'Sex is not assigned at birth': Author Helen Joyce speaks about 'Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality'

even by current standards it's been a very busy week in the media for people involved in the ongoing debate about sex and gender a book that tells children that a person's sex is assigned to them at birth by a doctor has been sent to more than 800 primary schools across the uk snp np joanna cherry has challenged nicolas sturgeon to a public debate on the gender recognition act after scotland's first minister failed to define what a woman is and a lesbian lawyer who has accused stonewall of trying to have her sacked over her views on trans women accused the charities barrister barrister of bullying her and laughing at her during her employment tribunal so joining me now i have helen joyce the author of trans when ideology meets reality it was a times spectator and observer book of the year in 2021 and is now this week out in paperback helen joyce everyone thank you for joining me thank you for having me on now helen uh this congratulations on the ongoing success of this brilliant book and um you might want to give us some background to why you wrote that but because this wasn't the sex gender error that wasn't your area was it particularly when you wrote no and when i came across this area i was the finance editor of the economist so i was running pieces about bond markets and oil prices and such like and now i just stumbled across the fact that there were people saying that what made you a man or a woman was what you felt like rather than just you know yes look down and have a quick check if you don't know and i couldn't believe that it took me about a year to try to work through the implications and it was when i realized that in the name of this idea children were being put on a path to transitioning and in case anyone doesn't know that can lead you to sterility so they put children on the path to puberty blockers then cross-sex hormones and then operations and i went to an event where i met some girls between 18 and 21 as some of whom had already had um hysterectomies at that point and then realized it was all a terrible mistake and yes they were lesbian or they were autistic spectrum disorder or you know they had childhood abuse or this was the latest social fed and here they were with the rest of their lives ahead of them and this is what had happened can you give us a sense of the extent of the problem because i know when when clinics such as the tavistock clinic which the nhs pediatric gender clinic was set up they were they had very few referrals in the early days that's right but then now it's grown exponentially and they're just the tip of the iceberg they see a few thousand kids a year but actually if you go into any um classroom in uh you know a civic city or somewhere like london or cambridge or brighton or someone like that in every classroom there'll be a kid who's trans-identified they may not be talking about it to their parents they may not be talking about it to their teachers but they will be talking about it among themselves and if it doesn't go any further than that you think oh well it's just the latest thing about being like a goth isn't it yes but you know for some of them it does go further and for all of them you know to me it's a massively sexist idea this idea that what makes you a man or a woman is something other than just what you are like i just am a woman there's nothing i could do to not be a woman you know i can go and get a phd in mathematics as i did i'm still a woman yes you know you're a gay man that doesn't make you not a man yes so it's massively sexist and actually homophobic as well to think that there's any sort of behavior standard to being male or female this is something that you really point out in your book which i should hold up oh yes there we go this is trans when ideology meets reality and it is a superb book and i think what you do really well is you sort of very in a very accessible way talk people through the issues because i think a lot of people when we talk about these issues think it's a very simple matter of equal rights for trans people which you were of course for equal rights yeah i mean and we have equal rights for everybody yes i'm just not for people being able to force other people to say they are what they aren't yes and it sounds like it's kind but actually i'm really not sure what's kind about saying that a male person can compete as a woman in sport that's not very kind to all the women in the sport is it there's already a competition for the male person to compete in and we're seeing that all the time so at the heart what it's about is there is a contingent of people and not all trans people i should say who believe that we each have a an innate gender identity and you describe it in the book as something like a sexed soul which i think is a really neat way of sort of describing what they say is that that overrides your body yes well fine if you want to feel like that i don't yeah and i don't want kids told it either so actually i was quoted in in articles about that book that you mentioned the one that's gone out date under primary schools and what i said to the journalists we've put it in in full i was so pleased you know i said um they talk about sex assigned at birth like i don't know you know who's assigning this sex of birth i've had kids twice and both times 20 weeks i knew what sex the child was they don't come out you know and have somebody own you know sorting hats let's see if there's a boy or a girl like you know what your child is yes and then to go to school and when you were seven or eight or nine some teacher says to you oh you could be male you could be female you could be a little bit male a little bit female in between both neither your gender could be a spectrum oh it could be something much more dramatic you know oh i have to think about this now and then you know what boring person wants to just be a male or just be a female if you could be gender fluid or on a spectrum or something and all of this seems to be again and again based on old-fashioned gender stereotypes well what else is there to you know so that particular book the one that you mentioned is by a chap called dolly pike and he's very careful not to say how the child is meant to work out whether they're these you know partly male partly female both or neither yes but i mean you're then just leaving the child in completely in the dark and kids by now they know that you know blue is the boy color and pink is the girl color and sparkles are for girls and footballers for boys and things so even though you're not saying it you are saying it yes so do you think that a lot of the problem is that when most people think about the trans issue they assume you're talking about what we used to call transsexuals people who for whatever reason feel deeply uncomfortable in their own body they have to either go through surgical procedure or change the way they present in order to live a happy life and those people obviously deserve sympathy and support and and the rest of it but this is not quite that is it no it's not i mean those people and one of my friends once uh likened them to sort of witness protection they were so rare that you could accommodate them with special cases yes and most of us would never meet somebody like that so that's one thing but now it's a social contagion yeah and this idea you know we know this happens we know this happens particularly with teenage girls this happens a lot like eating disorders or self-harming you know cutting these things run through classrooms and their ideas that if somebody didn't have the idea they wouldn't do it but now they have the idea you know you feel uncomfortable you don't feel right you you don't like i mean i'm sorry to say there's a lot of porn goes around the place in schools like boys may show you things on their phone or in particular girls who are starting to think that they may be lesbian that's such a porn word to a lot of girls so they're you know they're discovering who they are at 14 15 at the same time as they're being made feel massively uncomfortable about it and the idea that's presented to them the one fix for everything is you might be trans yes and that would resolve all of these difficulties that's the other thing is that you know if somebody says to you you've got you know you're on the autistic spectrum or you know it's very hard to cure and eating disorders or something you know that there's a great difficulty in front of you and a lot of sadness but this is being presented as a one-size-fits-all solution for absolutely everything and there are all these youtube influencers who are selling these most unrealistic descriptions of how wonderful that is to be on testosterone and how great they feel and you know adults don't know about this stuff you have to look for it there's this whole world out there where the children are teaching each other absolute nonsense and that's particularly uh troubling for young gay people i know there are lots of gay activists who are very they've basically come out of retirement to deal with this issue because there's a fear that effectively what what they're doing here is raising gay kids fixing kids and there's other gay men in particular and who are all for it and i'm sorry to say that some of those are the ones who are in the closet during section 28. yes and they've come back now to try to make up for that they see this as the fight that they can fix and they're also the gay men who don't much like women there's lovely men like you andrew and then there's some gay men who really don't think much of women right now when you wrote this book of course you you must have been putting yourself in the firing line because it's such a contentious issue whether it should be or not yes is besides the point but had you any idea of what you were letting yourself course of course i did because i mean you know as soon as i started trying to write an article about it the very first article i wrote i called people and i talked about it the same way as i had talked about every other article and you know people have said to me you know you were you were the finance editor but i had been in brazil i had talked to corrupt politicians i had written articles about things like the effect of pornography on teenagers or pedophilia and how you should deal with paedophiles that sort of thing and this was new i would ring somebody and i would say um you know can i just talk through with you the idea that um you know what makes us a man or a woman is actually how we feel and you know that might actually cause problems in certain spaces and they would call me a literal nazi say that i wanted them all dead as a first reaction yes yes okay yes absolutely that was the way it was like if you were talking to those people i will not talk to you well that surely as a journalist that would make you want to investigate it more well it did i do wonder a lot of journalists have said to me that they wouldn't touch it with a barge pole for exactly that reason and i think oh you're the sort of journalist to run away from the burning building aren't you yeah maybe go and do something else yeah maybe go and walk dogs or something because because clearly it's such a disproportionate reaction to say when someone asks a legitimate question to say you're a nazi it's so extreme something's being hidden there exactly something exactly exactly so that is what interested me and then it was meeting the kids and thinking yes detransitioners and that really was the moment when i thought you know because before that i was thinking this is very interesting and i think i could write a book but am i the right person yeah not so much that i was scared about it but just you know i mean i don't have any skin in the game yes i know that and i have got attacked for that people have said you know look what's a straight cis white blob but on the other hand you know considering uh the potential threat to women's rights yeah single sex spaces that kind of thing then surely yeah that you do have some skin in the game in that respect i do but of course they deny that yes exactly but i also feel you know there's been there's we are at a wonderful moment for um women's activism and general sex-based rights activism in this country there's all these amazing groups that are firing up you know for women sex matters which is where i work now as the director of advocacy i've taken time out from the economist to go and do that so it's actually very invigorating and exciting too to see you know at the ground floor a whole new sort of activism yes absolutely and do you feel that there is much that you can do with the kind of more shall we say histrionic reactions from the activist contingent who still continue to brand people like you nazis and fascists but also send some i mean i think this is what has woken a lot of people up to the problem is they've seen the death threats the rape threats the extreme dare i say very hyper masculine reaction to a lot of this you know is that is that difficult to deal with or is that something no i think it's brilliant i mean they're showing themselves up yeah so i just i also i i just i treat them like i treat toddlers yeah you know i've had two kids and when you've got a kid who's lying on the floor drumming their heels and screaming their heads off about i know they don't want to brush their teeth deep breath you know and just repeat the cam mantras and so on and then let them show themselves up for who they are and so in a sense that those kind of reactions might be the thing that helps oh yeah this through yes absolutely i mean if we're just relentlessly reasonable then the relentless trolls show themselves what they are and do you think things have got worse or better since you first published the book last year oh loads better in terms of being able to speak but you know the more we speak the angrier they get i think the only way out of this as i think i've said to you before is through like you know we just have to get to the other side we actually have to defeat these people yeah there are reasonable people over there that we need to talk to in government leading corporations you know in the nhs or in education yes but the people who are screaming nazi at the very idea that you might open your mouth yes just got to beat them so just to wrap up because i want i want people to be aware of your book and the new paperback version obviously is just that what so this is out this week is that right it was out last week so there's and there's three things that you can do you can read the book and you can follow me on twitter at h joyce gender and i have started a newsletter which is at my website thehelenjoyce.com welcome to the gb news youtube channel you can watch us live 24 hours a day catch up on your favorite shows and join in the conversation in the comments below don't 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Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022