Transgenderism: Republican socialist activist Bernadette McAliskey uses International Women's Day speech to say there is no firm definition of 'woman'

Ms McAliskey also indicated there should be no limits placed on when a foetus can be aborted, and that if anyone exposes themselves naked in public "their bodily autonomy should not be challenged".

Ms McAliskey was invited to speak by Alliance for Choice, an abortion advocacy group, to mark International Women’s Day on March 8.

••• ON ABORTION, PROSTITUTION & PUBLIC NUDITY •••

Ms McAliskey said: "So if it's my body and it's my right, it's my right from the start to the end.

"So don't tell me to settle for the first 12 weeks, the first 24 weeks, a position where a foetus may not have any real chance of survival.

"Don't tell me these things will be acceptable, but making a choice for myself in any circumstance is my choice.

"I've always believed in the fundamental right of any woman to secure a safe, a free termination of pregnancy, an abortion, when she asks for it – and that there's a full stop and an exclamation mark after that.

"That's it. That's my core position [applause].”

She went on to say: “Who's got a problem with sex workers, doing sex work of their own free will and consent?

"Because if you have, then you don't believe this is my body. It's simple as that…

"I believe that every woman if she wanted to any any other human being should be able to walk down, get out here and walk the whole way to the city centre stark naked – preferably not on a cold wet night – and not be subjected to ridicule.

"If you did it, you should not be assumed to be mentally ill.

"You should not be assumed to be a fair target for ridicule, for abuse.

"That's the kind of world we should live in – that whoever we are, are our fundamental human integrity should be respected by everybody else... our bodily autonomy should not be challenged by anybody else.”

••• ON TRANSGENDERISM •••

She also addressed the subject of what a woman is.

When it comes to he phrase “transwomen are not women” Ms McAliskey said: "I can't get my head actually round anybody who does think that.”

She told the audience: "It's not for somebody out there in the feminist movement within their particular ideology to tell somebody else they are not a woman if that person says that they are. It's just not on [applause].

"It's not on. And there's no rocket science in that [laughter].

"This is not a subject for a treatise, an undergraduate paper [laughter], a research, a podcast. No need. This is simple logic.

"If we believe this is my body, then I'll tell you whose body this is, what kind of body this is, and what I determine myself to be.

"And if you can't buy that, then you have to go and find the weakness, the flaw, the gap in your own knowledge, in your own humanity. in your own politics, because that's where the problem is.

"And if you don’t figure it out, when push comes to shove, you cannot be relied upon to take this struggle forward.”

She added: “And I'm not telling you things you don't know, because I see all the heads nodding.”

••• ON GENDER EQUALITY •••

"The right to say ‘no’ wasn't there when I was growing up,” said Ms McAliskey.

"It wasn’t there. And the safety and ability to protect yourself was a 24-hour-a-day job, since the world was full of men.”

Later she added that women were not even considered “second class citizens”.

“It's as deep a taboo, it's as deep a cultural fear in the maleness of our system, that women should be equal in every respect.

"That deep concept in the whole culture of our world is as deeply embedded a taboo, in its ultimate realisation, as incest is. I've no doubt about that.

"It's so deeply embedded across generations that the sky would fall down on Chicken Licken’s head if we had absolute and unequivocal gender equality.

"It would challenge war, it would challenge coercion, it would challenge the maleness of power.”

••• WHO IS BERNADETTE MCALISKEY? •••

Bernadette McAliskey came to prominence off the back of the civil rights in 1969 as the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Commons.

Though unmentioned in the hour-long video of her address, Ms McAliskey was also a founding member of the IRSP – the political wing of the INLA, founded at the same time in 1974 – alongside Seamus Costello.

She resigned from the party soon after (historian Tom Pat Coogan said her departure was due to her objections to its "militarism").

She later praised Costello – a leader of the OIRA (which killed over 50 people) and later the INLA (which went on to kill around 140) – for his “strength and inspiration”.

In 1994, Ms McAliskey carried the coffin of another mass killer, INLA boss Dominic McGlinchey, calling him "the finest republican of them all".

McGlinchey had earned the nickname Mad Dog (over a decade before it was applied to Johnny Adair) because of the extreme violence of the INLA during his tenure.

Ms McAliskey herself was shot and wounded by the UDA during the Troubles.

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