TRANS - Biology or Ideology? with Helen Joyce - The Shape of Dialogue #25

[Music] people often think that when we say trans ideology we mean trans people and that's not it at all it's about the belief that there can be an inner identity that in some sense makes you a man or a woman or indeed non-binary rather than those just being material facts about the species that we are that we're male and female and there are no non-binary people is everybody's either male or female welcome to the shape of dialogue joining me today is renowned journalist Helen Joyce Helen is the author of trans when ideology meets reality the canonical book on trans ideology and its negative impact on children women's rights education law freedom of expression and Society in general Howen studied mathematics at Cambridge University and University College London gaining a PhD in geometric measure Theory she was the journalist and The Economist for 17 years holding leading roles including education correspondent Brazil bureau chief and finance and international editor in 2022 Howen published her book trans which became an immediate bestseller she now works for the British charity sex matters which promotes clarity about sex and law policy and language in order to protect everybody's rights and now I give you Howen Joyce welcome to the shape of dialogue hen thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today oh thank you for inviting me yeah it's fantastic having you on now we're going to be talking about trans ideology which seems to have successfully embedded itself in many of our public and private institutions and what I'd like to do is explore how and why this has happened and what the ramifications are for or multiple fields in our society so to start can you articulate what trans ideology is and what your concerns are sure um so people often think that when we say trans ideology we mean trans people like people who identify as trans and that's not it at all it's about the belief that there can be an inner identity that in some sense makes you a man or a woman or indeed nonbinary other than those just being material facts about the species that we are that we're male and female and there are no non-binary people because everybody's either male or female so if you start from the position that people would have until even depends where you are in Academia it might be 20 25 years ago in ordinary life no more than five years ago I think really everybody would have agreed that uh there just are two Sexes and that's a brute fact about nature and then they might have understood that there are people who are not happy with the sex that they are and depending on how much they knew about it and whether they'd ever come across anyone like that they might have thought well we need to make some special accommodations for those people and that is still what some people a lot of people think we're talking about but we're not we're talking about an ideology meaning a theory of what it is to be human that says that we have innate identities and that those identities include the question of whether we're male female man woman or something in between like non-binary or fluid or something like that and that's not something that most people think is true and there isn't any empirical evidence for it it's a belief system so it's a very recently emerging belief system and it's one that changes all the time like whenever you argue with one bit of it they'll shift to another ground but it has permeated our institutions to the most extraordinary degree incredibly quickly I think there was probably a lot happening before all us normies realized but I don't think anyone can deny that it's accelerated a lot in recent years so when people say trans women are women or you must use preferred pronouns or please use whichever restrooms suit you know fit your gender identity best what they're doing is they're giving a specific instance of a general belief about humans which is that the biological sex that we are that's a material fact is not at all important but that what we say we are about whether we're a man or a woman is very very important and so important that every everybody else should just accept it as red so that's the issue um that I see with it is that um everybody else has to go along with it so if somebody tells me that they're Muslim or gay or atheist or you know that despite being very pale skinned they actually are a quarter black when they look back through their ancestry I take those things as red like of course I'm not going to argue with somebody about any of that for a start they're really the only person I can think of who know that but also it just doesn't impinge upon me any way like if somebody says they're Muslim or Catholic or whatever religion I don't think they're right about the universe you know I'm an atheist I think their beliefs are incorrect but I know they're correct that they are Muslim or Catholic or atheist um and and it just doesn't impinge upon me because we have freedom of belief and freedom of speech so I can just say what I are not I don't believe in your God I don't believe in souls or whatever but this is a belief system that masquerades is something that's not a belief system it masquerades as a human right and a truth about all humans and you're not allowed to be an atheist gender atheist when it comes to this particular belief system you're not allowed to say I hear you when you say you think you're a woman I believe that you think that you're a woman I can see that you're a man and I'm not going to pretend that you're a woman and moreover I think it's quite regressive to think that feelings of being a woman are what makes somebody a woman I think what makes somebody a woman is just being female that's all and there's no Behavioral or opinion Criterion for being a woman so that's the problem in a nutshell it's that it's a belief system an ideology that is based on nothing and that is being forced down everybody's throats we're all meant to go along with it and when we have to do that we don't just lose our freedom of belief and our freedom of speech we lose the rights to Single Sex spaces because they become single gender identity spaces which means they become mixed sex spaces and everybody want Single Sex bases in some some circumstances well I can't say everybody there are people who don't anymore both men and women I meant need Single Sex spaces in some circumstances but women really need them so it's particularly harmful for women I hope that was not too long and coverage the ground was beautiful it was brilliant it was interesting while you were talking about that I was thinking about many of the conversations I've had with people who who are essentially on the other side of the argument um and you know one conversation in mind was someone who's sort of well versed in all the literature um and said it just wasn't a problem for men to come into women's spaces particularly changing rooms what what would you say to those people because a lot of people I know probably will have a lot of difficulty with the conversation we're having so what would you say to those people is that person saying that there's no problem in general with men coming in or are they saying that men who identify as women aren't a problem I I I think probably both if you if you ask them but I'm go with the the second one you know men who identify as as woman yeah I think I'll I'll sort of go with both because for me it's the same argument but it's important to say that for other people it isn't the same argument so if you start from the position that we just are ineluctably male and female and there's just nothing we can do about that no matter how much we want to do about it which is the position I take and this is I don't think it's an unkind position anym than I think reality is unkind like it's not me who's saying that it's reality that's saying that it's biology that says that Evolution says that then you have to think like what are single sex bases for why do we not just have everything mixed sex because we don't segregate by race now we used to so some people will say you know you're a racist or the equivalent of a racist if you say that you don't want men in women's faces but race and sex are very different things and that is acknowledged in equality laws around the world um there are lots of spaces a lots of places I should say where it's acceptable to discriminate by sex but not acceptable to discriminate by race and changing ones is one of them so you certainly couldn't set up a changing room here in the UK where I am that was for white people only and rightly so there's no Salient difference between white and black people when it comes to changing rooms there is a Salient difference between male and female people when it comes to changing rooms however and it is expressed expressly lawful to segregate for changing rooms when it comes to male and female so what are those differences well little biology lesson which absolutely everybody knows is true but lots of people are now pretending is not true men are bigger than women and they're much stronger much much stronger much more than people realize most of us have fortunately not been hit by somebody of the opposite sex we haven't entered into physical altercations um most men have never been hit by a woman and you know unfortunately a lot of women have been hit by men but I haven't so it's easy to pretend if you're one of the privileged people who has not been beaten up by a husband or somebody like that that um really were quite equal physically but we're not so men are much stronger than women and the strength is differentially the biggest in the upper body and the bits of you that to do with punching and overpowering and throttling and such like most men are able to beat a woman until she's down and she's not able to get up most women the overlap is very small very very few women will be able to do that to men so we separate men and women in places where women are vulnerable because men also commit nearly all the sex crimes so a man is both able to overpower a woman and commits certain sorts of crimes that are facilitated by access to vulnerable spaces places where women are naked undressed sleeping unable to get away like prison um ill like Hospital Wards and we do that as a m major risk reduction measure for women and even if men don't do anything bad when they're in those spaces many many women indeed most just don't want to be seen naked or semi- undressed by people of the opposite sex in situations where they're happy with people of the same sex they want their intimate care to be from another woman they don't want to go into changing rooms even with a well- behaved man who's taking off his clothes they don't want to see his body they regard it as indecent exposure to see a man and and they regard the man seeing them as voyerism even if that man doesn't feel like that even if that man thinks that he's a good person he shouldn't be there he's out of he's in the wrong place so somebody who thinks that there are men who are really women will have listened to all of that and may have agreed with all of it but think it doesn't apply to trans women but to me a transwoman is just a man who says he's a woman so he's no different than other men he doesn't belong in women's faes and if you think what it feels like to the other women in the space like how are we to know what this man's beliefs about himself are he's clearly male he's as male as anybody else obviously trivially a man can just lie and say he identifies as a woman like if you allow in any man even the totally sincere ones who insist that they really are women you can't keep out any man because there's no way of other people knowing which men are sincere and which ones aren't so that's the reason why we need those spaces for women's safety dignity privacy for risk risk reduction and there's no difference between the men who identify as women and all the other men for for the other users I accept that there may be for for those men of course but I'm thinking about the other users the people that these spaces were set up for these spaces weren't set up to protect men who identify as women they were set up to protect women and we're half the population so I don't feel that we should be at all apologetic about saying what we need how could I convince somebody who really thinks it's possible for a man to be a woman it's very difficult once someone has brought into that idea um I suppose I could say well how are other people meant to know you know if a man tells me he identifies as a woman it doesn't make me feel any better about him being naked in front of me or him me me having to be naked in front of him um I might say there's very few of them and more than 50% of the population is female and you know we do have to think about numbers sometimes I might say well if we let in the men who really really somehow are women we can't keep out the men who really aren't um sometimes people say then well you're punishing a small minority for the behavior of the big majority namely the men like you know men men as in men who identifies men commit nearly all the sex crime that's true that's because most men are men who identify as men not men who identify as women sometimes they think that men who identify as women are lower risk than other men and that's false we know that from the statistics the one really good study because it was very complete was a Swedish one which was an entire population study of every man who had got himself right through um sex reassignment surgery which is the genital surgery removes your genitals uh and had gone through legal sex change as well uh a forward a study tracking them through the rest of their lives showed that their patterns of crime were the same as all mens there was no difference and the differences are so large between men and women when it comes to criminality like men commit I mean 98 99% of all sex crimes and there are generally 20 times as many men in prison as there are women in developed countries and even on top of that enormous difference in numbers the men are far far more far more likely to have committed violence and sex crimes so you at any one point there's just a few dozen or hundred or something like that women in prison in the whole of the UK for a sex crime and there's maybe 20,000 men and when you remember how under reported crimes like rape and sexual abuse and child abuse are overwhelmingly committed by men which we know from victimization studies if anyone wants to know um you realize that there's just an overwhelming difference so men who identify as women are in the Man Group when it comes to risk not in a woman group so when you admit them into women's spaces you're enormously increasing the risk for all the women in that group and that's not me saying that trans women are perverts or something I'm just saying they're men that's all I don't think all men are perverts I just think that most of the sex criminals are men that's all I've tried this many times and people they're very determined to believe that my reason is big as it they stick with it that's the best I can do yeah um it's also I said is um it just creates a Honeypot for nefarious men if if you were a sexual offender all you have to do is pretend to be a woman and then you're in a woman's Chang so we know that from anywhere that you have a sacred cast of Men I'm Irish I hope my accent hasn't vanished so much that people in New Zealand can't tell but sometimes we love it okay I've lived in England for so long that people sometimes think I'm from the West country or something like that or some similarities um you know I knew a lot of priests who were wonderful people like when I think back to the parish priest in the parish that I was in as a child and teenager he was one of the best people I've ever known a good man who gave up his life and service to other human beings um so I'm not anti claricy but the fact is you weren't allowed to question priests in Catholic Ireland of my childhood and young adulthood and so of course men who were peteras did find their way into the into the priesthood and when they behaved the way they did nobody reported it because they knew they wouldn't get listened to and they knew that they would get told that they were bringing disrepute on the church um a relative of mine a much older relative went into the priesthood and he actually left before he was ordained and the unpleasant term that was used for men like that when I was a child was they were spoiled priests so he was a spoiled priest wonderful man went on into teaching and did a great deal of good and what he said was uh that the cardinal rule that they had to stick to was never bring trouble to the church I forget the exact phrase don't bring disrepute to the church so keep your dirty laundry to yourself and in situations like that bad people take advantage and we've seen that in um Boy Scouts as well because people you know naively thought everybody who's scout leader is a very good person who loves children and of course most of them are that's why they're doing it dead easy for Peter fathers to come in boarding school teachers uh children's TV presenters children's entertainers all these places give you access to children and until we all became much more aware of child sex abuse and a cloak behind which you could hide so if you say that men who identify as women can come into women's spaces freely as you say you're going to get Bad actors you just are um and I'm just not willing to sacrifice women on that basis even if it's really hard for the sincere men who identify as women yeah we've got to find another answer for them and they're my secondary concern after the majority of humanity that is female and to experience most of the sexual crime and commit almost none of it yeah the other thing as I always think if a a member of a family was sexually molested in a changing room by a man their opinion would probably change quite dramatically it's it's yeah my husband says that too and I wonder right I mean some people are so far down the rabbit hole that they see nothing yeah and also you know there were people who knew very well that a member of their family had been abused by a priest but what could they do about it the priest was the sacred cast literally yeah yeah I I in your in your Preamble I I was thinking you know well one of the question I was going to ask that I didn't was essentially you're saying that trans ideology is a new religion and and I think it is it's a Godless near religion and um you know what you're saying is trans men in particular are a sacred class which you can question yeah so the terminology is always dreadfully confusing you and I using man and woman to mean sex terms so men who identify as women in their terminology are trans women um which is you know which is one of the reasons they've managed to get so far the language is so confusing and difficult to keep track of We There was a very interesting poll in the UK um some months ago commissioned by Murray Blackburn and McKenzie who were a brilliant policy House of three amazing women in Scotland and they asked questions about what people understood the words transwoman and transgender woman to mean and they they tried to compromise or you know find formulations that everybody understood so registered at Birth was what they said for sex if I remember correctly or recorded at Birth and they said you know is a trans woman somebody who was recorded male at Birth female at Birth don't know and what they found is a sixth of the UK population thought that a trans woman was someone who's recorded a female at Birth and another six said they didn't know and I can tell you that among the rest of them who correctly identified that a transwoman is someone who's born male at Birth what you find is that in a conversation they may when their brain is switched on get that right at the beginning but then they get confused later down the line so there was a very very funny a terrible but funny um piece of research out from a hospital I think Hospital trust in Brighton here and Brighton's like San Francisco you know it's it's the epicenter of this stuff in the UK and they were talking about um pregnancy and trans people of course only trans men can get pregnant because they're women and then at some point poor s was writing this got very very confused and said very few trans women have ever given birth now no transwoman literally zero ever has given birth well he wasn't too ideological documents who knew yeah the terminology got lost yeah so people really get lost and I think that that is part of the reason that there has been so little resistance is people don't know what they're being asked so I think a lot of the people who say yes of course trans women are women think that the slogan is saying trans women are women who identify as men you know and then why would you keep them out of the women's changing rooms they're women let people understand that they're vulnerable the same way that all other women are probably extra vulnerable as well because they maybe make risky choices so yeah I just I just have to say that for your readers like or your listeners this is you really have to keep your head around you that's why I say man who identifies as woman like a lot of Road testing people understand what I'm talking about yeah I I I completely agree I think the language is wellan you know orw got a lot of a lot of things right um and you know there's inversions basically you know man means woman woman means man which is very confusing yeah um and I mean something I'm I'm a real pedant about definitions and so I find this um you know rather irritating and concerning but the law has to be P pedantic well well the law does yes but even in in just normal dialogue and conversation we do have to you know we have to what each other means yeah and so yes exactly it's not a language if you don't exactly and and in a way I'll run this past you it's sort of like the political correctness that has creeped in over my lifetime I mean I've I've always been concerned you know of course there are some some situations where it is good but it's this sort of dictate upon high that language should change rather than it evolving um as as language normally does from grass grass troops and bottom up so what what would your comments be I mean we're sort of touched on it but if you can talk about it more broadly about how the trans ideology movement has used language is essentially in a sense a trojan horse to get their ideology past people and and fully fully convinc people fully convinced people yeah I think that's the effect but I don't think they're quite that cynical I think that they're people who do believe that language creates reality yes and that's got a fairly long history at this point in postmodernist thinking um it sort of started From if you go back to 19th century scientists the Victorian men roughly who you know many advancers Evolution the theory of evolution and so on these were people who believed that there was a reality out there and that their job was to see reality as clearly as possible and I know more and more think that even if that's not completely true it's the most productive way to think about things when you're trying to create policy or um do science but the thing is it's not actually completely true like we are just inescapably creatures who have viewpoints and who see only partially and who bring our biases in to what we do I mean even just on the we see only partially France like our eyes only see a small amount of electromagnetic radiation we're a certain size so we don't see relativity and we don't see quantum mechanics these are really very different than this this size physics like the three very different sorts of physics so you know we really only see part of what's there a little bit of what's there and when the more you learn about the way that the eye works and the ear works you realize that we are in our brains creating a great deal of what we see and what we hear and that's a kind of seductive idea when you discover it first because it feels very clever and you think like wow you know everything's happening in the brain and not out there out there is like just a formless amorphous mass of stuff and we create reality in our brains and and again I say a lot of that is true but not all of it and then you start to think much more um trivial and tertiary order things like you know it matters whether you're a male or female as an observer it matters whether you're black or white and again you know there's truth to that like the fact is that medicine and science really overlooked things that are specific to women like women's medical um research is much poorer than men's medical research things were done to black people that would not have been done to white people um descriptions of sort of the normal person in a group tends to be a white person like all of this is true and so there was a lot of value to people making these points when they made them first and trying to make science better at going like are we considering women as well as men are we considering people of different races or are we imagining that the norm for this Blood sugar test or whatever is basically Caucasian etc etc anyway it all went too far as things often do and it got to the point where you create reality really yourself entirely um and then you know that became to seem moral because the thing is once you're creating reality with words you can make reality be whatever you want and so why would you not make it Utopia why would you not make it so that men and women are really equal in all respects I don't mean equal in value value mean really actually equal so we're as strong as men for example sometimes I say you know women are much weaker than men physically and therefore we need our own sports I tweeted something about that recently and some idiot underne said you know all the brilliant Sports women would find that deeply insulting well I happen to be from a very sporty family I'm the one non-sporty person out of my large number of siblings I have five siblings who were Captain Cricket for Ireland and two sisters who played on the Ireland team one of whom captained it for many years she played in Australia for a long time I'm half year and half the year in Ireland um in Tasmania if I remember correctly uh so people may know her Isabelle Joyce I know you're in New Zealand but anyway for God you're you're that side of the world so yeah she so of course she knows she's physically weaker than men for goodness sake she's been playing against boys and men all her life like when she was captaining Ireland she was playing on a seconds and thirds and occasionally firsts clubside for men to get enough practice with strong people and fast balls she's well aware of the fact that she wouldn't be a professional cricketer if she had to be in with the men she's just you know she's the best Irish female cricketer who's ever been but she was at her very best on a men's club side so yes there's an enormous difference does this mean that she's inferior to them no it just means that her body evolved to do a set of things that men don't have to do namely get pregnant give birth and breastfeed and that's an enormous enormous burden on a human body that men bodies don't have to so of course you can do more things like sorry I rant about this because it annoys me so much because it's such a trivial point that the other side is making like you think women aren't great like we make all new Life yeah we live for years longer we're less susceptible to infection we have better self-control of our emotions in particular the anger ones you know there's a bunch of great things about being female even in the body that men don't have and yet because men are stronger they're like oh you think women your men men are superior well try giving birth then and it's you know the one the men who say well why don't women try harder why don't they train harder well why don't you try harder to get pregnant Evolution made to sex is their different things yeah right rant over sorry for I love it just while we're on that I think you know don't quote me on the exact numbers but you know Serena Williams the greatest female tennis player that's ever lived I think um she was beaten by a male who was ranked 270 so that it was something but it was it was more than that it was more than that um what happened was I think he was I think it was nearer to 200 like 206 or something like that it was definitely between 200 and 300 she she made the point that she the greatest female tennis player of all time and really remarkably strong like that's an unusually strong body if you look at her she's you know she's in the loveliest sense she's a freak of nature that's the point about being the very best ever you're always a freak of nature like you know like some um biles like so tiny and so strong like absolute outliers so she's a huge outlier and she said but I'd be beaten by you know the top several hundred men yeah so this guy did the challenge and but what he did was he played a round of golf in the morning he went for a couple of points for lunch and then he did two sets against one against Serena and once once against her sister Venus so that they were fresh they did one set each and he beat them from memory six love 61 so he just it's just the proper body strength like if you look at Men's men and women's tennis they're very different games I mean actually the women's tennis is better in my opinion because the men's have too many aces like women just can't get as many aces because that upper body strength I spent ages learning about this from my book if you think of what happens when you serve in tennis you're recruiting a lot of your upper body you're using your hand your arm your shoulder your chest your back and all of those are about 50% stronger in men than they are in women so it's you're compounding all these many differences and you can just whack the ball and men who are training will practice Aces for months and years and then they will win by getting Aces because it's so fast they can get the ball so fast the other man just can't get to it it's beyond human ability to move that fast women just can't do that so women have much more um volleys rallies um and so it's a different game a more interesting game in my opinion but that's how he won yeah quack so a good follow on to that is what so what Helen is the problem with men competing in women's sports what could possib could possibly be wrong with that well you have to think like what is what is Sport um go it was annoy me when people do these very Grand questions like what is Sport anyway but like sport isn't just um a hobby if it isn't fair it isn't sport is one of the things they say in philosophy of sport and once you start to think about what fairness is is it it kind of it's very difficult to get a hold of it because it's obviously not fair that one person for example the the Williams has a parent who's wealthy enough and trained enough to train them from little and another person doesn't it's not fair that some countries are bigger than others and so it's easier for them to medals it's not fair that some countries are richer nothing's Fair that's the reality nothing well so what we do in sport is we have categories which identify things which we regard as as unfair if they were to be directly in comp in competition with each other an obvious one would be paralympians so the so the Paralympics category you know either you say that sport is only for able-bodied people or you have a separate category for people who are not able-bodied it's not fair that somebody's disabled but like do we have to compound that unfairness by having it so that they can't place for it obviously not and then it would be grossly unfair for somebody's able bodies to compete in in the in the paralympic category because they're bringing an advantage that's specifically categorically outside that category so we have several categories the usual ones are age disability and sex because they're very large ones and they're groups largish groups of people and they the advantage of being in the prime category in each of those being able-bodied being prime age being male is so large that if we didn't categorize by that the other group wouldn't actually ever get on the like into the competition let alone on the podium and um you on age you would have no under 18s if adults could compete in it you would have no over 35s under 35s could compete in it so we separate things and then once you have a separate category bringing the categorical Advantage into the disadvantaged group is unfair it is just unfair it's like having an outboard motor on your bike in a cycling competition you know I'm so share to cyclist but I'd still lose even with an outboard motor it's still unfair I'd be I'd be faster than I would be without it that is not allowed in cycling we do not have Motors in cycling end a story and then we accept that some cyclists have a better body they have a better bike they got better training whatever those are the sources of unfairness that mean that everybody doesn't finish at the same time like if we went through and we said there were to be no sources of unfairness what we'd be saying is all human beings would ender the Finish Line at the same moment there would never be any competition so competition in sport are about identifying the people who have the natural advantages the training the skill the drive the physique all of those things but not the ones that are categorical and if you allow if you allow someone to move category then that tends to override all the others so I said that Sera Williams was in the most beautiful sense of freak of nature she is but if we had mixed sex tennis as in just one category we'd never have heard of her because she's you know she's the most perfect female human being for playing tennis imaginable but much more ordinary men can beat her so if you want to identify female Brilliance ability exceptional performance and so on you have to have a female category same with paralympians you're never going to know about the amazing paralympian athletes if there's no Paralympics category you're never going to see the world's best under 180 in anything if there's no child category so you're just not allowed to move category if you're going from the privileged category to the unprivileged category you're allowed the other way by the way so you know if there was somebody who was um like like I said my sister was always playing in men's games I mean you know she's bringing her major female disadvantage into men's category that's that's generally regarded as fair I think there are some places that you wouldn't like boxing because it's too dangerous you get killed actually boxing is an interesting one to bring up along with weightlifting they have um weight categories and that is because no matter how brilliant a man is if he's small he can't box against a big man he'll just lose he might be a much much better boxer much faster on his feet you know much nippier much more skilled but he'll just get a fist to the face and he'll be gone so we have weight categories in that um you know we don't have to have we could just say oh well boxing just identifies the enormously freakish big good boxers the same way that basketball doesn't have height categories and so basically there's almost nobody small in basketball but you absolutely could introduce a hey category in basketball the reason they don't is because small people who would be very very good at basketball are probably very good at some other sports as well because they're fast and they're skilled they've got a good hand eye coordination Etc they just play something else like there sports for everybody you know if you're a huge beefy guy you go into weightlifting boxing American football if you're very tall you go into basketball da D but if you said that men and women had to compete together in all of those it would be men so a woman can't say well you know I've got a woman's physique and so that means I go into these Sports no the men will be better at those too because they're stronger you know more endurance um well more endurance except at very very long distances uh you know more response to training um just basically everything better um biomechanics men's biomechanics are much better than women's for movement because women have to get a baby out like this extra ask that Evolution had to answer um the the way that the force goes down through the legs when you're walking running jumping Etc is more efficient for men men have more efficient tendons and muscles they're Tighter and more elastic so you bounce more with the same Force there's a lot of differences between men and women under the hood more than the obvious ones yeah yeah well I think the key thing about sports where we watch watch sports is the uncertainty and it's uncertain because because the the the range the differential range is actually quite close now if you if if we keep on allowing men to fight to compete in women's sport wom's sport is apart from anything just going to become incredibly boring because the men should win all all the time so sometimes people say well Case by case then there's this campaigner here chap called Peter tachel who um was a gay rights Advocate and is now basically a trans rights Advocate although he would say LGBT he's credibly frustrating person to talk to because you explain to him in ch with chapter and verse why what he's saying is wrong and then the next time you see him he just says it again so one of his ones is that um some trans women are small and weak so he he said I he is a particular example of some trans woman he knows who plays in women's football I don't think professionally but I'm not sure I I mean I really don't think professionally but women's sport isn't a sort of Second Chance for weak men the fact is that's just not a very good man like you know we don't go oh well this able-bodied person is fat and old and unfit and they're not bothering to train so let's let them into the Paro Olympics where they might actually beat somebody who should be in the Paro Olympics but who's been training all the time so yeah I I I just want to say that because people sometimes think um you know that the range that the Rangers do overlap a bit for men and women we're not going to let in the shitest men into women's sports where they can be much much better there than they were as men yeah because it's just totally unfair on women who were actually exceptional yeah you know women's sports is about identifying and rewarding female exceptional performance it's not about rewarding mundane ordinary unexceptional men yeah now the two two topics I really want to get covered in this podcast is education what are we teaching to our children about this I mean I don't know the chapter and verse of your syllabus and New Zealand but I bet you it's as rubbish as the one here I mean something went wrong about 50 years ago in education where we stopped thinking that the point of teachers was a to be in local paren in school during the day that is that we understand that parents are the people who have primary responsible ability for their children for their safety and their education their upbringing and also that they were there to change the world Ro and to teach stuff skills and information and so that's what's that that's taken as a given by most teachers now that their job is to form the Next Generation in a way that you know is what they regard as good um I don't like the phrase social justice Warrior because I think it's overused but that's what they see themselves as in the most literal sense that they are Creator in Utopia in the Next Generation rather than you know I've got a range of people in front of me some of them are from conservative families some of them are from Liberal ones some are religious some aren't they're from all over the place my job is to make sure that all the kids in front of me are as good at masks as they can be or you know have learned how to be fine upstanding citizens who can go on and have a productive life productive and happy life ideally um so basically once you make that switch what you decide about in your syllabus loses all connection with objective reality because of this idea that you can remake the world linguistically so you teach children flat lies because they believe them children believe what adults tell them like children believe in Santa Claus without question until they're a certain age if you tell little children that what makes boys and girls boys and girls is what they wear and what they play with then they will believe that and some of them will continue to believe it into adulthood I would guess um but in particular some of them will look at themselves and think well what I like is pink and Barbie and shopping and gossiping and um you know I love the idea of wearing jewelry and makeup when I'm a little bit older I must be a girl and other ones will think you know I don't like any of that and frankly I like being out in the mud and climbing and you know getting into fist fights so I must be a boy but those kids are the ones they're they're a minority most girls are quite feminine and most boys are quite masculine like play and behavior and preferences for clothing and so on are actually quite you know fitted with the stereotypes but there's overlap and nobody's entirely masculine or feminine in that way I mean I like mathematics I'll would be an ordinarily feminine woman in many ways but I have a PhD in mathematics and so everybody's like that everybody's a mixture but if you tell people that what makes them what if you tell little boys I should say and little girls that what makes them boys and girls is there is how well they fit with stereotypes the kids who get confused most are the ones who are destined to grow up gay the ones who are autistic and therefore very very black and white thinkers and as they head towards puberty what you'll get is the ones who are most terrified by the changes that puberty brings that's the ones who've been really scared by porn that they've seen and porn is almost ubiquitous now in schools because of the mobile phone you'll get the ones who've been abused and because girls in particular want to identify out of their bodies if those bodies if they think those bodies have uh been what brought on the abuse you'll get the ones who ident who started in uh developing early you know a girl of nine or 10 who grows breasts is going to get wolf whistled on the street and she's not remotely mentally up for it prepared for it yeah so that's what's happening they're telling children children that sex isn't important that it's bigoted to notice people's sex and to think it's real that sex is a spectrum the gender identity is real innate everybody knows theirs it's important that you know what yours is that your gender identity is what makes you a boy or a girl that it's very very brave and wonderful to be trans but also the same as being CIS which is the opposite of trans like not being trans is CIS like that it's bad to think that one is better than the other but actually identifying as friends is identifying with a lie with a falsehood and it's identifying in a way that will give you set set you up to be in conflict with other people and in conflict with your own body for the rest of your life so it's obviously inferior and it may put you on a medicalized pathway as well so you know we should regard that to the extent that somebody we cannot stop them from identifying as trans those people we need to accommodate as as well as we can and as kindly as we can but I mean it's obviously an inferior outcome to working out what sex you are and identifying with that's that's the ideal outcome so yeah we're we're ruining a generation of kids I think in many ways to do with mental health but this is a serious one of them yeah yeah and in the extreme you know you you can get what I see as rather horrific uh medical interventions I mean what one I heard of is a 13-year-old getting a double myectomy um yeah we just had a report here from Dr yes I was I was gon to ask about yeah strangely enough yeah yeah well so when we're recording it's um is it a week it's yeah it's a week since it came out now as we're recording um so Dr Hillary Cass is very eminent pediatrician she's a former um president of the Royal Society for Pediatrics here in the UK very widely respected sort of towards the end of her career she has spent the last four years doing a government commissioned study into specifically pediatric gender medicine so her Remis is in the NHS the National Health Service but that's nearly everything here in the way of healthcare um it's the gender services so not you know schools or what GPS family doctors are doing it's really that like the specialist clinics but her report is magisterial um she commissioned a very large and very high quality um literature review and study of all the guidelines around the world like the formalized guidelines and what she concluded was that they're nearly all terrible so the big ones from W path and which is the world professionalist Association of transgender Health which isn't world it's mostly American it's not professional anyone can join you just pay $200 and it's not about healthare again again again all welli and inversions yeah yeah yeah it sounds great but it's just you pay $200 and you can join and 75% of the members are American and it has the most lunatic standards of care imaginable and they aren't standards of care standards of care is a proper term in medicine it means you've gone through a certain process which is very evident R they just said what they thought should happen like there's an entire chapter on unic gender identity says little boys can be born Unix and what you should do is cut their genitals off an entire chapter on non-binary no mention of lower age limits for anything um what else is completely insane and they took out an Ethics chapter that they started writing so I mean like when I say it's bad I mean it's as bad as it's possible to be anyway she noted that down so what she concluded um is that if you look at the evidence there's Lally no evidence supporting the use of puberty blockers for gender distress in childhood um all of this has been horribly misreported in many places in the past week so I'm going to try and knock down a few of the misinformation it would be good because I think on in a week's time the Ministry of Education here is going to make an announcement on puy blogers yeah okay okay so one of the things that a literature review does like the one she commissioned people at the University of York is it it it sets criteria beforehand you know that it has to cover these things that it has to be in English for example as the usual common one um and then you you identify all of them and all of this is to stop bias whereby you let weak things in because they fit what you wanted to conclude or did you exclude strong things that don't that don't fit with your preconceptions you know so you set everything in advance so the review identified 102 Studies by doing that two were of the highest quality 50 were of medium quality and 50 were quality now lots of things are good studies when they say medium quality it may just be that they're a bit small right or it may be that you know the very best ones have randomly chosen groups but may just not be possible to choose a random group as a control so you know it's fine to be a medium study and the point of these reviews is to collect them so 50 medium studies that all pointed the same way would actually give you quite a strong conclusion right right so you use 52 studies used and you know you weight your strong more than you waight your weiant you drop the week because those are just they're more likely than not to mislead you so they looked at those 52 studies and they found literally no evidence supporting the idea that puberty blockers were helpful for childood gender distress and so that got reported as two studies she used and she threw out the other hundred that's flatly false but also that um oh we just don't know it's six of one half doesen of the other now what puberty blockers do is they're like putting you directly into immediate menopause they cut down that they cut out that particular hormonal Loop entirely so a child remains in a state of Arrested Development the child does not go into puberty but they continue to age their cohorts go into puberty they continue to get taller um but they don't have the enormous brain reshaping that happens in puberty like anyone listening to this who's watched somebody go go through puberty you will know that it's an extraordinary process like you feel like you're watching a fast forward sometimes you wake up and your Sun's an inch taller you know and it's how you grow up it's how you stop being a child and become an adult so interfering with that is already something that you would do in only the most extreme circumstances and then when you look at what it does physically it's clearly bad for your bones because in your bones you put down the the um the calcium that is going to last you through the rest of your life especially if you're female it's clearly bad for your brain as I said there's an enormous brain spurt during puberty but it also keeps your genitals and your gonads that's your testes and your ovaries in a state of childhood um it also keeps your sexual response in a state of childhood as well so if you were destined to grow up gay you will genuinely find that genuinely find that out early in puberty because you'll start to get a sexual response to people of your sex that will you will not find that out and um you will not strong to become orgasmic so what we do know now about puberty blockers is on top of all of that most people who take puberty blockers go on to cross- seex hormones so they're sometimes sold as a pors buttons so that you can wait until you're old enough to decide but actually they lock you in essentially a Gateway a Gateway drag yeah there's a phrase in medicine the Cascade of intervention so any woman who has been told in a maternity like pregnancy maternity class that if she has a has a an epidural she's more likely to have a cesarian that's a Cascade of inter I so puberty blockers almost 100% leads on to the cross- seex hormones if you start on puberty blockers around 12 or 13 and then you go on to cross- sex hormones you will continue to have a child's genitals little boy penis your testes and your ovaries will not mature so you will not start producing sperm um you will not be able to have orgasm and you will not know what your sexuality is and yet that's what we're doing so why would you ever do something like this to a child would you do it if the evidence was we don't know if it's going to make you feel better we don't know if it's going to help what you came in with mainly gender distress you would do that I can only think of one situation where you would do that and that is if the child would die otherwise sorry say that again say that again if the child would die otherwise that is the logic of giving children chemotherapy and radiotherapy for otherwise fatal childhood cancers the child is going to die or they're going to grow up steroid okay we'll go for stero now we've got like don't know if this will help might not you're going to grow stero oh and by the way your bones and your brain so 100% of people who go puberty blockers become ster I think it's like 95 to 100 there's no Global but it's really near 100% okay yeah just just a minor thing e if you know what I mean you know ex I mean you you never have children pu yeah you'll never be a sexual entity yeah yeah you'll never you will be you will be neutered you'll be neutered yeah now that's if you started early if you start puberty blockers at 15 you've done a lot of your development I still think they're very bad drugs but I'm just saying like that that pathway is the block puberty and the reason for blocking puberty is mostly in boys the reason they do it and they don't say this they say pause button they say life saving you know what what the real reason is is that boys who go through puberty are not going to pass as women as adults because puberty for boys does a whole load of things that basically turn are very visibly not a woman that we can't undo you know facial hair broader shoulders hairline voice breaking is a big one the other way around I mean of course women develop in a way that doesn't look like men but you can take testosterone as an adult and you'll start to grow a beard your voice will break da d da so women who identifies as men generally pass much much better right than men who identifies as women right so adult men who identify as women it is a source of great sorrow to them that they don't pass and us some of them become very fixated on it they um they transitioned in their 40s or 50s often after being married having kids enjoying a healthy sex life all of those things these men are commonly erotic crossdressers and the erotic fixation on dressing as a woman to masturbate to get sexual pleasure that becomes a fixation for them and over time that fixation grows and grows and they become convinced that the one source of sorrow in their life is that they won't pass and they project that on to Children right look at little boys who have gender distress and they think you know I'll stop him from going through poty that that makes sense and I think they become very fixated on us like if you listen to I wouldn't normally bring up P you know personal individuals but this isn't a private individual it's um Rachel LaVine who is very senior in the American uh Federal Administration Assistant Secretary of Health who is a man who identifies as a woman I mean he's he just looks like a man with long hair wearing the women's uniform not the men's and he sounds like that too um he calls himself a lesbian as far as I know because he's a straight man but that man more than anyone else I've ever heard give speeches talking about how puberty blockers are life-saving care how important it is for little boys to have access to this and I'm like you know you you didn't sacrifice your genitals and your sex life and your brain health and your bone health and all of those things and so why could you possibly want those things to be taken from minors and I think it must be because he's so unhappy himself about not passing that he projects that onto children so the real reason that these drugs are used is because there are adult men who are trying to live vicariously and trying to make right what they think is the thing that made them most unhappy I don't think it is the thing that made them most unhappy I think we can get fixated I think they've become fixated and they blame everything on the fact that they don't pass yeah well what you've just described as nothing short of extreme child abuse yes I think it is too I completely do these drugs shouldn't be used I do understand although I don't agree with the early gender doctors who try it I did talk to um two or three three actually very principled Canadian doctors who have supported this pathway back in the 1990s and 2000s but they were imagining incredibly carefully gatekeep I don't think you can gatekeep I'm just trying to say what they were imag incredibly gatekeep systems where hardly anybody transitioned where you only would consider doing this to children who had been like so distressed that they were trying to cut their own genitals off when they were three you know and you could imagine that maybe this child is somebody who'd be better off now you need the studies to answer to find out whether they really would be and what C showed is no they aren't you know it's a question if you could identify these people and if you do this thing maybe they will be better off she answered there's no reason to say that and in particular one place where she didn't just say we don't know is the suicide risk it is categorically incorrect to say that puberty blockers make suicide less likely in children with gender dysphoria we know that's false that's answered but that's the only thing that you could put on the scales to balance the enormous I have I have I have I have been given that argument um yeah well the well the jury is in we have the data it's not true children with gender dysphoria are a little bit more likely than other children to um sadly to commit suicide or to attempt suicide but that is because there are a lot of co-morbidities these are children who very commonly are depressed anxious Eating Disorders etc etc so when you compare them with children who have the same other diagnoses all the difference disappears yeah and puberty blockers don't help anym yeah so yeah well that is all very depressing stuff yeah um it is a medical scandal this is a huge yes and uh you know I was listening to a podcast Rec um the other day about the history of medical scandals so it's it's it's in a long line you know with lobotomies and um I can't remember what the other yeah people say how could this happen but it happens all the time well you know that's my favorite quote is um the more things change the more they stay the same so yeah we we're not we're not special we we're not immune to these social contagion now yeah I often think what happens and to the the people who said that lobotomies were a bad idea because I mean it's so obviously a bad idea to stick something in the eye eye socket and wiggle it around in the brain there must have been in fact I know there were people there was a sort of traveling circus in America the guy who wasn't the guy who invented the labotomy who was Portuguese the guy who popularized it was the guy who thought of doing it through the eyes because it could be done very quickly and he and his team would turn up at hospitals where they would already have stated about 20 patients and he would just do them all in a morning with his traveling circus and other people would clean up afterwards and off you'd go somewhere else there were people in those hospitals saying why are we doing this I bet you they were treated the same way as those of us who were saying that this is a medical Scandal I bet you they were and then at some point the outcomes became so clearly there were so many people who were and permanently institutionalized um and unable to function after labotomy that the Scandal became impossible to ignore and then you won't find anyone who supports this yeah except the people who have become complicit the guy who invented them continued to argue for the rest of his life that they were a good thing and that they were just doing being done on the wrong people yeah we're going to see that again yeah I completely agree freedom of speech do we have any I mean we do we're talking here well you know I mean have you well one of your your um podcast you did with um was it Jordan pet Peterson got pulled down but well I mean we we do have freedom of speech but we have we have limited freedom of speech we have significant limitations particularly on the subject you're talking about yes yes yes I mean I mean more generally as well I don't know if you saw just the night before you and I are talking a major conservative conference was shut down in Belgium natcon it's called um now natcon would be to the far end of right-wing respectable but it's definitely in the respectable as in not illegal to happen mainstream and important individuals go they represent a significant portion of public opinion very significant that's by by definition is the sort of thing that should be allowed to go ahead you don't silence very large parts of mainstream public opinion if you do you end up with brexit you end up with increased racism you end up with a lot of bad things so it was closed down in the Belgian City by the mayor saying that it was hateful he sent in you armed police to block the venue and to stop the people going in and it includes people like so braan who is a a former Minister here Home Secretary here in the UK and again soel bravman has took well to the right of the political party of the the conservative party she's right there but you know so what they're the party in power people voted for them she's expressing a major mainstream opinion anyway they um they took out an injunction overnight and went directly to the National level Court which gave them an an injunction to stop the same thing happening today so the second day of the conference is going to go ahead it is incredible to me that anyone could either think of doing this or think that it is a good idea it's back to the words or magic if we stop people from saying there are too many immigrants political correctness has gone too far any of those things these are not my opinions I'm not saying that they are significant opinions of large chunks of the population they are lawful there should be no impediments to say them but people think that if you stop them then the opinion vanishes which is the most stupid thinking this is like you know when children play hideand-seek and they think they they cover their eyes you can't see them it's that level of stupid yeah well I completely agree I actually started this podcast exactly for that that reason um two people were banned by the the we we have no freedom of speech on this on this topic well I mean can you actually say that I mean we are you know we are talking I mean I've been listened to hundreds of hours of you talking um so yes because I don't stop I mean as as one of the people who dislikes me most FR trans and call wall who did a debate with me in one of the very rare public things where you have someone putting forward trans and someone putting forward you know the remarkable opinion that there are two Sexes and he says you know Helen Joyce just says the same thing over and over again in different words yes that's not my fault well I I'm going to disagree with you that's just the number I'm going to disagree with me a friend text me today and she said the great thing about Helen every time you listen to her she's got something new to say so yeah but it's always the same thing it's always there are two sexes get very frustrated by this if we could all just establish that this problem would be over me that's oh and that they matter sorry you've got to say the matter bit as well yeah that that's the joy of politics really is as you have to say something the same thing over and over and over again and then eventually yeah and I don't find that the joy there's a reason I'm not a politician couldn't stand it well I'm saying yes so you challenged me yeah yeah you challenged me on the question of whether we have free speech or not so free speech doesn't mean you are able to speak it's much more than that it's that there aren't unreasonable or unfair restrictions on your speech so you know it is a fact that most mainstream media will not listen to me or anyone else who says any of the same things as me and categorize us as hateful so I have been on the BBC precisely once since I became known to be somebody who and can I can we just can I just B in there just to give the audience I mean I'll have this in the intro but just to remind the audience you worked for the economist which is when of the most mainstream magazines um 17 years 17 years you're you're an editor you were the Brazilian yep very senior very very senior I was one of the most senior editors The Economist and I did not lose my job over this issue I left because I want to Campa on this issue and they tried very hard to keep yeah so you you couldn't in a sense you couldn't get more mainstream than Helen Joyce not just mainstream but like technocratic Centrist like I belonged to the class who went to davil I went to davil twice when I was fin editor I was on the BBC all the time right I had a list of things I was regarded as suitable to commentate on so my jobs included education correspondent um Brazil correspondent based in s Paulo International editor Finance editor I did a a job was an executive editor job which is a more um sort of administrator thing and then I finished as Britain editor those are the sorts of things that get you on P places like the BBC all the damn time and chairing big conferences and so on you know people would invite me to talk about South America about financial regulation about British Politics the last job that I did at the economist I was writing leaders editorials the whole time right through Boris Johnson eating cake and they're like you may have heard that that prime minister did a lot of cake eating and it got him out of power so that's who I was I'm not some random person saying I'm entitled to go on the BBC I'm somebody who was on the bloody BBC the whole time then Along Comes this issue that's a big issue um and here I am um writing a you know a best-selling book on it um and it's as if I don't exist and it's not just me it's all the other people all the many people you know some of them with TVs are longer than mine who've known about these things more who write in more Outlets you know so I'm saying this about me because I know my facts but I'm not the only one by it's everybody on my side and then they get these total non- entities who have no no sensible thing to say on the other side so the one and only time I've been on the BBC since I came out on this topic was in fact about the cast review so it was the day it came out I was on the BBC in an early morning slot there were good people on other bits of the BBC as well Hillary Cass herself was on the flagship radio 4 today program so that was brilliant and she had a good interview on that the person who was on directly before me they got an edited quote from a pre from a pre-recorded interview with a a reality TV contestant who has friends so te boy who says he's a woman and he literally said that he knew he was a woman because as a baby he was photographed in a blond wig and wearing pink dresses that was played and then they go to me to talk about it that is what they think of as balance on the BBC and I mean what journalist listens to somebody say they have pictures of themselves as a baby a baby he said the word baby in a blond wig no nobody puts blonde wigs on babies what is he talking about this is obvious and anyway what's that why has the media because the I think I imagine the same things is in in New Zealand I imagine it's the same why has the media got so Vaper like this because it's not just on this issue no I know I know I mean constra constrained so narrowly constrained their over to window is is minute yeah so why is that well they're very inward looking you know Med media have always like the people you care about most in the media are your competitors and other media like when I was in Brazil yes okay you want to know what's happening out in Brazil That's the job and you want to know what readers think and you try and make yourself keep focusing on that but the fact is you also want to know what the fd's correspondent is writing and what the Wall Street journal's correspondent is writing and those are the people that you meet at things so unless you're careful you live in a bubble yes so I think that the BBC in particular but you know a lot of media organizations have allowed themselves to get very insular then there's political polarization like more and more you you are writing for only one segment of society so the guardian used to when I was a in the 90s when I was a young woman I used to um read the guardian I loved it even though it wasn't my politics because they had a very deliberate uh decision that on any contentious issue they would find the best voices they could and give you a foreign against that's what the opinion Pages were they were you know on on very difficult topics like the Middle East they would find somebody saying what Israel thought and what Palestine the Palestinian leadership thought and I people would always complain but that was regarded as a good thing that meant that you were getting conversations going and now the guardian ignores this topic uh has never quoted the organization I work for did not review my book you know I maybe the Observer reviewed my book the Sunday version maybe they did review it late and said stupid things about I can't remember anyway the point is they are writing only now for the farle in so so America they're not journalists they're activists who write yes and they would say that I I've heard that an editorial meetings of the Guardian now and people will like suppose an immigrant kills somebody and it would be the sort of horrific killing that you might just report if anybody killed somebody in those circumstances like you know a senseless attack on the street type thing which are rare here luckily and people at the guardian will say we won't report that because it gives ammunition to people who don't like immigrants yes it does but it's also true journalists aren't meant to censor like that that's for other people that's for the activists and it's for the politicians our job is is it news report it as fairly as I can and move on to the next story leave it to other people to make those value judgments yeah so yeah me we're report we're quoted and reported all the time in the right-wing press here and now and that's been hard work but in the BBC is very leftwing even though it has a statut of Duty um because it's publicly funded to be unbiased um they hire people who come now almost entirely uh from universities this is another big change in journalism it's become a graduate profession and it tends not to be a well-paid job by the standards of graduate jobs anymore because the media are in such difficulties so it doesn't attract people who could earn more in hard Sciences mathematics you know the the disciplines that are least Infested by postmodern so they're hiring from a pool of people who believe postmodernist over time the organization changes so basically the BBC is made up largely now of young very ideological people who talk to each other talk to their friends and imagine the world agrees with them yeah and I imagine it's the same and very removed from The Real World yes I mean these are not people who are going to end up uh in prison for example so I remember when started to look at this topic I thought I must have missed something because you know it's so obviously insane like it just is an extraordinarily stupid theory that should take two sentences to demolish you know sex is real Evolution created it it's it so happens that mammals can't change sex I didn't make it that way Evolution did and there are significant differences between male and female people that require that you notice people's sexes in certain situations unlike for example race a religion I I don't want to know anybody's religion I just don't want them to tell me about it and you know race there's a few situations where someone might want to have you know a black support group because black people's experiences are a bit different or something like that I don't need to look at people's races I don't need to know their religions I do need to know their sex I need to know it all sorts of situations anywhere privacy is engaged anywhere fairness of strength are engaged anywhere that's got risk assessment uh obviously anything to do with sex you know people have sexualities and that's actually quite a lot of life so it's so obviously stupid that how did it ever get off the ground and so I kept thinking I'm missing something I'm missing something I'm missing something I stayed quiet for months thinking like what am I missing and then I started to say a few things and one of the early things I said is look you know if you say that people are like trans women are women you will sure as eggs as eggs end up putting a rapist in a women's jail and I thought that that was a DK I thought that the answer would be uh oh yeah you're right I haven't thought of that and people said you're saying all trans women are rapists well you know it's these were people I admired these were people who were clever people who would never have made that logical error in any other circumstance well it was ideological commitment and they're never going to end up in jail themselves as David Hume said reason as a slave of passs of completely and you know when when you look and see what happens people who insist on talking up about this you can see why people would stay quiet one of the other things people say on the free speech thing is they have this asinine comeback where they say well I'm listening to you aren't I and it's like well what about all the people you aren't listening to like I know because I'm so out people get on to me and they say things like I've set up a burner email so this can't be traced like nobody's going to trace emails to me for crying out loud I just have to tell you right about everything I work in a school the child safeguarding risks are huge I don't don't dare say anything because I've lose my job I'm a single mom my kids depend upon me can you do something about it like a no I can't I'm one person you haven't even told me where you are and even if you had I can't it is up to you frankly and if you're not going to do it no one's going to do it so it sounds like no one's going to do it but B that person is not speaking yes I'm speaking but loads of other people aren't who would be well they the and the second thing I'll say is I have actually suffered very major consequences so you know I ended up going to leaving a job I loved because I needed to do this work it's stupid work like what I'm doing is stupid it shouldn't be necessary to say any of this yeah like you know I'm having to say over and over again most basic facts that everybody knows perfectly well because people are pretending they don't I shouldn't have to do this I liked the job I was doing I get death threats I get treated like you know it's it's got major consequences for those of us who speak up and I'm somebody who hasn't got trauma isn't anxious but will have those things really suffer yeah if they say anything well you know going back to freedom of speech the the the real tragedy is the self sens sound sorry self sensorship which you you just mentioned um that's why they attack people who speak out so much it's why JK R gets such they're desperate to take her down because literally nobody else can speak if she can't yeah so to finish um and and some other things that I've heard you talk about you talk about um what Jonathan height is saying we're teaching our children which is three of the worst things that children should be taught do you want to just quickly go over those let me see if I can get them right so he says we're teaching anti- CBT so anti- cognitive behavioral therapy he says we're teaching them that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker and that feelings are a good guide to actions and can I remember wrote the Third Way um that can you I've got yes I do uh life yeah here we go life is a battle between people who are purely good and those who are purely evil exactly all of those are Dreadful Dreadful beliefs they're not only wrong but they're harmful to our mental health so I mean what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is the traditional saying and you know this that's not always true sometimes bruises or injuries are so bad that they weaken you permanently but the sort of everyday challenges are how we grow and we've started to teach children that ordinary everyday challenges are things that may be traumatic um and so we're we're clearing the way as much as we can of all the ordinary challenges anyone who's got a child in secondary school or university knows what I'm saying is true so it's now the case that universities automatically give extensions if you ask like an academic was telling me the other day that they use a an AI to answer the requests for um extensions the first extension is always granted automatically the question and the AI looks to see when a human being will look after second or third um request that's that's appalling so because the thing is they know that they'll get sued quickly Enough by somebody who has um you know a diagnosed anxiety condition um and will say that they're committing they committing disability discrimination but the thing is it's become quite easy to get uh an anxiety diagnosis for start loads of universities just say you know sign the paper yourself saying you have one they don't even ask for formal diagnosis but the doctor is under the same pressure if you go into a doctor and say I have anxiety and the doctor says pull yourself together try it hard or don't be a wimp that doctor will get sued so there's no gatekeeping now to saying that you have anxiety so the university has just universities have just folded they they no longer impose deadlines and the thing is screwing up on a deadline and having to stay up all night the night before and turn in bad work that gets failed or missing your deadline and thinking right I'll never do that again that's a formative experience it doesn't kill you like I always said to my kids if you fail the ground will not open up and it will not swallow you and you will stand up and you will say that was I'm going to try harder next time and you're you're sweeping that out of kids way so what doesn't kill them isn't even being allowed to happen to them because people think it'll make them weaker and they're becoming weaker they don't colliding deadlines they are less likely to be asked to to call be called on in class and kind to go I didn't do the reading and they don't have uh sudden death exams everybody has to be told they're brilliant grade inflation all these ways in which you might say to yourself I didn't do well enough there I should have tried harder or do you know what I'm not good enough at that I should try something else and I'm you know anyone who has been working in the last 10 years and has anything to do with people who've been hired will know this too young people including people with very good qualifications from very good institutions expect you to money coddle them they expect you to be the person who clears any obstacles out of their way is becoming very difficult in jobs like journalism that have very significant colliding deadlines and that are fighting for their life so that's that one that's the doesn't kill you make you weaker life is a battle between purely good and purely evil people nobody's purely good or Pur purely evil you know pretty much everybody's a mixture even the most evil people there have been which I I don't feel that I need to make any AP apologia for you know the actual genocidal Maniacs it's still interesting to know how did they get to be powerful where did they how did they get where they are how did they come to think the things they did you know their ideas were of their time they were encouraged by people who definitely weren't evil evil but were cowardly or who had been taught about you know inferior races or whatever so if you think just oh Hitler was evil and that's all there is to say about it you ignore the fact of what German Society was doing at the time what the beliefs were that he was brought up with you ignore many things that you need to understand stand to make the world a better place and also you're not purely evil are you you know you're not so you must be purely good but actually you are mixed like everybody else you have weak points you screw up you do things that you look back on and you should feel ashamed everybody does but if you say those things to yourself that makes you evil so it takes away accountability and in particular self Judgment of the sort that we all need to be better people and what was the other one um uh feelings feelings they a good gu thinking in action and always trust your always trust your feelings yeah the central thing they teach you if you do do CBT which has a decent evidence base behind it for a significant but not enormous range of mental health disorders is it is exactly the opposite that the central characteristic of feelings is that they change the only feelings that last any length of time are severe unremitting pain if you're not in severe unremitting pain your feelings just don't last or depressed people of course can be like constantly in a low mood so you know you learn to say to yourself I'm not a bad person I just feel bad today I you know my one of my older boy had you know had pretty miserable teenage years um just general standard misery teenage misery and he'd say to me I I feel like I'm a very bad person and I'd say but you know you're only 16 what have you done like you just can't be a bad person yes you haven't had a chance you just so you just feel bad right now and that will change so just wait you know read something nice give yourself a break go play your guitar whatever it is you'll feel better tomorrow and certainly don't act like don't you know don't do something based on the fact that you feel like you're a bad person like chop off your genitors so yeah I mean he you know John is completely right and Abigail shri's book is she's just written a book called band therapy you know B basally All American children are being taught this stuff in a mixture of therapy and in the way that education is going in America the whole thing there the whole way that they're reshaping education and therapy in America is based on those Dreadful ideas and 40% of under Americans and under AES in America have been through some formal sort of therapy 40 4 Z and all of them go to schools where the teachers have given shitty half day and weekend courses on this sort of nonsense and tell them to do feeling check-ins and you know the emotionally literate and Things No all nonsense great you have to ask something more what's going to well is there hope I mean what when I'm I'm hearing all of these things you know I mean if we're just talking about the West the West has been through some trying times I mean you know there's the first world war second world war um you know the Cold War blah blah blah um the thing about the West I find interesting it's it can regenerate itself it can it can have lows um what concerns me about what you're talking about is essentially it's an epistemological trap we're falling us we we're putting ourselves in um but in a sense I suppose positively you know we have in terms of freedom of speech we have a very major network of you know I hate I hate this word but alternative media um Legacy Media I I mean I have no idea but I can't say it lasting um for that much longer um it it will probably last for a long time but I I think its influence will wne um I mean in New Zealand I think it's only 22% of of people actually trust journalists you know that the the ranking of of um Legacy Media is very low um yeah I in some ways I I always think it's a good Strate strategy to be optimistic but can you see any optimism are we on the trans issue are we are we going is it going to be turn up okay well you finish up on a positive note then I mean the first thing I'll say is you know that isn't the question that animates me I don't do what I do because I'm optimist what doess even if the chance was 1 um so I mean it's another of those sort of our feelings a guide to it I'm just not cynical enough to say do you know what I can't stop from sterilizing children so I'm not even going to try yeah I mean I think we've got to try and that is why I wrote my book actually it was literally that calculation it was when I realized that they were sterilizing children and I said the sentence to myself and you know I can't stop them but perhaps I can reduce the number so it's so important and more and more people realize how important it is that there's just more and more people who are doing something about it even if it's going to be very hard which is will because there has been such significant capture of Institutions and then the second thing is um I don't think it necessarily makes people happy to be doing what's fun or what's easy in fact I know that doing easy stuff doesn't make people happy doing things you genu genuinely think are important is what makes people feel like they're living a good life and this is important so although I'm thinking about sad things all the time like the fact that they're sterilizing kids I wake up every day with a sense of purpose and there are more and more people who feel like that um so those networks are growing which makes me feel like I'm part of something as well um I would invite people to take this attitude and look around for people what they can do in their own sphere and who they can do it with and you will find that you do feel better about at all once you're actually acting but also you know this is not just a Neo religion it's a very cultish NE religion and Cults can last quite a long time and can have amazing success but the overreach is extraordinary and they make people so visibly and evidently unhappy like whenever I look at the trans um protesters the trans rights protesters at events that I go to they aren't an advertisement for their worldview to say the least like inside there are energized people giving their time free to do something they regard as important who are bringing a great deal of skills to it who are coping with adversity very bravely and outside there are people who are talking absolute nonsense and being very very hateful and childish like doing an adult equivalent of the toddler tantrum and who do not look like they are mentally healthy in the way that they those things become more and more evident more you know the more people know about this the more they agree with me and the less they agree with the Trans rights activists and we only become more knowledgeable not less so the direction of travel is the right way and then every now and then you know there are really seismic shifts I do think that the cast review is here in Ireland um recently we had uh to referenda so we have a constitution that requires you to have a referendum if you want to change it and the trans rights Lobby pushed for a a change to take the word mother out of the Constitution so our constitution was written in 1920s and it you know it is a bit dat it uses language that we wouldn't use now it says that it recognizes the the essential role of the mother in The Home the thing is most mothers do spend some time in the home most women want to be mothers most mothers want to spend time with their babies more than fathers do so if you look at it that way you say it's recognizing reality it's recognizing sex reality the difference between men and women it doesn't say you have to stay in the home like there are no obstacles to women working in Ireland anymore than there are anywhere else but anyway they wanted to take the house because it was gendered language and was Obsolete and then they lied a load about how it was helding women back in Ireland which is a total lie but they had to go to referendum and they lost certainly no very high 70s to low 20s there was one constituency in all of Ireland that voted for the change and it was like 50.2 to 49.8 and it was the most like rich media loving constituency in all of Ireland that said that and you know Irish politicians are nothing if they aren't um pragmatic like we have a a political class that know has an eye to the main chance always suddenly it was as if nobody had ever thought this was a good idea like a week earlier they had been saying this is essential modern IR D after that they're like who referendum idea doesn't matter you know and and it just got dropped so every now and then we get the chance to tell them what they sod off with this nonsense in a way that they have to listen to um or every now and then there's a genuinely good piece of work like the cast review that you can point to and that kicks the legs out from under something disgusting and we just have to keep building on those yes so direction of travel knowing that you're doing the right thing I mean you know if I thought there was z% chance I could win here i' still be doing it so yeah well on behalf of the world Helen thank you you are an amazing person that's a bit Grand I'm I'm a grand sort of guy no I'm serious you know you're you're you're doing um seriously important work and you are so amazing at it um I've as I said I've probably listened to hundreds of hours of you and I'm still not bored um every time I listen so it's fantastic and it's been a great honor to talk to you I'm going to get bored at some point not yet though well you know just work through it because because we need you and uh and thank you so much for doing the podcast it's been a great experience oh thank you for having me on I read and Rel [Music]

Channel: The Shape of Dialogue

Views: 14,710

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Id: GfOe2coJkhE

Length: 88min 26sec (5306 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2024