after Féile cancellation
Féile
2025 Féile panel on the Supreme Court ruling
BBC Audio
Video
Watch the Nora Calder / WRN-related video
Guest Links
Nora Calder
Women’s Rights Network
Host
Róisín Michaux
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Substack
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