Trans: Ideology Meets Reality - Parallax Views

this is a faith-based movement and the faith is that we have in ourselves and those inner selves are sexed and the sex can be different from the body but then I keep coming back to the fact that it's a very linguistic movement and it requires the policing of other people's language that's why they don't want debate and that's why they're angry with somebody like me [Music] welcome to Parallax views and I a series of conversations about the politics of culture primarily focusing on freedom of speech my name is Markland Denning and I'm delighted to be discussing the book trans when ideology meets reality with its author Helen Joyce Helen is an academic a mathematician a journalist with the economist amongst other Publications she's also a leading activist in the feminist group sex matters Helen's book is a Sunday Times bestseller and is indispensable if you want to get a grip on the issues surrounding the phenomenon of transgenderism can I start Helen by asking you um to Define for us um transgenderism and transgender ideology uh in relation to it so funnily enough I never use the phrase transgenderism in the book because it's never clear do you mean somebody who's identifying out of their sex or do you mean people who have certain thoughts about such identification so that's why I tend to use Theory or ideology for what I'm talking about in the book I mean as you know since you've read it um somewhere around paragraph eight or nine in the introduction I say this is not a book about trans people and the first sentence of the book is this is a book about an idea so transgender ideology or gender identity theory is is an idea and that idea is that what makes us men or women or what makes us male or female is not the unalterable fact of our bodies or what we were conceived as what we the evolved which group which evolves group we belong to male or female it's something that we think about ourselves feel about ourselves say about ourselves so in that sense I say in the book that it's something like a sexed soul so then the ideology that's built on top of that is quite simple which is well it's it's not simple in its consequences but it's simple to say and that is that if somebody says they're a woman they are a woman and we do have certain things in the world that are divided between men and women most obviously um intimate spaces but also Sports and if somebody says they're a Woman They gain access to the women's ones and if they say they're a man they gain access to the men's ones and anyone who says but hang on a minute that's not the body I associate with women or that's not the body I associate with men is accused of things like um biological essentialism or um hate speech really because I think it's part it's partly what you said it's about identity it's it's about moving away from a communal idea of the world into a very personal idea of what it is to be a part to be you to be human to be very self-defined and I mean you have been accused of hate when you just simply by writing this very temperate book which may contain ideas that some people disagree with but there's certainly no kind of vitriolic uh rhetoric in it so it is quite extraordinary that people are now just habitually uh described as engaging in hate speech simply by articulating the kind of views you are I mean it's years old because what I think is what everybody thought until half a minute ago and still what about 99 of people on the Earth think I've tried it when I was still working at The Economist because I'm on leave at the moment with sex matters as you mentioned which isn't a feminist organization by the way it's not that we're not feminists particularly it's that it's about sex-based rights which everybody has male and female so it's an organization for everybody we're more basic even than being feminist we're just about there are two Sexes what does that mean for your human rights right yeah um anyway so when I was still at the economist I was traveling for some reporting in Asia and I was I'd got interested I was writing about banking as it happens about personal banking um I I was already interested in the topic so I tried asking people you know what do you think of this it was either impossible to explain to people what I was even asking them or if I finally managed to get through to them what I was trying to say the Jaws just dropped and they were like that's the craziest thing I've ever heard it can't be that people think that so it is odd that something so ordinary and something that we would have no problem in saying about any other species is somehow hate speech now suddenly I mean it's a kind of creationism really because it's certainly seeing humans as very separate from any other animals I mean we are we're just great apes we're very closely related to the other great apes of course you know the sex means the same for us as it does for all the other mammals but apparently not [Music] um what is strange to somebody sort of coming to this to this issue relatively recently is the split uh within the feminist movement because potentially um if you have um self-id self-identification in relation to gender stroke sex then potentially every male could redefine themselves as being female and that would be an extraordinary thing for people who think of themselves as feminists to accept why is it they're all some such people who are militantly pro-trans I mean they tend to be call themselves sort of intersectional feminism yeah oh yeah or third wave um I mean feminism I've always regarded myself as a feminist in the sense that I think women are as good as men frankly much better but I'm joking with that bit um but I was never a movement feminist but within movement feminism there have always been splits as I'm sadly discovering right now uh so it's not that surprising that there are people within feminism who think of everything differently and I'm maybe not being very fair to my opponents because you know I don't actually understand how they can possibly think what they claim to think but I'm sure they do my best explanation is that um attempts to free women from unjust rules to do with sex things like not being allowed to vote not having property rights and being subordinate to husbands that sort of thing a lot of those um those unjust rules were naturalized they were described as being you know the order of things the correct order of things you know women were mentally weaker or physically weaker or morally weaker their proper place according to the Bible was subject to men that sort of thing and so women to argue that they had they could be on an equal footing to men had to argue against what was being described as nature and so then when you say to somebody you know it is my nature that I'm female got two centuries of Echoes for people of you know it's my nature that I'm weaker it's my nature that I'm subordinate and so on and then the other thing I would say is that um you know I didn't really think about this until I had kids and most people don't um human female physiology is a tough gig so in general animals I mean if you look at Evolution you look at evolutionary theory um there are reasons why there are two Sexes which we don't need to go into here and they're mathematical they're mathematical modeling reasons why it's two and one of them ends up with larger gametes and fewer of them and when a smaller gametes and more of them and that affects a lot of things and with mammals where you grow the baby inside you it affects even more things than it would say for fish right but humans have really very unusually difficult pregnancies births and long child rearing periods because our babies are born very very immature because they've got to get out so all these things like because we stand upright the pregnancy is difficult the birth is difficult you know anyway so so we are simultaneously the two most striking things about the animals that we are are one our brains we don't feel like we're animals we feel like we're Gods stuck in meat suits but also we have this incredibly animalistic function over a female the pregnancy and childbirth and the child wearing are not easy you know if you look at other other apes they're much much easier right so this is actually really very difficult to come to terms with if you're trying to say how women can be liberated and the pattern for women's lib has been the man so women have argued that they are as good as men and we are as good as men we're as clever as you were many other things like that but we have this animalistic function that can't be hived off and that we haven't ever properly incorporated into the way that we organize Society or the way that we think about what it is to be human the pattern for the human is the man and so all of this means that feminism is still grappling with some quite foundational questions and they're difficult questions when what you're trying to say to an unreconstructed sexist is I'm as good as you so I think I think that's it I think there's like a foundational problem that we still haven't tackled with in feminism and the result is that when you say anything about biology or anything about nature people are suspicious but also if you say anything about being evolutionarily different men and women they're also suspicious so a friend of mine who's a right-wing woman who doesn't describe herself as a feminist and although she's a notable campaigner on women's rights she says you know the transgender Lobby say that you know Evolution happened from the neck up only and the feminists say that it happened from the neck down only so I think we need to get uh we still it's like we need a humanism actually within which feminism could sit so that's maybe a longer and grander answer than you wanted but I mean I still think about this all the time yourself very fascinating I mean something else that occurs to me in relation to this is is it possible that the transgender ideological militants so not you know people who thinks yeah as trans but the real ideologues at the heart of this and you'll know much more about them than I will that actually transgenderism is actually a cover for a more revolutionary ideology which is not they're using trans for a more grandiose project so that the sort of binary opposition of the patriarchy versus women has for them becomes superseded by the conflict between what they would consider to be Bourgeois Western basic rationalist Society yeah versus the collection of Outsider groups that the the more contemporary new left have come to embrace so their ideology is really about sort of almost culture year zero yeah about overturning the entirety of the culture whereas traditional feminists have been about really piecemeal sort of change demanding very specific reforms that would benefit with women whereas these people are really about some sort of fundamental hence that may also indicate their obsession with children in relation to this a sort of culture year zero project I don't know I'm going off on one side no you've asked me about five fascinating questions there and I don't know which ones to answer they're all good um let me see if I can think through that um so I would say like all really interesting phenomena there are a lot of different things going on and I don't think we can step away from the fact that there is a small but non-zero number of powerful men who want more than anything else to counter as women and I think I think of that as like the nuclear reactor in the movement without that the whole thing would just kind of come to a halt and for those people it's not enough that you accommodate them like it's not enough that we say you know you can wear what you like you can do what you like you can marry who you like because nobody disputes that now I mean no exactly but also that's that's like pretending that's going along with and they don't want going along with and because I mean I'm thinking of quite specific people here um and I think probably anyone who's been watching this for a while will be able to think of their own examples um they're often quite notably powerful and forceful men who've done very well and I've got what they want in life they're often like you know they've done well in business they've been very successful and so on they're not going to take no from anybody and in particular they're not going to take no from women on this one so women really must step into line on this and so I think that's that's part of it I mean and this is by no means all trans people by any means really but you know without those people I think this would not not ever have got off the ground you're talking about the ideological drivers not just frankly it's not an ideological driver I mean it's an erotic and personal and intellectual driver it's it's something that's core to these people's self-conceptions and um yeah there's there's they're just not going to be happy otherwise I don't think they're very happy anyway but they're not going to be happy without that so I think you know that's one part and then I don't think we can either ignore the fact that the sort of the multi-decade move that we've seen especially on the left has been towards greater individualism I mean you know much of that is good like too many things were not within people's own control but there are things that just aren't within our control like it is not within my control to be a totally different person and that's what this is this is like saying you know I'm able to Define myself in all these ways well there's one more one more way to define myself and other people saying no to that feels like bigotry and then the children thing I think there's a lot there too but I would say um you know I mean I I use I mentioned the word erotic I mentioned to the elephant in the room and there's absolutely an erotic drive for some men in particular to present as women that's their theoretic fixation in fact and they're in love with the woman they wish to be and if um if you don't want to say that like one of the the Specialists that I interviewed for the book he said he said it very frankly he said you know you suppose you've been erotically cross-dressing since your your teens and you're now in your 50s and this woman is more real to you than anything else and it's time to be her and you walk into work and you say I've been masturbating in my wife's knickers since I got married it's time to wear them all the time that's not going to go down well but if you go in and you say I have always been a woman Inside and now it's time I can't hide that fact about me anymore that fits much better into this long run history of you know and you know Black Liberation women's Liberation Gay Liberation jumping on this much more respectable but also a strong feeling of progress a sort of Arc of progress Ben slowly but you know that sort of thing it feels like part of that even though it's a very different thing so then what do you have to say and do to make that plausible that actually there's a woman Inside and that's the real person that you are because it's a very bizarre claim well you have to have always been that way and if you've always been that way then there are children who are trans right so there have got to be people born this way and that's children and that contradicts what we already knew about how people develop a transgender identity it's not something you're born with like people tend to think oh there's probably a bit of your brain you've probably got a lady brain and a man body or something there's no evidence of that in fact there's evidence that it's not true and the thing is that men's and women's Brains are a bit different and in fact gay people's brains and straight people's brains are a little bit different in what ways they're just just some really small parts of the brain that you can see I just mean statistically like our brains are not the most different bit about us by any means but statistically there are some differences there aren't between trans people and uh non-trans people once you control for sexual orientation so so it isn't that it's your brain okay and if you look back at sort of the 70 or 80 years that doctors have been seeing people who come in and say I was meant to be a woman or I was meant to be a man or whatever um if they're children they tend to grow out of it like 80 to 90 grow out and it happens around puberty and it happens mostly because they say oh I'm gay because there's a strong link between being quite non-conforming for your sex in early childhood and growing up to be gay like we've known that for a long time like every homophobe knows it like every dad who wants to you know you know beat the sissiness out of his his little boy because he wants him to grow up straight knows it and yet it's become a kind of an unmentionable thing I don't quite know why because it's really very obvious once you look if you know children and but those kids now think of themselves as trans and they often before would too they'd Wonder like why am I like this like especially if they've got a very traditional rigid family that's trying to push them into traditional sex roles so you have a little boy who wants a Barbe and doesn't like you know cries about the idea of playing rugby and so on and if he's told he's a take away the doll no you're not allowed to wear a skirt at some point the idea occurs to that poor child why am I like this I wish I was a girl maybe I was meant to be a girl because that's now being encouraged effectively by mermaids and yes exactly so those kids they popped up they always popped up and as soon as a gender clinics saw kids very few of them but they used to see them and they just tracked them and what happened was those boys and their teams went oh now I know I'm different I'm gay that was the the overwhelming thing that happened so no there aren't trans kids we know that and yet there must be but they're being encouraged to believe they are and so you're getting a sort of in a way another form of gay conversion therapy aren't you I think it's the most straightforward form of gay conversion therapy it's a conversion therapy on the body you turn uh you know perfectly normal healthy gay person into a sterile because you know this treatment pathway sends you on the way to sterility a sterile pretend straight person of the opposite sex um what are the implications um of the creation of a human right to be recognized as whatever sex you want to be recognized as I mean for example does it open the door also to the idea of trans-racialism yeah could I redefine myself as a person of color um does it could it lead potentially to people demanding to be recognized as oaps when they're in their 20s I mean I know this sounds kind of daily mail or maybe owned in the book you refer to transhumanism which you know I was reading about a family called the pritzkers who are very big in Democratic Party politics billionaires and they're sort of putting in lots of money to the creation of synthetic sex identities I mean it sounds like something out of a um science fiction kind of horror movie yeah the the prom they're putting money into some point sort of sinister sounding kind of experimentation men particularly geared to young people again I mean do you know do you know anything I mean Jennifer pritzker is a trans woman um and that you know that is one of the people who has pushed very hard for his gender self ID I don't know more than that on the pritzker your family but um you know when you think like this is somebody who was a man and until in his 50s he identified as a man he was quite successful he was in there and is he biologically a man yeah yeah I mean yes you can't change your Sexes so he's biologically a man but he identifies I don't know but I mean it still doesn't change yourself castration does not turn a man into a woman um but yeah and there's another trans woman um another successful and person in the Pharma industry called Martin rothblatt who has written the book called from transgender to a transhuman so I don't need to make the link the Link's there you know um I mean what is the human what happens if you call it a human right to be able to identify as something you're not um what I contend in the book is that it pops up in lots of places the problem pops up in lots of places because there aren't that many places where it matters what sex people are in in ordinary everyday world like it doesn't matter what sex anybody sitting here is or what sex you are and I are we're just talking to each other although we both know what sex the other person is and each of us if we look around we can see what sex everybody is it doesn't matter it matters when you're deciding you know who to have sex with or marry it matters and when you're going to get undressed it matters if you want to get medical treatment matters in prison it matters in sports it matters in places where you're naked vulnerable um competing physically doing things that mean interacting you know closely with other people and if somebody can insist that they're the sex they're not you know it's it you come straight to the you know Liberty ends when your fist hits my nose sort of thing the nose appears at that point so you straight away you are trampling on other people's rights and I mean that's what sex matters is about it's about saying you know what what are sex-based rights and how do we accommodate people who don't want to be thought about as the sex that they are in a world where there are still some accommodations that require us to recognize the sex of the people around us and you need to think that through within a human rights framework like you know what does that mean for birth certificates what does that mean for intimate spaces what does it mean for health care you know you can you can work them out in each of these places but it certainly isn't that you can just declare yourself whichever sex you are and everyone else has to go along because that destroys their rights so you asked about things like transracialism or transism and so on and it's funny that it's just been sex and not the others and then I come back to the fact that there are powerful men For Whom The Erotic fixation is to be women there isn't an equivalent for the others there isn't you know there isn't a really powerful wealthy absolutely obsessive contingent of white men who want nothing more than to be black and I'm the same for age we'd all love to be younger but we'd love it because you know our hips would feel better and you know we'd be more gorgeous not actually just the just the the thing that's written on the piece of paperage you know what I mean like you know we don't there are people who are doing this there are there are adults who do dress and nappies and children's clothes there was a guy just a couple of weeks ago who was removed from a playground because he had turned up in the little good girl's dress with a dummy and a nappy and everything and the police had to take him out because he says he's a little girl he's three and again that's an erotic fixation so so yeah I mean once you start it once you start saying that there's a human right to have other people to force other people to say that you are what you're not intellectually there's no stopping point intellectually it could be anything but are there people who want to do it is the question and I would say mostly not the sex is the is the specific one I mean there have been one or two cases I think in America of transracialism yeah yeah of white women yeah then yeah and then presenting why you know I mean one reason is for Advantage because in American um hiring and in universities and so on there's quite significant advantage to being Black Or Hispanic but also because you know we keep telling especially in America white kids that there's something wrong with being white but it's very basic it's very boring to be a CIS hash white male you know so people identify as non-binary as the easiest thing that you can do here like to not be basic I mean that kid's very large numbers of kids in schools now say that they're either pansexual or non-binary because they're both indisprovable like nothing actually is required yeah of either of those but they they give you some freedom from this sense that you know within this sort of very identitarian intersectional model um you are not the person who's not allowed to speak like another sort of sit down you know you're a man you sit down you're white you sit down like if you're all if you're all of those things if you're all the bad things sis have white male for those who don't know sis is the opposite of trans um like you're not allowed to speak at all you've got no freedom of maneuver so there's a Temptation there to to identify out of that I suppose in America um it's very taboo to identify out of whiteness and again it's just very very hard to say why intellectually you should be allowed to identify out of maleness which you know in a male female hierarchy male is the superior one just as white as the superior one in black in that binary you know and being very simplistic here do you know what I mean so why are you allowed to identify out of maleness and into femaleness but you aren't allowed to identify out of whiteness and into blackness and I mean I think it's there aren't people who are arguing for it for the last hundred years is the big real reason but intellectually it's because the two are theorized in completely different ways so sex and gender are theorized within queer Theory in which all boundaries are seen as bad things definitions are there to be blurred binaries are there to be overturned hierarchies are dissolved everything like that whereas race is theorized within critical race theory in which the binary is the strictest thing imaginable and not stay in your lane whiteness like you can't identify out once you can't even be forgiven for whiteness like according to Robin D'Angelo you must do Penance all of your life for being white so so you mustn't be allowed to identify out of whiteness because if you if you could then you'd be able to identify out of doing the work yeah yeah interesting um in the book you it's a very fascinating section uh on post-modernism and the the influence you think this has had on transgender ideology the notion of deconstructing the binary which you've just sort of touched on the type of theory Advanced by Judith Butler I was wondering if you could say a little bit about that yeah I mean I'm not a philosopher and I'm not a historian of philosophy I though so I mean let's just let's just sort of skip lightly to where I think it's got us as opposed to any sort of fair history of it because I think it's an incredibly bastard-eyed bastardized version of it now you know it's a sort of tumblerized flattened you know ridiculous version of what probably had some profundity to it so in your introduction you said you know people who believe that words can be redefined or something like this you know to mean what they want to mean but they kind of can and words kind of do shape our reality but if you think like some words when you say with this ring ID wedge you become married like it actually does something it creates things like legal obligations but when you say that somebody is I think what was I described as by um the master of keys a couple of weeks ago offensive hateful and something else I forget what you change Reality by saying words like that you get people to turn up and bang things outside you you put people in danger you know you create haste by saying those sorts of words so I think what happened in the post-modernist movement is they noticed to some extent they noticed how words do shape our reality if you've no words for things and you can't say and describe them you almost don't feel them sometimes but they became intoxicated with this and maybe went too far and this is where I'm not the historian of philosophy so I think that I think there was an observation there that was real and also very valuable like the lots of things have been naturalized that weren't natural like you know only opposite sex marriage women taking you know women under the direction of their husbands like so to say what's natural is it are these things natural that we think are natural you know is is homosexuality unnatural do words describe reality or create reality so but these things have acted like a sort of a slow acid on our culture and I think they've very definitely gone too far at the point at which it's hate speech to say we come into sexes you know if you if if you have if you have two people on a desert island and those two people don't speak the same language or don't speak any language you know I'll be able to give you a fair old prediction about whether little new human beings are born by looking to see what sex those two people are and it's not language that can shape that nothing I can say will change whether or not those people will make babies or not and I think that's been thrown out and I don't think it was by the original post-modernist philosophers I think if this is the 2015 Tumblr version of this nonsense you know well I think from my understanding of them that you know you go back to Foucault and all the kind of new left theories to kind of abandoned classical Marxism and then they uh they sought to develop a new updated um radical style of politics they were seeking to challenge what they saw as being established Bourgeois ideology and also traditional religious ideology but they weren't denying metaphysical reality and it seems to me that the big division here which I mean I I Rand used to write about about man-made stuff which can be changed and which is the subject the focus of ideological debate but on the other hand metaphysical reality which can't be changed it's just that once you have an ideology that actually seeks to die metaphysical reality then you are in big trouble it seems to be and this is sort of where some elements have left the new Left yes for example Extinction Rebellion have this slogan demand The Impossible yeah yeah well that's that's going to work well don't you think that one of the things that's happened over there you know if we go sort of over the whole of what we might call since the Industrial Revolution is that we did things that we thought were impossible like often wonder like how how very ordinary people who aren't thinking about this hard like what do they think when they hear that sex is a spectrum or that there are three Sexes or five Sexes or you can change sexually they know perfectly well that's not true and then I think like how many things in my life have I been told that I thought weren't true and then it turns out they are you know light is a wave and a particle I still don't understand that and I have a PhD in mathematics you know all these things that turned out to be possible that we thought weren't possible so I think people and I mean really changing sex is not one of those things and it's not likely to be one of those things anytime and there are emotely near future but how can you be sure if you're just an ordinary Joe who's trying to get on with your life I think you must just see these things fly by in the rear view mirror and think they can do that now that's surprising all right then you know the high ups are saying it's the case now yeah um leading on from that transgenderism like post-modernism sounds superficially liberal or small L sort of epistemologically anarchic sort of let it all hang out you can be anything you want to be um but within this it seems to me there is especially if that idea is sort of politicized a highly authoritarian logic to it because it does then imply that you can restructure Society on the basis of ideology and control of of language and that the task then is to transfer this sort of extraordinary power to a supposedly enlightened Elite yeah who will do it for us yeah and then they will ban all types of speech under the guise of it being hateful I mean it's an extraordinary extraordinarily linguistic movement like to say that you become a woman or that you reveal that you always were a woman by saying that you're a woman like it's all about utterance which is very post-modern but if you say things and other people must believe them you are not just reordering reality or maybe you aren't reordering a reality what you're doing is you're forcing other people to to lie to pretend and because it is a lie a man cannot become a woman a male person cannot be female if you build that in that they're entitled to do and say that what you're doing even though you're not saying it at the time is you're building in that it's one person's right to force the entire rest of humanity yes to see something they don't see or at least say they see something they don't see and if you do that and it's highly illiberal but it's also going to require a major policing of speech because actually it's very innate to us to see what sex other people are I mean it would be very surprising if it wasn't it's obviously important reproduction from the reproductive point of view so the idea that is would not have evolved into us to have a very instinctive and instinctual perception of other people's sex is absurd and actually there's good evidence that women are better at spotting sex than men are much quicker from fewer cues uh you know with there's all these tests where you pixelate pictures or you just show people there's a fascinating one you just get um I think it's eight dots of light and those eight dots of light what they are is there I think it's the elbows the shoulders the hips and the knees of somebody walking or maybe it's 10 you've got the ankles as well and all you see is those walking and you can easily straight away see whether it's a man or a woman and it's just an animation right but women see these things quicker than men so why well men are stronger and men rape and men are dangerous and women have to be picky and this is true right across the animal kingdom this is not a statement about humans women are much pickier in terms of mates than men are because the investment of a pregnancy and so on is a much bigger investment than you know one ejaculation so women notice when there's a man around much faster I've been talking about like you know milliseconds difference because it's a very quick thing for both sexes then men notice what sex other people are and men tend to go on sort of what we might say more um oh more sort of large-scale cues so you know if it's got high heels on and it's got tits and it's wearing lipstick man it's more like fine it looks like a woman to me you know and women are like are you kidding you know there's a million things that makes this person not look like a woman so I think that's one of the undersung reasons why there's a difference here like some men you know I I want I want us to pick up this point women are actually more keen on transgender ideology than men are in polls so I'm not trying to say that this is all an imposition of men and women but let's just talk about the the very aggressive trans rights activists who do tend to be men whether they're men who identify as trans antifa type exactly exactly so I think I think is that some of those men at least she looks like a woman to me or she'll do you know it's all right I mean I don't want her in the men's lose that doesn't look like a man to me and we're going like still looks like a man to me and there's that perception difference so yeah I mean it's not something that's very easy to force other people to lie about because it's so innate that you recognize it so do you think that part of the drive to restrict um freedom of speech in this area to actually limit debate because Stonewall and these kind of groups say they don't believe there should be any debate in principle that even yeah to articulate a different view is to commit a human rights violation and all that they're just intimately connected because this is a speech policing movement but it's part of that that they can't actually risk a debate because this is fundamentally a movement that is based on faith on people revealing some sort of inner truth that can't be empirically verified Justified um so they kind of inherently know this as nonsense it's based on sort of Fantastical foundations but for other political or maybe in some cases sexual or whatever it is psychological reasons there is a group of people who want to adhere to this ideology and impose it but they can't actually afford the rest of society to challenge it intellectually so I I agree with you half I don't agree that the reason that they don't want debate is they know they lose or they know that it's ridiculous I think that's that's too that's too simple I think they do at least sort of believe it um I think that they think so what are they bothered about you or anybody else saying we don't we don't because they because they are absolutist theists it's a religion you know this is a religion without regard okay I shouldn't have called it I shouldn't have said theist this is a faith-based movement right and the faith is that we have in ourselves and those inner selves are sexed and the sex can be different from the body that's a proposition that's not open to any sort of scientific or intellectual inquiry it's just a proposition it's like saying you know three gods in one or you know after three days he rose again you know like there's no debate to be had about whether God is three Spirits in one it's not that sort of thing so I think I think there's that that they don't see any point in debate from their point of view this is this is a faith this is a faith-based statement but then I keep coming back to the fact that it's a very linguistic movement and it requires the policing of other people's language that's why they don't want debate and that's why they're angry with somebody like me it's it's like going to the mullers in Iran and saying look what's it to you if the women don't want to wear scarves like you believe one thing they believe another thing no they're absolutists they're as bad as them all As yeah so I mean we are I think beginning to see the kind of emergence of a new morality police in this country the police yes now yes put you on a non-crime hate database because they know they couldn't get a conviction yeah but you'll put on a list of people who home according to the police uh an unacceptable view even though it's a legal one yeah so it's an amazing kind of weird situation Humanity has always done this you know what's weird is that we had this brief period where we tried to find ways in which two people I mean I don't know you know if there are 10 people in a room probably all 10 of them now in a kind in in a city like London believe fundamentally incompatible things um I mean I'm from a Catholic Family and I'm an atheist but I mean we don't argue about it when I go home because our idea this painfully one idea is that we live in a liberal secular democracy and that means freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of belief and that means tolerance tolerance even of things you find hateful and wrong I remember a religious friend of mine saying something about um you know he'd pray for my soul or something like that and I said well I don't think I have a soul and he said yes but God doesn't worry about that and I said I don't think you've got a soul either and the pair was just laughed and got on with it you know so I believed that neither of us are souls and he believes that both of us have souls and we both of us just go along with it but that's it's not usual in human in human history usually that's often tumbles with you yeah but I think we I think we probably thought in Western Europe uh that we'd kind of got past that with the Enlightenment and all yeah it was interesting to see that we're kind of moving I think in a regressive way there's nothing Progressive about that we're not protecting it like these things are precious and they were very hard one and they're very easily lost and we are not taking at all seriously enough how important these things are like how important it is that people do not say horrible things about people who are just trying to speak even if you disagree with them it's really hard to listen to people saying things that strike at your identity I know that so I know that people don't want to hear it and they've been told that their feelings about how it feels to listen to someone like me speak when you fundamentally disagree with me they've been told that those feelings license calling me hateful and trying to silence me and that that's moral and good but actually that's just you know that's a pathway to a terrifying kind of society where people can you know smash you in the face or yeah worse because you have a different view I mean if you don't have that self-denight moment then liberal democracy but that's impossible absolutely and the thing they do first it isn't smash you in the face and it doesn't lock you up it's try to lose you your job so if you look back at past sinkings into illiberalism so you know the run-up to the Third Reich for example why why did people join a Nazi party before it was clear really where it was going but when it was pretty clear the kind of place it was going and why did the kids join Hitler Youth it's because their parents were worried about their jobs if they didn't people do these things to save their jobs because we don't like to starve we don't want to be out in the street we don't lose our homes we want to be able to look after our children so all of this is policed through work more than anything else it's HR departments it's the put your pronouns and your email signature and you think like oh it's stupid like everybody knows I'm a woman or everybody knows I'm a man but why would I rock the boat and you know you because you've seen it in the papers you've seen that there have been people who've been fired over this sort of stuff so you stay quiet and before you know it we're back to a morality police which brings me on to my last question obviously JK Rowling uh my four star to yourself and others have led a fantastically courageous pushback against uh this ideology and its illiberal uh imposition on our society but what how do you see things going now and what happens if legally politically speaking this movement just carries on advancing you do get uh you know automatic self identification as now is sort of about to happen I gather in Scotland but then that will have implications of the rest of the UK If you get a you know a a a government that that wants to legislate for this plus other stuff what do people like you and those of us who you know have a profound desire to be able to say what we think on this not be forced to use pronouns we don't want to use we don't want mandated speech what do we do I mean I think it's all to play for still here because we've actually got a pretty good human rights framework in our law um and there are we do have rights to freedom of speech and freedom of belief and those things do offer us protections that are testable in court even if they bring in things like the hate speech legislation and the not the non-misgendering and so on you know so there's an awful lot to keep fighting for and I think it's going to be house to house for quite a while I think it's going to have to be using things like um you know religious teachers who refuse to use incorrectly sexed pronouns for kids and get sacked and have to go to employment tribunals and claim that it's protected belief and you know all that sort of things there's going to be years of court cases years of people being sued judicial reviews all that sort of thing I mean that's in our future but suppose we lose I think is the question you're asking suppose we lose yeah in the short term medium term this gets worse so I mean there are people who are quite seriously looking at um just removing sex as a concept entirely in law so there was a four-year research project at King's College in London and got several hundred thousand in a government grant this is just one of many many government grants for this sort of stuff and like you know it's being funded by Charities and ngos and so on as well and think tanks um and their theory is it's so stupid that I just I still find it hard to say these things the theory is that we will end sexism if it becomes impossible to say anything or record anything about sex I'm sorry I just it'll only be impossible to talk about it if that's all um so their idea is to get rid of sex on birth certificates and to remove any legal rights or obligations of any sort from the concept of sex so an maternity right will become parental rights parental leave you know there might be a sort of an unspoken exceptionist that there's one of you who might have to head off to the hospital for a bit and might not quite be able to return to the shop before the next day referred to as a person who gives birth or something yes yes and and that would be very detached and I mean this is all related to you know the transhumanist idea that we'll be fixing ourselves and becoming mortal and become cyborgs and so on and on the way there uh you know we'll be using surrogates like there's even this move to call I mean if two gay men want to have a baby um to say the sort of infertility that they have is situational infertility and there's a legal case underway in New York uh to get the one of the couple is trying to get his health insurers who and to pay for the surrogate and the egg um on the grounds that he's in the same situation as a woman who's you know Fallopian tubes are blocked or something like that um situationally and fertile as opposed to medically and fertile so you know this way of thinking it's it's it's very very very powerful and it's in the air and it was going for decades before any of us really noticed that we needed to push back against it and you know what what happens when a when a Theocratic state starts each person has to decide themselves what they're going to do don't they I mean look at those women in Iran who had their heads Heads bare in the 1970s they put on head scarves didn't they and here they are taking them off again and getting beaten and shot for it do I think that happens here not exactly are you decide don't you you decide whether you're going to put the pronouns in your email signature or whether you're just going to say no and go to jail and try and make a course celebrity of it hopefully we won't get there there here we can show the world that it's possible to accommodate people who deny the reality of sex I do want to say just something which you know this thing about the difference between the sexes this is if you ask an opinion polls it's women rather than men who say that they agree with transgender ideology like by about 10 percentage points and it's larger numbers when they're younger and it's a bit of a puzzle because it's more harmful very obviously more harmful for women than for men and I think it's a mixture of younger women not realizing that women do tend to get radicalized by the experience of having children and before that you like to think that you're the same as the men and it won't make any difference and then you have a child and you realize that the world is not half fixed you thought it was but it isn't um women not liking to say this is going to affect me badly because I'm physically weaker I can be raped you know and pretty much any man could overpower me these are not pleasant things to think about so I think it's easier to deny them for a lot of people and then a sort of a very sanctimonious kind of one-upmanship that people can be prone to that you know you're so kind and so generous it's like being it's like being a white person who's pro-racial preferences in American universities you know it's such a virtue signal because obviously it hurts you you're such a good person so I don't actually think very highly of of this sort of argument but it is just a fact that it is women who are imposing this on women more than men Helen Joyce thank you so much for for joining me utterly fascinating well thank you for having me I hope you've enjoyed it yes and thank you very much and your book again last plug for it I mean it is a truly fantastic book uh very thought-provoking um and a fantastic kind of comprehensive uh analysis and introduction to this issue thank you so much thank you very much belt that way you'll never miss out on a single iea broadcast foreign [Music]

Channel: Institute of Economic Affairs

Views: 809,595

Keywords: trans, transgender, trans woman, trans rights, transphobe, transphobic, lgbt, trans health, transgender health, cultural marx, cultural marxism, frankfurt school, what is cultural marxism, critical race theory, news, critical race theory explained, teaching critical race theory, politics, parallax

Id: 8xUrtNW6Fzo

Length: 50min 25sec (3025 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2022