Helen Joyce: the truth about trans and why sex matters | SpectatorTV

hello and welcome to Marshall matters with me Winston Marshall at The Spectator on this podcast I've been exploring freedom of speech and taboo topics in the creative industry well it seems to me there is no more totemic and taboo a topic than the trans debate so to explore the trans issue I am joined by Britain Edison Economist and author of trans Helen Joyce Helen thank you so much thanks for inviting me in um so Hardball question yep to start off is a trans woman a woman of course not we all know what woman means woman means that you were conceived female you got born and you grew up you didn't die before you grew up that's the only Criterion for being a one so then what is all that's about well some people would like to redefine the words man and woman to mean well I don't know what quite what they think they mean because I've spent years thinking about it and I can't make it work maybe social roles maybe they think there are social roles man and woman and that a man can play the social role of a woman I've never heard anything with sexist in my life I don't think that I play the social role of a woman I just think I am a woman and everything I do is a thing that a woman does just by definition and I've done some very manly things in my life I have a PhD in mathematics for example I'm also a mother I don't think that makes me some mixture of masculine and feminine I think I'm just a woman who you know did some relatively unconventional things as well as some quite conventional things some people want to be the opposite sex and I think that a lot of this started by a misplaced kindness uh the desire to accommodate people and when there were very few of them that maybe didn't seem like such a big deal like we don't worry about witness protection you know and we forceify all sorts of things for people in witness protection but they're just such a tiny number and there's a reason to do it so when they were very very very very very tiny number of people who wanted to have surgery and try and pass as the opposite sex doesn't matter but now we're in a situation where several percent of young people say that they are not identifying within the gender binary or that their Trends or their non-binary they're gender fluid and and then they want to move around in a world that does have certain things separated by sex then it is a problem you know that a man just says I feel like a woman today I'm going into the women's toilets I mean Eddie's ordinary uses the women's toilets does he he does yeah and and uh are you worried about does that concern you of course it's not private I don't think any men should be in the women's toilets so I don't care if they're putting on lipstick or a skirt they still shouldn't be in the women's toilets right now part of this and it seems to me uh about definition of words and one word that has many definitions is gender and I want to understand what where the word gender comes from and why it's being differentiated from sex now I think I have the answer to this but perhaps and I think you express this very well in articulate this in your in your book but perhaps you can break this down the difference between sex and gender so sex is reproductive roles and that doesn't mean that you're fertile it doesn't mean you've actually been a parent doesn't mean that you know you're still at the fertile point of your life or anything but it's a body plan it's a body plan that was designed by Evolution to support either the male or female role in reproduction or mammals come in male and female most plants and animals do too only like you know little single-celled organisms that just split don't and male means that the whole organism or the body part was uh created in such a way like by Evolution that it supports the production of small motile gametes that we call sperm in humans and female means it's eggs and those are two reproductive strategies and those things shape your whole body like everything in a man's body and everything in a woman's body has been optimized by Evolution to support those two reproductive roles so where did gender come from then well the word used to mean just a grammatical thing like you know gender was in grammar whether it was a masculine or feminine word and I mean that doesn't necessarily mean to do with male and female like the word for girl in German is a masculine word in Ireland the same with Colleen the word for girl is a I think it's neuter it's not female anyway um and then it got sort of co-opted into meaning these social roles and the way we're socialized into being masculine or feminine but this is a co-option by uh by feminists by famously and they were they were trying to separate out the idea that you know a woman had to be feminine in the famous phrase of Simone de Beauvoir she said uh one's not born but becomes a woman and she didn't mean that a man can become a woman she meant as girls female children are socialized into being woman that you're not able to just grow up and be yourself you're forced into you know Beauty rituals subservience you know the mirror to men that sort of thing and there's an awful lot of Truth to that and of course there's an equivalent process of socialization for boys and men you don't cry be tough you know don't show if you feel pain be ready to fight those sorts of things and they're not totally divorced from biological reality these roles like there's not nothing not totally divorce no of course not because I mean you know obviously they're not at all no some of them are I mean things like which color is a boy color or a girl color that's just arbitrary right you know so some things about gender are quite arbitrary the fact that dancing in our culture is seen as a feminine thing to do in many cultures it's done exclusively by men so some some gender things are absolutely in positions and the idea that you know that uh women are there to reflect back the man believe you me it doesn't look like that from this side but that is a gendered expectation so for second wave feminists I think they went too far in saying that it was all socialization sure but a lot of it is and it's very interesting and productive to look and see which bits are actually tied to how people are how we behave towards people who are gender non-conforming because even the bits that are connected with or being male or female some people are very very atypical for their sex and how how good are we at accommodating those people you know if you're a very flamboyant somewhat flaming gay man how do you fit into your culture if you're super Butch lesbian how do you fit into your culture culture you know but then it became this idea of gender identity which was something more inner like an essence um and I it's odd that this happened because the person who cited most often Judith Butler saw it as a performance she saw it as an extremely external and superficial thing she said gender is what you do and she denied any sort of natural substrate to it at all she just thought that they were the things that got reality because they were done over and over again famously she said that they are in imitations without Originals what does that mean oh it means that like it's totally arbitrary what men and women do in our culture completely arbitrary but it's just done over and over again okay and that's what made it masculine and feminine and she believes that you could disrupt it by drag or by you know being deliberately gender and unconforming by querying the boundaries this sort of thing but somehow she's still cited by people who seem to believe that it's an Inner Essence and I mean the more I don't know the more trivial of these people seem to think that it's like a pink brain in a blue body or a blue brain in a pink body I mean these are the drawings that used to be done for children yeah a couple years ago by the translobby groups like they would literally show a little outline of a child pink you know with a blue brain and say this child you know has a boy gender identity trapped in a girl's body is this the concept of a sexed soul yeah that's what I've called it um I mean if you say that they'll say no no it's much more subtle than that but if you look at the teaching materials that are going to schools that's exactly what they're saying I mean as soon as you say that a man could be a woman either you mean the social roles see I mean if you target himself up and wears makeup and high heels and tatters around the place saying yes sir he's become a woman or you mean he feels like a woman and that makes him a woman like there are no other options so I know there's a as you cite the the post-modernist uh history that's that's shaped the course of of this philosophy but is there a science to uh people who have gen dysphoria what's what do we understand about that scientifically so gender dysphoria is the experience of being deeply uncomfortable with the fact of your sex um hard to imagine I suppose unless you've experienced it so I can't be more precise than that I mean the latest iteration of trans ideology doesn't require gender dysphoria for the idea that your trends like it says some people have no gender dysphoria they just know that they are non-binary or they know that they're members of the opposite sex so they have left that behind even but if we for a moment just answer the question you know what is gender dysphoria it doesn't mean you're a member of the opposite sex you know like how could it it just means you're unhappy being the sex you are in some way so what's gender dysphoria it's the next question you might ask yourself well I would say that it's a largely socially created illness so that's true of most mental conditions that they are some mixture of a predisposition life history but also how Society interprets what's happened to you so if you think of something like anorexia if you could look back through history there have always been occasional people who have settled on self-starvation as a way to express their discomfort or their you know hatred of their lives or as a response to a society they see as just unbearable you know it's rare and then it it sort of became the done the done way to express your misery if you were a young American Girl American teenage girl in say the 1970s or 80s but it was still unusual elsewhere and sociologists of medicine have tracked how the media spread that idea in other cultures and so the cases of anorexia arise like really arise from almost nothing to very large numbers so that this is actually something that uh happened in Hong Kong until 1993 or 1994 there are very few cases of anorexia and and they weren't and they weren't experienced the typical way that we think of anorexia so the version of anorexia you and I have been taught involves a distorted body image you know the girl who's starving away still looks in the mirror and sees herself as fat the few kids who were starving themselves in Hong Kong before that period knew perfectly well what size they were they just tended to say I I feel I can't eat I feel I have a constriction and when you looked at their back history it wasn't about you know unrealistic images of women and the media or indeed even miserable personal circumstances that had changed recently like a family divorce or something they didn't want to live yeah their lives were completely empty and they didn't want to live so they starved but they were tiny numbers and then one of these girls died and she died in a public place on her way to school so it was very shocking and it was widely reported and the media looking for ways to report it obviously you know you're starting to be able to search for things online they found American reports of self-starvation and they interpreted what had happened for the Hong Kong population through that lens and that became the way that Hong Kong girls also expressed their misery and and the numbers completely skyrocketed by hundreds of times yeah you know from like a couple of year to you know several dozen a week at the same special the same specialist you know so so gender dysphoria I think is like that I think there are rare individuals who spontaneously land on the idea that what's wrong with their lives and what's wrong with them is that they were born in the wrong body they were all sick so they're really meant to be the opposite sex or some version of that but now that's the narrative for pretty much all disease for children so we're creating gender dysphoria yes this is something that Carl Jung called a psychic endemic that's right and uh there's a superb book by Abigail schreier called irreversible damage which explores this specific issue and how young girls are getting stuck down YouTube wormholes and it's convincing them that they're not only that they have gender dysphoria but the the way to treat the gender dysphoria is to have irreversible treatment it's a great book I really admire Abigail for writing it and you know she wrote it because she wrote one column for the Wall Street Journal on some of these issues and was absolutely astonished by the answers and the response that she got from readers so lots of people wrote to her parents saying please look into this more write more about this this has happened to my daughter I'm told I'm a bigot for saying that you know she wasn't but I don't believe this nonsense about her really being a boy and and she started to look into it more and then realized that nearly every specialist journalist in health or social science or you know equality or any of the things you might imagine would look into it have been scared off it by the response so that's why she wrote her book and I would say even since writing that book the shape of gender dysphoria has mutated among that group like it's because we can tell that this is a psychic Contagion in part by how fast it's changing so every sort of few months it's new gender identities like it's much less common now to say that you're a trans boy now you say you're a non-binary or gender fluid or a demi-boy and you it's less Demi boy well we're a bit boyish don't worry I mean why are you asking me it's nonsense is what it is the idea of this being how you spend your teens inventing micro identities it's quite sad it could be a lot more fun than this it could be a lot more fun yeah now despite your frustration uh there is someone I call progress legally uh as we speak mermaids which is a group advising teenagers um has just had their trusty Dr Jacob Breslow resigned because he was he spoke at before you act conference in 2011 which would cause for pedophiles to have the right to live in truth and dignity and also calls pedophiles minor attracted persons and having gone on their website this morning they've closed down their phone lines uh because of the Intolerable abuse quote that they've been receiving as a consequence they have also they are a group that have enjoyed the support of Megan and Harry as well as actor actress Emma Watson what can you tell me about mermaids and of course there's a legal proceedings at the moment where they have been taking LGB Alliance to court uh disputing the lgba uh being a charity what's your take on the mermaids organization so mermaids were set up oh gosh more than 20 years ago um by some parents as a little self-help group and it was a good group then so this is before the transcontagion really got going and there were just a few dozen children a year seen in the gender clinics uh but it's very a very difficult experience like it's very hard to cope with something that hardly anyone's coping with so they found each other and supported each other and they were quite sensible like they shared good you know there's very little research but what there was they shared it and they supported each other and if you look back at the way back machine you look at their early website and you know they weren't crazy they were you know talking about the reality of sex bodies they weren't suggesting that a child who had gender dysphoria thereby was a member of the opposite sex or anything everything changed for them when a woman called Susie Green became one of the parents and so Susie has done a TED talk about her experience and her husband's experience with their child Jackie who's a boy who was a highly effeminate little boy um and they found it difficult in particular that a father found it difficult having such an effeminate little boy because he didn't want a gay son and so they went to family counseling and I don't think Susie was that bothered by it but the father definitely was and what they were advised was that they should they had to hang together the two of them had to make a decision and stick with it and they decided that this little boy was actually a girl that was the decision and they transitioned to Jackie socially meaning changing name pronouns letting this child's hair grow long telling everyone it's a girl wearing girls clothes that sort of thing and then you know puberty approaches obviously that is pretty shocking in terms of homophobic I mean a lot of it is homophobia but this is conversion therapy quiet well this is a whole other level of conversions and now I'm not saying that all the kids who identify as trans are same-sex attracted but historically speaking in the 50 to 70 years that we've seen kids at all being looked at by gender doctors most of them were interesting most of the because there is a strong link and this is back to your question about gender there is a strong link between being gender non-conforming and growing up gay is by no means 100 there are plenty of a link or correlation a strong correlation very strong like 20 or 25 times more likely to grow up gay if you're highly highly gendered and conforming to the extent that the people around you would notice yes compared to the general population that said there are still plenty of sweet little boys who love ballet who grow up to be straight and you know girls who can't stand Thrills and want to be climbing trees and love football and so on but just numbers wise there's a strong correlation so most of the kids who saw the early gender doctors there were very few of those kids but most of them were same-sex attracted when they passed puberty and the first studies which tracked the kids but didn't do any interventions and that almost all those kids stopped saying I want to be a boy or I want to be a girl or I think I really am a girl they just accept themselves as gay puberty taught them who they were but that process was foreclosed for Jackie Greene um who has transitioned at age four and Susie found um at the time there was no there was no transition pathway on the NHS Susie reached out to American doctors and got puberty blockers from a chap called Norman's bank at the Boston Children's Hospital and blocked Jackie's puberty I think probably around age 11 and then at age 13 or 14 Jackie was put on estrogen and then they flew to Thailand and got Jackie what's called um gender reassignment surgery meaning genital surgery on his 16th birthday so that was when he was castrated and had a near vagina created [Music] that's all about 13 14 years ago I think maybe a little less and Susie is now the chair of mermaids and has been for a long time and that's the pathway that mermaids promotes and so anyone who didn't agree with that pathway is no longer in mermaids and it's it's entirely people who believe that this is that you know children can be born in the wrong body you would socially transition a child who was born in the wrong body you would do the surgery you would you know they pushed very hard for that treatment pathway on the NHS and they succeeded in getting it too it was their pressure that really stopped the Tavistock which is the NHS clinic for gender dysphoric children that stopped the Tavistock from being so cautious so mermaids really led the NHS down that path so that they're they're recommending puberty blockers to Children their path they recommend this what they call gender affirmative pathway okay which which really presupposes that if a child says to you I'm really a boy or I'm really a girl that child knows what they're talking about and means it and that it's going to last in such a way that you would really take these steps now in case it's not obvious these steps sterilize you they probably mean that you'll have no sex life as well and we don't know what puberty blockers do to your brain but you may remember being a teenager Lots changes in your brain in your teens like it's the second major developmental Sprint after babyhood so just disturbing it is to say the least a risky thing to do so mermaids has a lot of money now it became quite a fashionable charity it got like all these people like Emma Watson and Harry and Megan supporting it and it got a half a million over a few years from the national lottery and it grew to be quite a large charity I mean not an enormous charity but like you know quite sizable and they produce produce teaching materials and they train teachers and there's a notorious video of a mermaid's trainer teaching teachers using what they called a gender scale which had a picture of a Barbie doll and a picture of a GI Joe and in between these sort of mannequins morphing from pink with pigtails to a big Butch thing in Black you know in between the two and telling teachers they should encourage children to place themselves in this gender scale and work out who they were which can only mean that you look at this and if you're not Barbie or GI Joe you wonder are you really a boy or a girl do we know how far into into schools that this got from mermaids particularly I think they trained in several dozen schools and that went out but there's a set of these Charities there's a constellation of them gendered intelligence the proud trust stone wall do this sort of stuff to mermaids this is the sort of thing that goes into all schools now lots of councils got help in drawing up their trans inclusion policies and their RSE lessons from people like mermaids so it's been incredibly influential so this this is the stuff that's being taught to children and then we wonder why there's an increase in gender dysphoria telling children if you don't feel like Barbie or GI Joe you might have gender dysphoria you might be trans like we're actually suggest selling trans identities to children in schools so mermaids has this self mythology that they are very under pressure from transphobes of course they would think I'm a transfer folk the first time I ever looked for mermaids on Twitter I was already blocked and that was before I wrote my book so they they don't accept any challenge they don't talk to journalists who aren't totally uncritical they're like an organization Under Siege that's not good for transparency and it's not the way that you should run a charity you should be using you know absolute maximum transparency and that sort of very um responsible situation with very vulnerable beneficiaries for your charity so this is Jacob Breslow guy yeah I mean he hasn't been a trustee for very long but I mean the way it's been reported is as if you know back in 2011 he made this lapse since then he's been a student at um lse and done a PhD and now he's one of the people running he's an associate professor there and he runs courses and the courses are all about queer queering childhood so he supervised a thesis last year um in which a student gave a presentation of this paper and it was saying you know tariffs that's trans exclusionary radical feminists people like me who think sex is real you know tariffs are scared of trans people well I [ __ ] hope they're scared I'll hold the knife to your throat and whisper in your ear are you scared I sure hope so like this sort of stuff this is Jacob breslow's work and the queering the pedagogy stuff is this idea that childhood is like male or female socially constructed category which it kind of is but only kind of same way that man and woman are kind of socially constructed on top of a substration that's real but the queer theorists think it's all just words it's all just The Superficial stuff and so what his thesis is about and he's about he's writing a book at the moment and it has their queer children as one of the chapters or queer childhood it's all about disrupting this idea of childhood innocence um thinking about the boundaries between children and adults and you can see how I'm trying to pick my words very carefully and you can see how this could be done with good intentions but you can also see how it would be done with very nefarious intentions I mean this is absolutely where the pedophiles of today are is in this queer pedagogy queer queering childhood stuff and not just today because and you write about this in your book there's a history of a link between the the with pedophile groups or I don't know quite how to what language to use but simple things like Pro pedophile I guess I mean Pro lowering the age of consent Pro conceptualizing of pedophilia as a sexual orientation which by the way it might be but that doesn't mean it's right like it could be the world's most unfortunate sexual orientation and that it's a sexual orientation you're not allowed to act on but that's probably where they're coming from it is it is I mean I I I have a lot of sympathy with people who are born with um conditions or urges that mean they can't you know be comfortably accommodated in society because I'm a massive bleeding heart I know they don't think I am but I am um so I'm really really sorry for somebody who might feel that they have urges that are totally unacceptable I'm starting to believe that we can't even study this because as soon as we try and study this the bloody pedophiles come in but you think to yourself like let's find out are some people born pedophile what can you do how do you work with them can I cure them and then the blooming pedophiles come in yeah I mean I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for example a man might have an urge to kiss a very beautiful woman yeah but then that there's no sympathy I don't know our poor guy can't kiss her no don't because I told you I'm a bleeding heart and let's take position here suppose you just don't find adults of either sex at all attractive you're never going to have a decent sex life and you're never going to form a proper relationship or else you're going to be doing something unconscionable that's your choice I think that's a bit sad and I'd like to know more about it can we help these people are they born that way whatever but it seems to me that every time we try to study this in computer files and start saying well if people are born this way it's another sexuality minor attracted persons blah blah so to say the least Jacob breslow's work should have suggested that at no point was he remotely suitable to work with the children's charity agreed um to say the least but also I would like to know whether mermaids reached out to him because that's how it normally works for charities it's not like you put an ad in the paper and so we want we want trustees you reach out to people I think they liked his um quite violent rhetoric towards tariffs this is absolutely not like an ordinary properly run charity that's just made one little mistake about somebody who was at a dodgy conference in 2011. this is indicative of a world view right so my earlier point was that things seem to be at least in Britain making uh a turn legally for what you might call the better with mermaids coming apart uh you mentioned my Force data and there's of course Alison Bailey the Barrister who was a co-founder of the LGB Alliance who have both been proved under the equality act 2010 in court that their uh beliefs of gender critical beliefs are protected beliefs so it seems now legally and of course the Tavistock which mermaids were influencing have been told this summer to close by Spring next year tavista talk had been advising children to get surgery without parental consent puberty blockers and um perhaps much more but it would seem despite these things that happened but things that are perhaps turning for the better are you hopeful yes I think so I mean I will just say a little bit about the Tavistock um the Tavistock doesn't actually do things over parental consent it has fairly strict rules about when um when you would take puberty blockers when you would take cross-sex hormones when you would have surgery it does have age limits for these things it has never acted without parental consent because gender dysphoria it's it's so it's so ineffable you know like there are no criteria for us that aren't things that can be seen outside like that the child is miserable or that the child's you know persistently you know claims that they are members the opposite sex what it was doing was basically being quite unquestioning and very very patchy by the way like incredibly different like it had this big increase in numbers you know some therapists were better than others but if a parent said no I'm not having much I'll go down this pathway the Tavistock to not push for them to the good law project Jolie and Mormons um project let's say uh that took a court case to establish that the children could consent um without parental consent and that was established in court actually but I don't think the Tavistock was doing it they certainly didn't want to okay but so I would say that it was a poorly run poorly managed overburdened um service that had allowed itself to be pushed around by activists um it is being closed down because a review is being done of gender services in the NHS for children by Hillary Cass is a very eminent pediatrician and she looked at us in her interim report which was published this year the final report is due out next year and she said that this service was not safe too overburdened too long waiting lists very patchy and poor treatment too little consideration of other problems and she said that gender shouldn't be hived off like this like this one Specialist Clinic to see gender dysphoric kids only makes sense when you have a few dozen of them a year or maximum a couple of hundred but now that you know there's a half a dozen kids in every class and every school saying that they're Trends I exaggerate only very slightly well how much are you exaggerating that I I think in about a six-month time I won't be exaggerating at all it's there's this incredible increase this this Autumn when kids went back to school so many of them have identified as trans we're hearing from parents all the time saying what happened you know let her home from the school or indeed just discovered by chance when it's when it's everywhere you would just deal with it and with all your other Mental Health Services which is basically what Hillary cast has recommended because the people that they've been seeing at the Tavistock the children they've been seeing at the Tavistock they're um they're very high degree of comorbidities that means other issues yes so self-harm autistic Spectrum and depression Eating Disorders family traumas um child abuse and a very large number of them same-sex attracted as I said you know since so saying that you're just going to look at their gender makes no sense like if a kid comes into you and they've been cutting and they're clearly unwell and you get the feeling that this child is depressed you would want to do a full workup really and the gender issues maybe you should just park them but that's not what happens in a gender clinic so that was her recommendation can you tell me about the equality act 2010 because it seems that it's it's a double-edged sword because on the one hand it's been used to exonerate Alison Bailey as I mentioned and Maya Foster your friend but on the other hand um I think it was Kardashian Cardiff University that allows uh trans gender or transsexuals to use the toilet of their choosing and they cite the equality at 2010 because it's a protective belief so what's the is is the equality act what's going on there it's a bit of a jumble I I'm basically a fan of the equality act which puts me at odds with the current government with whom more in sympathy in general um on trans issues than I would be with labor and lib Dems so the way the equality act works is it was passed in 2010 as a sort of a tidying up a big overarching law that brought together about 100 pieces of legislation and case law that had developed over the previous decades there are nine protected characteristics and what that basically means is they're things that you're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of except when you need to I know that sounds odd but what I mean if I take an example um let's see age you can't discriminate on age means that you couldn't have a job ad that says you know young bar keeper required but you are allowed to for example have a playground that says under tens only because the kids can't play if the teenagers are hanging out on the swings but you're not so you're not so there's there's lawful and unlawful discrimination and that's the framework that's the way you think about it sex is one of the protected characteristics and it means male or female so you can't advertise and say we want a secretary female only or you know there's sex discrimination is obviously a big one but you could for example do a program in an inner city school that you know you identified that it was the white working class boys who were behind and reading so you do a special course for them because it's it's in the service of more equality basically so so I think the equality Act is quite a good way to look at these things so badly miscited and never more than when it comes to sex because another of the protected characteristics is gender reassignment and that's this prop that is it's an odd definition it's something like proposing to undergo undergoing or having undergone any process of a site reassigning your sex characteristics that's not quite right but it's something like that it's anybody who thinks themselves as trans very vague no criteria you don't have to be in the care of a doctor or anything like that and if it's just well you can't discriminate against them I'm all for that you know some bloke turns up at work in a skirt and you know lipstick and nail polish and you know says he's changed his name to Susie I don't want him to be fired I also don't want him using the women's toilets because he's not a woman okay yeah so that's that's the mistake a lot of these places think that if you have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment your sex has changed but actually they're two separate characteristics so Cardiff University is just making a mistake there as are all the other universities because that's not unusual and the reason they're making that mistake is because of the lobby groups like Stonewall and mermaids that have systematically misrepresented the equality act in their training materials in their schemes for employers you know they have these very influential schemes like the um the workplace equality index from Stonewall you sign up and they come and they Mark you basically and then you get a badge and it says like we're great and one of the ways that you'll show you're great is by letting the men use the women's toilets if they say they're women I'm not I'm not exaggerating that is one of the ways they'll say you're great and they want you to get rid of gender language you know to your maternity policy would say you know parent or birthing parent yeah just in case it wasn't already obvious what is wrong with having a trans woman in a toilet for women I mean the language is straight away misleading isn't it you know when people when you say trans woman you think it's some sort of woman but it's men and it could be a man who looks like you I mean there are no criteria and even if it's a man who's dressed in the women's clothes and so on I'm not blind I can see who's a man and the reason we have single sex toilets I mean it's three reasons safety dignity and privacy I was in them uh Edinburgh yesterday for the protests against the Scottish government's plans to introduce gender self-id and afterwards we went for a meal lunch and it was in a pub and the pub had mixed sex toilets it just had one toilets you went in and okay so each of the individual cubicles did have a full-length door and the um sink was inside so you think like it's a single it's a single facility but it's all behind one door and it comes out onto a narrow corridor with I think it was eight doors opening onto it do you remember how Larry men can get in pubs do you know what men do in to women in poems do you know what teenage girls have to put up with this is not safe this is not safe a pub that does this sort of toilet design is putting women in danger women go to toilets to get away from men sometimes and then there's just a privacy issue you know like if your period has started and you know you've bled or something if you deal with it and miscarriages commonly happen in women's toilets they don't tend to wait until you're at home you know um and then there are women who have special or particular needs so um you're disabled you need to be helped into the toilet you don't want to do that like like I imagine a woman who needs somebody to help her an elderly woman say in this space if it's a women's toilet you can leave the door open to the individual cubicle another one will be really nice about it and they'll just give you a bit of privacy there was no possibility of that here and what about a Muslim woman or an Orthodox Jewish woman who can't do certain things into close proximity with men you know women take longer to use the toilets we need about half as many toilets again as men do toilet sales are such a trivial thing and it's because healthy young people like you instant who do podcasting and who do journalism and so on they imagine themselves they haven't been afraid they're mostly men they haven't been afraid in a in a pub but they haven't had to go and hide in the toilet and get their phone out and ring a friend to come and get them because there's some weird guy outside you know men will follow women into toilets if they can when they try and get away from them in perhaps and now they've got an excuse that man you can't challenge him because he could say he's a woman so the toilet seems like you know you could be quite relaxed about toilets but you wouldn't be relaxed maybe about say changing rooms or rate crisis centers or whatever no toilets are really important people don't go out unless they can use safe dignified clean private spaces oh by the way men piss on the seat I'd really really really rather I wasn't using a toilet that lots of men have been using all day on behalf of all men I apologize that is disgusting it is disgusting but lots then pissing this in the in the sinks as well if there's a if there's no toilet free you know this I saw your face yeah I don't want this happening in my toilets so sometimes people say this thing about it you know there's a gender-neutral toilet at home but that's not used by several hundred men in a day that I don't know so where the transactors would take umbrage with this argument I think is that they would say that this is accusing uh trans agendas of behaving like this and they said you're not a transgender wouldn't behave like this and and well a trans a trans woman is just a man there's no other Criterion for being a trans woman then that your male it used to be that um you would not consider using the women's toilets unless you were under the care of a gender doctor like in the 1980s and 90s the doctors would give you a letter in case women challenged you in the toilet and you would get out of this letter that says aha you know I'm being seen by a doctor and I'm in the process of transitioning I don't think women liked that very much but it was a very tiny number of people and women still felt free to say you shouldn't be here now you can't you can't challenge anyone like there are signs that you see sometimes in toilets that say all genders or they say does someone here look like they shouldn't be here you don't know what gender someone is by looking don't ask so it just means any man I'm not saying anything particular about men who identify as trans I'm just saying they're men that's all um so you mentioned that you're in Scotland yep tell me about the Scottish gender bill yeah okay so there are two relevant laws for the question of who's Trends one of them we've talked about the equality act that doesn't really set criteria it's just if you say you're trans you are there's a much much tinier group of people who've used the terms of an earlier law the gender recognition Act of 2004 to to change the sex that's on their birth certificate to do that you had to go to a doctor get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria get a signature from another doctor fill in a form pay five pounds and that's considered by a panel but basically approve it pretty much always but then you get a thing called a gender recognition certificate and that allows you to get a new birth search that says the sex that you're not on it there's no particular criteria for surgery or anything like that so if you're imagining like I think people listening to debates about trans issues they often imagine somebody who's basically indistinguishable from a member of the opposite sex but like no you could just look like anyone else of your sex but now your birthstone says you're the opposite sex on the other hand it's bit bureaucratic so not many people do it Scotland plans to make it very easy that you adjust oh sorry you have to wait two years as well I forgot that that's the important Criterion here wait two years to so between applying and getting your gender recognition certificate takes two years at the moment at the moment Scotland wants to bring that down to three months it wants to basically make it just that you say you want it no doctor no diagnosis of gender dysphoria as low as age 16. so basically they're just opening up to a much much larger group of people with no criteria or checks of any sort like you could be you could actually be a rapist and apply for this yes and then you would legally count in more situations as a member of the opposite sex so for example if you're imprisoned it'd be rather hard to send you to a prison that's for your own sex well this is uh this actually the the Crux of this um it's an argument you make very well in your book and it's related to prisons but it's uh I'd like to ask you about that but it's actually about the the propensity for violence that men have as opposed to as to women and that and that is the problem with the toilet bill that's the the the problem with um what's going on in prisons Now in America if I'm not mistaken in New Jersey uh a man identifying as a woman just raped and impregnated two women in a prison and uh this was earlier this year but uh and you make the case in your book and this is uh I'm gonna I'm gonna read your book if you don't mind because I think this is fine by one argument the far greater number of male prisoners and their far greater propensity for violent and sexual crimes mean that not very many males will need to seek transfer before women's prisons are overwhelmed if the UK prisons inspectorate is right and two percent of male prisoners identify as women that is a figure greater than half the total number of female prisoners and if trans women's offending pattern is male typical and the share imprisoned for sex crimes is five times as high as for women you arrive at a startling conclusion of all the sex offenders behind bars in both men's and women's prisons who identify as women well over two-thirds are male it's hard to keep track of and so I'll sort of I'll talk through the numbers there are about 88 000 people in prison in England and Wales four thousand are women so 84 000 in one bucket and four thousand in the other now of those 84 000 nearly 20 are in for a sex crime of the four thousand only four percent so just like so it's five times and then five times again is the difference okay if you're looking just at sex crimes and then if you analyze the sex crimes most of the sex crimes the men commit are rape sexual assault whatever the women it's mostly accessory or um non-contact crimes so that's things like helping with child porn obviously a very bad crime but not making you a risk to other actual adults around you so there's only a really a handful of women who commit violence sex offenses like on the person each year and their attempt there's what about 20 000 men and that's just the ones we know about like if the other men in jail lots of them will be sex criminals as well because rape is very underreported and so on so you've tens and tens of thousands of men and a couple hundred women who commit these sorts of crimes then on top of that you've got the fact that men are much stronger than women the differences are large especially in the upper body and then you would think that you're going to allow one of these men to say he's a woman and put him in the women's prisons and the violence difference between men and women and the types of crimes difference means the prisons are different as well there are no high security women's prisons there's only medium and low security and they're generally much more home-like places like the problem one of the women I know in Scotland a woman called her own a Hotchkiss she's a retired prison governor the problems in a women's prison are the women are self-harming depressed almost all of them have been victims of domestic violence rape they're in for prostitution um non-payment of fines shoplifting the people with very chaotic and miserable lives and they're very very often people whose lives have been destroyed by their relations with men I'm not saying it's all the men's fault I'm just saying that's the way it is they're shitty boyfriends they had a pimp you know they ran away from some bloke who was hitting them and life went downhill after that that's women's prisons they're very sad places you don't tend to have to worry about fights or anything like that men's prisons are very different like you know there's those 20 of committed sex crimes but then there's a lot of other violent crimes as well there's a lot of violence in men's prisons um they're just really very different places and then you get these men who say they're women I mean we you know we don't have good data on these things but of the trans identifying male prisoners that we know about half of them have committed sex crimes not 20 have either they're taking you know advantage of a stupid policy or there's something about being a trans woman that makes you more likely than other men to be a sex criminal I don't think it's the second one I think it's the first I think it's the lacks policy so no men belong in women's prisons they really don't there's a lot of vulnerable men in men's prisons who have to be managed and looked after and protected from the other prisoners as far as I'm concerned trans women are one of those groups yeah they're vulnerable but they do not belong in a women's jail we do not parachute out gang members or I would say a separate Wing separate Wing yeah yeah um so uh how much where are we at with gender self ID well here it's been knocked on the head really in England in Scotland it's going full steam ahead and that's what the Scottish yes that's what the protests that I was at yesterday was about and I don't know how much you know about Scottish politics but it basically all just revolves around Independence so you've not more than 90 of Scottish people choose their party first and foremost on what they call the Constitutional question okay if you're pro-independence you vote SNP if you're against you split your vote between Laboratory um so that's why the s p have basically a permanent lock on power makes them a very bad government things will run very badly in Scotland their health outcomes are terrible their education outcomes are terrible their spending is high and very poor quality General Public Services doesn't matter they're going to be elected forevermore so it's quite depressing really that you know there's no accountability and for reasons that I really can't speculate on Nicholas sturgeon has decided that gender self ID is going to be her big Legacy right she's become convinced that that it's and you know that it's a liberal and you know it's the next big civil rights battle to allow men to say they're women so anyway we all tipped up outside Hollywood yesterday with banners and you know good sound system and there were some very very stirring speeches you know about there's a man running the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Center a man who says he's a woman you know and has said that women who very much like the idea of men and women's right crisis centers that were bigots and the bigots get raped too um we need to re-educate ourselves about our trauma not use the trauma as an excuse there are men in women's prisons in Scotland more than elsewhere in the UK um you know there's there's just Lots there were lots of quite sad stories and I mean it was a very stirring day but yeah it's hard to see changing her mind and she can do what she likes um being Irish what's what's going on in Ireland on on the on the uh the issue yeah we foolishly brought in self ID without any debate in 2015. so we've we had three big sort of what were presented as civil rights issues in short succession and I think two of them were and one of them was um fraudulent the other two were a gay marriage and a more liberal abortion law and so those two had big public debates both of them required um referendums to change our Constitution which had already which described abortion you know as not allowable at all and um marriage is between a man and woman so we had to we had to um change our Constitution and that required a referendum and there was a lot of public debate and there were modern laws and it was done really well it was just that was democracy and action but I don't think the founding fathers of Ireland in 1920 whatever were thinking that ever we would think that men could be women or women men and so they didn't write that down so it was easy to just pass it and for reasons I won't go into for legal reasons we needed to allow some recognition of trans identities to do with the European Court of Human Rights but it didn't have to be done the way it was like the law just kept getting water down and watered down and then finally the law that went through in 2015 says you fill in a form online um you make a sworn statement in front of a notary a send off your breaststroke and they'll send you back another one that says the opposite sex on us that's it right um can I bring up what's probably the most controversial part of your book oh I'm interested to know what you think is the most confident you probably won't find it controversial but uh I can certainly imagine this paragraph okay riling the trans activists more than any other interesting um mainstream trans activism are the desires of Rich powerful males who want to be classed as women everything I have written about the harm to Children's bodies the loss of women's privacy the destruction of women's sports and the perversion of language is collateral damage have you had any pushback no no no no I mean that's that's actually flown under the many lies that are told about me so I'm interested you think it's so controversial but why that's controversial though is is because it's I I suppose it doesn't really allow for the the what you've already explained your sympathy with people for people with gender dysphoria and stuff but it it sort of writes off the whole movement yeah really as a a something nefarious rather than than really accepting there's there's a serious issue at the core of of people who don't feel comfortable in their in their bodies so I absolutely and the book does not write off the issue that there are people who are uncomfortable in their bodies it writes off the idea that that makes the members of the opposite sex those two things are just not logically connected like there's just no reason to say this man who wishes he wasn't a man thereby is a woman we don't say that of anything else I mean I'd like to be a doctor or an airline pilot we would never look at a black person or a black child who says you know racism is awful I wish I was white and then say well you're trans white like it's incredibly offensive actually um so the movement the movement that I'm talking about there that that paragraph is about the movement for gender self-id in law process whereby a male person gets a piece of paper that says he's female or a female person gets a piece of paper that says she's male that's a really recent development and it's not really a solution to gender dysphoria like gender dysphoria could be solved perhaps by getting used to the body you're in for example um so that movement's like why why does anyone want to count legally as a member of the opposite sex like the more I think about it the more I think it's extraordinary that that has been pushed as a civil right why is it a civil right there's nothing else that I'm not that I can get a piece of paper saying I am and it turned I mean in my opinion you know there are many sort of strands to this you know like all big shifts you could say it's a perfect storm like those you know 10 or 12 different bits to it but it would not have happened if there weren't some rich powerful men who wanted more than anything else to be women so that's what I mean by that paragraph that without that core this would not have coalesced um men and their sex drives it turns out is a pretty powerful uh shaper of the world men do all sorts of things for their sex drives as wonderful things art conquering countries Etc but they do terrible things there is a sexual side to some of this is it called yes um controversial label I mean I think it's an arguable if you look in good faith at the evidence that there are some men For Whom the idea of being a woman is a sexual idea so even if we don't go any further than that even if we don't say that it's actually a lot of the trans women for some of them it clearly is so autoginophilia just for someone who doesn't know it's the Greek for love of oneself as a woman and it's posited as indeed another sexuality by the people who researched it um it's a sexuality that what turns a man on is is The woman Inside is his imagined self as a woman and again I'm not saying all trans women fall in this category but some do and some will tell you they do and they've written about it yes so we're sure that there are men like this yes [Music] um it's a you know when you start to think that some of the men who want to use women's faces want to use them because they find that sexy you're like you know why should women have to put up with that again yeah like I can see why the man wants to do it I can't see why we're meant to go along with it yeah um so if I can tie this uh all together now by going back to my uh original uh opening uh uh words where I describe the state of the creative Industries and how the trans has been such it's been the number one divisive issues it's the issue on on this show I I've had James Dreyfus the actor star of Thin Blue Line and gimme gimme gimme and Notting Hill speak about getting scrubbed off Doctor Who as the master for having gender critical opinions I've had Rosie K the dancer choreographer describe how she had was forced to resign from the company that she built dance company and to to form a new one and I wondered whether you might have insight and this is perhaps a difficult question is why has this specific topic become as fervent and febrile and totemic and and and uh huge as it as it has I think it's because of what I just said that it's about people gaining recognition legal or societal for exactly what they're not so at its heart is a lie at it at its heart there's the lie that a man can be a woman or a woman can be a man or a child can change sex and you know as I think you know my PhD is a mathematics I was an academic before I became a journalist and that's part of why I think I recognized this is also strange at first in that you know I'm used to logical arguments and I'm used to theorems where every step follows on from the previous line and I see that as introducing zero equals one into your mathematical universe so you probably I don't know how much you like maths at school but you probably remember that you could do the same thing to both sides of an equation and it would still be true so if you added four to both sides that was fine if you divided both sides by two that was fine yeah now suppose you've got one lie zero equals one okay you could add zero to one side of the equation and one to the other and you've got another lie then you double this and you've got another lie again you could do it twice you get a different line the whole thing collapses so if you imagine some crazy mathematician who says there's this whole world that's all mathematical and it's all kind of interconnected but just over here just there I'm just going to allow zero to be one it propagates it starts to ruin all the other theorems and if you're very attached to that lie that one over there you're going to have to start getting very angry with people who notice you're going to have to say to them no it's not propagating it's just that that has no influence on anything else but it does this is cognitive dissonance isn't it and to actually confront that difference means perhaps unpicking your entire understanding of the world which can be a very painful or you don't confront it you just tell the other person to shut up much easier much easier option so if you're quite attached to this thing here which you might be for reasons that you know it's it's psychologically very important to you but loads of people who are very supportive of trans ideology have no particular skin in this game they've just decided that this is the latest virtue single it's the latest way to be a good person they might be very attached to the idea of themselves as somebody who back in the day would have been you know part of the Civil Rights Movement would have been for fighting for women suffrage would have you know been really campaigning for gay marriage but those things are done you want something to do so you become quite attached to this and then anyone who says to you but look you know if you allow men to be women over here you're going to have rapists in women's jails over there you're going to ruin women's sport you get very angry yeah and you must silence people it's the only way to maintain the LIE is to let it is to make it impossible for anyone to talk about it that's why it's totalitarian you have to control the language you have to keep people silent you have to cancel anyone who does it says anything about it in order that other people are too scared to speak about it that's why because it's a lie but if I can finish on a personal question then have you been canceled because you are now very public facing I I said before we started speaking that having read uh widely on on this particular particular topic I would recommend your book trans as the perfect starting Place pretty much authoritative on issue certainly in Britain uh uh for people who wanted to an entry point and um I wondered now that you're so public in your stance as gender critical if you've been canceled and what uh push back you've had I mean this word canceled kind of isn't very well defined is it so I'll just answer what the response has been so I I didn't know it was going to be so controversial when I found it so I was already quite a long way in before I realized that I was putting my career at risk but I was lucky and the editor of The Economist is not a coward zany doesn't like bullies and she does like free speech and she does not like people telling her what she should put on her paper and that turned out to be enough even though she didn't really agree with me so I didn't lose my job and I'm not actually working at The Economist at the moment I'm on a leave of absence I had to decide what to do when that year ends I'm working with sex matters at the moment as a campaign group sort of a startup and non-profit that's working towards charitable status and Maya Force data that I mentioned who lost her job for saying Sex Is Real at a think tank still Boggle when I say that sentence um she's the executive director I'm one of the founders it's a bunch of lawyers basically looking at the way that we deal with sex in law and everyday life so I'm working there now with them at the moment um I mean I think it's the most interesting thing I've ever done um I guess because I don't have skin in this game I don't care what people say like I don't have a trans child I'm not trans identified you know I'm earning a living that they can't get at certainly people tried certainly people have tried you know to get me unpublished to go after anyone who's connected with me you know and you've had problems in America being published yeah I mean the book didn't get picked up by any American publisher though kindly Simon and Chester distributed it and feedback was very much that people thought it would sell but that they didn't want the grief inside the office I didn't get anyone so that's an interesting specific feedback because the more obvious critique would be that it's pretty British specific to British law not exclusively and so actually to an American audience that might be harder but if the actual criticism is no we didn't want pushback from the young people in the business or you know that's that's a separate issue so but this is what happens in publishing Publishers are all cowards well nearly all cowards my Publisher's lovely but they careful I'm sorry I just it's funny it's addictive saying what you think it turns out it's so enjoyable being honest um yeah like I wrote it to be quite International like I went to Canada I went to the US I did I grounded different bits of it in different countries you know so the um the sports stuff in one place the employment stuff and another the school stuff and another the bathroom stuff and another so it could have sold in America Americans are very parochial in their publishing industry though so maybe it's just that but the feedback was no some from some of them no this will sell but too much grief inside the office there's no one book from a first-time author that's worth that grief like if it's Jordan Peterson or JK Rowling you tell the kids to shut up um yeah so so I didn't get a publisher and I didn't get anyone pick up the audiobook for the same reason there are about 10 companies that produce audiobooks in this country and not one of them was willing to do it so my son recorded it in the understeer's office um little coverage where the washing machine is we hung we hung duvets around she's a sound engineer so he came home for a week and he recorded me doing it there and it's the one and only audiobook that's been put out by my print Publishers great so we got it out there anyway well done well uh Helen Joyce thank you so much for your time I recommend your book trans to readers and sure later up on that conversation fascinating and I wish you all the best as you continue your journey speaking your mind freely fearlessly and I enjoy I I look forward to enjoying what you have to say next thank you very much for having me in foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Spectator

Views: 183,188

Keywords: The Spectator, Spectator, SpectatorTV, Spectator TV, SpecTV, The Week in 60 Minutes, TWI60

Id: o8b6b2i_LH0

Length: 61min 23sec (3683 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022