Posts shared millions of times on X, Facebook and TikTok this month claim that Irish teacher Enoch Burke has been “sentenced to life in prison for transphobia” after refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns, reports Reuters. Court records and multiple fact‑checks show something very different: Burke is being held in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison on an open‑ended civil contempt order for repeatedly defying High Court injunctions not to trespass on the grounds of his former school.

The distinction is central. A criminal life sentence in Ireland follows conviction for a serious offence and carries a minimum custodial term before parole can even be considered. Civil contempt, by contrast, is a coercive measure: detention continues only for as long as the person refuses to comply with a court order. In Burke’s case, judges have repeatedly said he can walk free if he undertakes to stay away from Wilson’s Hospital School in Co Westmeath.

None of this has stopped the story mutating online into a stark culture‑war narrative. One widely shared post asserted: “Today in Ireland, Christian schoolteacher Enoch Burke was sentenced to LIFE in prison for ‘refusing to use a transgender student’s pronouns’.” An almost identical message on X drew about 2.5 million views. Screenshots of a headline reading “sentenced to life in prison for transphobia” have circulated internationally, often stripped of any reference to court orders or trespass.

An examination of court judgments, legal commentary and contemporaneous reporting presents a more complex, and more prosaic, chain of events stretching back to 2022.

Burke, an evangelical Christian and then a teacher at Wilson’s Hospital, began objecting publicly when the school’s principal directed staff to use a transitioning student’s new name and they/them pronouns. He interrupted a school event and a religious service to challenge the directive. The board suspended him in August 2022 pending a disciplinary process and secured an interim High Court injunction requiring him not to attend the school while suspended.

He refused to comply, continuing to turn up at the campus gates and attempting to enter the grounds. In September 2022 he was committed to Mountjoy for civil contempt of court. He spent 108 days in custody before being released shortly before Christmas, still without agreeing to obey the order.

The pattern then repeated. Burke resumed attending at the school. The High Court imposed fines of €700 for each day he appeared, later increased in subsequent rulings; by late 2025, unpaid contempt fines owing to the Courts Service exceeded €225,000. In January 2023 a disciplinary panel dismissed him as a teacher. In May that year, Mr Justice Alexander Owens ruled that his suspension had been lawful, described Burke as the “author of his own misfortune”, awarded the school €15,000 in damages for trespass and granted a permanent injunction barring him from the campus.

Despite this, Burke continued to present himself at the school. He has now been jailed on civil‑contempt grounds four times and, cumulatively, has spent more than 500 days behind bars over the dispute. In November 2025, Mr Justice Brian Cregan ordered his fourth committal after finding that fines and private security had failed to deter him. The judge also ordered that Burke’s state‑funded teacher’s salary be paid directly to the school until the €15,000 trespass award is discharged.

Cregan’s written judgment is explicit on the reason for the imprisonment. “Mr Burke has not been imprisoned or fined for his views on transgender issues, which he is perfectly entitled to have and to articulate,” it states. “Mr Burke has been imprisoned, and fined, for contempt of court, because he has breached court orders directing him not to trespass on school property.” The judge added that Burke “has the keys to his own prison”: he will remain detained until he purges his contempt by undertaking to obey the injunction.

Irish legal materials underline the difference between this and a criminal life term. The Law Society Gazette and the Law Reform Commission have described civil‑contempt detention as indeterminate but coercive rather than punitive – a mechanism to force compliance with court orders. By contrast, under the Parole Act 2019, prisoners serving criminal life sentences cannot be granted parole until they have served at least 12 years, and typically remain in custody for much longer. Burke has not been convicted of any offence attracting a life sentence and is not under the Parole Board’s remit.

The “life sentence” language appears to have originated not in court but in Burke’s own camp. On 3 December, a post on his verified X account claimed that a judge had jailed him for Christmas with an “effective life sentence” and described his “only crime” as refusing to endorse “transgenderism” and “a satanic ideology”. Sympathetic websites and commentators amplified that phrase, and some headlines dropped the qualifier “effective”, presenting it as a formal life term.

From there the story was simplified further as it crossed borders and platforms. Many posts omit any mention of injunctions, contempt hearings, daily fines or trespass findings, compressing three years of litigation into a one‑line narrative: teacher refuses pronouns, is jailed for life. Right‑wing and Christian outlets in several countries have used the case to illustrate claims that Western governments are criminalising dissent on gender identity.

Irish and international fact‑checkers including Reuters, The Journal in Dublin and US‑based Lead Stories have all described the online claims as misleading. They note that purging his contempt does not require Burke to use any particular pronouns or renounce his beliefs. It would simply mean giving a binding undertaking to stay away from Wilson’s Hospital School.

For now, Burke remains in Mountjoy ahead of a further High Court review next year. The case has become a test of the Irish courts’ willingness to use open‑ended civil‑contempt powers against a litigant who appears determined not to comply – and a case study in how a technical legal impasse can be reframed, within days, as a global parable of “life in prison for pronouns”.