"Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" - My conversation with Helen Joyce

foreign [Music] welcome to the Poetry of reality I don't have a religion but I think if I had one it would be the religion of reality and it's a pleasure to meet Helen Joyce here as I haven't met her before I wanted to meet her ever since reading her wonderful book trans when ideology meets reality uh science is all about reality and Science and reality have come up against some competition some opposition and Helen has been in the Forefront of fighting against some of this opposition um there's a character in a Kingsley Amos novel I think who gets interviewed on television and the interviewer tells him who he is and what he does and how long he's done it so that's a typical Trope of Television to to tell the interviewee about herself but I'm going to ask Helen to introduce herself very briefly thank you thank you so much for having me on well I work um for a an advocacy organization called sex matters now but my background has been rather varied so when I was a little girl I wanted to be a dancer and I actually went off to dance school when I left school at 16 and after two years realized that wasn't a great idea and went and did a degree in maths in Trinity College Dublin and I stayed and did my masters in Cambridge and my PhD in maths at UCL in London and then spent three years doing postdoc in mathematics before changing course and going into public understanding of maths and science and then in 2005 I joined the economist as the education correspondent and I spent 17 years there doing various jobs along the way living in Brazil as a foreign correspondent and then becoming an editor of various sections of the paper including the international and finance sections and one fateful day in 2017 the editor sat down beside me at lunch and said why do the kids keep coming home and saying such and such as trends and I said I have no idea should I look into it for you and my first attempt to find an author I found somebody who had been through a lot of queer Theory and gender studies at University and managed to write three pages about people identifying as male or female man or woman without ever mentioning that sex is about reproduction and that the Sexes are reproductive roles and that their evolved categories and I had to bend that piece and I ended up writing it myself and by this time I realized that there was a lot of very odd stuff Happening Here and that turned into my book which came out in 2021. it is a very odd phenomenon because I'm used to continue wherever I look I mean there's tall versus short fat versus thin old versus young all these things are a smooth Continuum um the one thing that isn't is sex I mean sex really is binaries no question about it you're either male or female and it's absolutely clear you could do it on gamete sides you can do it on chromosomes um and so it is to me as a biologist distinctly weird that people can simply declare I am a woman though I have a penis um that seems to me to be a strange Distortion of language because we languages useful as something to express your thoughts clearly and so I'm bewildered by it and I was fascinated to read your book and I learned a tremendous lot from it and while I'm about it I would recommend a couple of other books um irreversible damage by Abigail schreier about the particularly focusing on young girls and how they get um misled and this one Material Girls by Kathleen stock I I listened to this on audio so I don't have a physical copy of the books I'm printed out because I got the cover of it um Helen what do you think lies behind this odd Distortion of reality so that was basically the question that got me into this in the first place and I mean I've been thinking really almost full time about this for about five years now and I don't have a pat answer for you I think like a lot of interesting phenomena it's a lot of things um I would say that when I started to write about it first I quickly realized that this wasn't treated the same way as anything else like just asking very obvious questions like um don't you think that if we allow people to self-identify their sex this will lead to for example destroying women's sports or putting rapists in women's jails people would turn this back on me and say you think that trans people are predators or you think that trans people are in bad faith you're a bigot and I hadn't experienced this before in at that point about 14 years as a journalist that's a willful misunderstanding yes it is it is willful misunderstanding um and I mean I slowly became aware that what we were talking about here was an intensely linguistic movement like there isn't a sense in which a man can become a woman except linguistically like yes okay he can have operations and people some people do most trans people don't have any operations don't take any medicine don't have any genital surgery but that doesn't change your sex I mean the reason the female eunuch has called that is that Jermaine Greer was pointing at the way that the man is seen as the full human and the woman is seen as the lacking human she is a female eunuch she's a man that you've castrated but actually female people aren't male people lacking something you know or male people lacking something with a little grow bag that you pop a baby out of every now and then you know female people are their own category female and male are actually very profound categories they're profound biological evolved evolutionarily they have to be that it's it's a the gift of giving birth is something that that pervades the yes uh the whole um anatomy and physiology and psychology actually exactly and if you're a mammal every part of your body is female like earthworms have both parts you know but you know my hands are female my jaw is female it's not just that I have you know I'm a man with uterus popped in and no penis but so it was the only sense in which a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man is by saying so it's a speech utterance and so I've come to see I think there are many things happening here there's things happening in medicine in politics but one of the things that's happening is a long run maybe two or three Century move towards seeing categories and classification as inherently oppressive so people think you know um you know heteronormative is a bad thing or they think that um you know the traditional family is constraining and they miss the point that these things often like when I say evolved I don't mean like evolutionary biology I mean that they they came to be over significant amounts of time for a reason and they're supportive as well as constraining but everything that's structured or categorized or named or classified that's now seen as something imposed upon people so somebody like Judith Butler for example who's the queer theorist who wrote gender trouble which is kind of the foundational text that Academia uses when looking at these issues says that gender is is an imitation for which there is no original that she doesn't see sex she says sex is socially constructed and gender is the real thing and there isn't any foundation for gender it's just something that's made meaningful by performing it over and over again now I hadn't come across this at University as I say I studied mathematics and I spent my time proving theorems and defining my terms very carefully so I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that significant numbers of young people are being taught this sort of nonsense but they come out of it thinking that somebody who says look there are two Sexes and the sex that you are or it's the sex that you were conceived as they think that what you're doing is imposing social roles on them so I was brought up to think that what was liberatory and what was Progressive was to say well this little person is a girl let's not let her stop that let's not let that stop her doing anything she could be an astronaut I mean I think they were all sort of I was brought up to think that you could do whatever you wanted to you you have the power to to as you said be an astronaut be whatever you damn well like and it's as though this trend now is reverting to stereotyped girls like pink and boys like blue and boys like playing with with meccano sets and girls like playing with dolls and and it's a stereotyping which I kind of revolt against and yet it seems to be increasingly fashionable absolutely and it's worse than just the old-fashioned stereotyping that would have said look this child is definitely a boy and if he doesn't like rugby and so on well he's a puffer and let's bully him it's now saying he's actually a girl yes so you know there's the pink and the blue boxes have been re-structured and remade and reinforced and a child who doesn't fit into the one that's for the sex that they were inverted commas assigned at Birth we have to pop them into the other one and if you call them out on this they say no no no no no that's gender expression that's gender roles you're talking about we're talking about gender identity which is a sort of an IT positive innate knowing that you pop into the world with but nobody pops into the world knowing that sort of thing about themselves children learn it from the stereotypes they self-examine and match themselves against the stereotypes so now we say to little you know what you used to call a [ __ ] boy you know that little boy now thinks that he's meant to be a girl and teachers may say that's not what I'm telling him but it is what they're telling him yes I was very upset to see evidence from your book and others that teaches and doctors perhaps are latching on to a child who expresses the slightest doubt about this and then affirms them as being um the opposite gender to their sex I mean it's worse than that they latch onto us they suggest sell it yes you know these books for two and three and five-year-olds that say you must examine your gender I've got to hear a quote from a a girl from America I think she must have been about 12 when this happened to her she was in she says I was in a very liberal School um and she says there was so much peer pressure to either be gay or trans at this school basically it felt like you weren't cool if you were heterosexual this made me even question myself quite a few times even though I'm heterosexual I know that this pressure can be real for so many children some of them actually be gay or trans and I will definitely support them and fight for them in the end but that's pretty young to be labeling yourself in any permanent way in my opinion um she was a very bright girl she's actually written books about science for for children and very very impressive and I was really depressed to read her letter that there is peer pressure and even teacher pressure um to really go against reality yeah yeah absolutely and teachers think that they're being Progressive you know so in this country we don't have a syllabus for sex ed for relationships and sex ed there's some sort of very vague things that you're meant to cover um like the fact the facts about sex and gender identity or the facts about sexual orientation and gender identity without telling you what those facts are I don't think there are any facts about gender identity and so there are these external providers who are basically Lobby groups that write unbelievably inaccurate materials and then sell them to schools so I've seen short videos and they're so nicely made there's one by m a guy called who calls himself Ollie and his sidekick is a balloon and they call themselves pop and Ollie and pop and Ollie you know it's very bright and colorful and they're like your sex is the best guess that a doctor had when you were born they looked at you and guessed yeah they often conflate this fact that there are people who have differences or disorders of sex development there's a tiny number of people I mean a few people do need investigations to not two percent exactly exactly and even then you know mostly they're getting investigated for conditions that don't cast out on their sex it's just their genitals have not developed normally so I mean probably about half a dozen people a year in this country in Britain have their sex assigned at Birth the rest of us the doctor writes it down anyway so it says you know so the doctor guesses your sex and then when you're old enough you get the chance to tell everybody what sex you are are you male female a boy or a girl or something else in between and then and then stars come behind him and it looks like you're going through the Galaxy and it says or something else entirely and we get off this this putative sex Spectrum down here and what are you meant to make of this if you're eight like first off that you're very boring if you think you're a boy or a girl but also you're just given no hints as to what this gender thing is so you look around and you see Barbie and GI Joe and you know that sort of thing and you say well I don't like Barbie I might be a boy it's incredibly regressive yes um somewhere in your book there's a story about a mother who said who had eight children and she said and not a single one of them is boring CIS is that what that's right so so sis is this very new coinage that's uh with by analogy with Trends yes because what they don't want is you saying you know real women and trans women or normal women and trans women are actual women and trans women they want there to be two types of women so they need a symmetric words to trans and that is CIS on the same side of yes and so this uh this woman I found this quote in an a closed Facebook group in America for parents of trans kids uh somebody gave me a password into it and I lurked there for a while and watched and there were doctors gender doctors in there suggest selling treatments answering questions with extremely inaccurate information like claiming that science has settled on things that it's not but mostly what you saw was the parents reinforcing each other's false beliefs so a new parent will come in and go hi you know my my great little my great little trans boy which is a girl you know she's four I'm learning so much from her sorry um I forget I've forgotten which way around I'm having this child let's say it's really a girl and this girl says she's a boy you know my little trans guy I'm learning so much from him but I'm just wondering like I I'm a bit worried about socially transitioning him case I'm leading him on the path to medicalization and then people will love bomb her and come in and say wow great to have you here with us love them that is what um religious cults do uh they they love bomb is the phrase they actually use I think yes that's right and then if you if you step out of line if at any point you say well I'm not going to do yeah and you are just going to get piled on and you'll get kicked out and the thing that these people use more than anything else is the emotional blackmail of telling you that if you don't get with the program your child will kill themselves now that is appalling because that because well put it another way the evidence for that had better be damn good otherwise it is the most appalling blackmail how good is the evidence I mean the evidence that it does lead to Suicide it doesn't so the important thing to understand is that the reason they say suicide it's not just that it's emotional blackmail it's that they're suggesting that you put your child on a pathway that leads to sterility because if you put a child on puberty blockers early in puberty and then you put them on cross-sex hormones at some point we don't know exactly when but maybe at 20 or 21 you've missed your opportunity your own sex organs are not going to grow you're not going to be a person who can conceive or impregnate somebody else so they're sterilizing children and the only reason you would ever do that is to save a child's life so it has to be yeah it has to be death it has to be death or sterility yes so that's why suicide now there are not a lot of children committing suicide thankfully it's very very rare in miners to commit suicide so that's the first bit of evidence that this is not true there's an enormous boom in trans identification there has been no concomitant boom in suicide again thankfully but there have actually been a few papers that have looked at children who are on the waiting list for gender clinics and what they have found is that these children you know they do have a lot of mental comorbidities mental health comorbidities so you are seeing higher rates of depression anxiety so that's there anyway they're depressed anyway or or bulimic or well they they say they say that of course that it's it's you know the stress the minority stress that's causing these things but there's no evidence that that's true it's at least as probable and I would say much more probable that a child who's looking for solutions to feeling miserable and is suggest sold that if you're trans you can reinvent yourself you know you're like a phoenix your rise from the ash as a new person all your problems will be left behind so yes so so the suicide rate is and the self-harm rate is a little higher than it is in the general population but not out of line for mental health conditions yeah and and important to say there is literally no evidence that transitioning the child will decrease that risk yes so so it does seem like a terrible it'll be emotional blackmail people like you who are standing up about this mostly women I suppose uh are getting an awful lot of persecution um I think they're very brave and and um JK Rowling is very brave Kathleen Stock's very brave Maya forced out it's very brave is that how you pronounce it yes it is yes what gives you the courage I mean I don't want to answer for anybody else although I work with Maya daily so I sort of see where she comes from and it's um and I know Kathleen and I've missed Joe Rowling and it's my privilege to have met her um in my case I was lucky to work somewhere that has a very Collegiate and rigorously intellectual atmosphere namely The Economist but even there of course there were people who didn't agree that I should be speaking about this and it was awkward on occasion I would say in my case I was in too deep okay I was so far stacked in blood that there was no way back you know like I before I knew that this was going to be a problem I was so far in that I couldn't get back and then I um I was you know I was quite I was quite negative about it I really felt this to me very bad was happening and you know all the people who think that something very bad is happening they'll pick a different bit of it they'll say it's about Free Speech or it's about women's rights it's about Children's Health or it's about just you know basic reality or sanity and it was all of those things for me but then I went to an event at which um some D transitioners were speaking and this would have been I think late 2019 and I found it a profoundly um upsetting event so at this one in particular there were six young women of course there are boys who transition and de-transition to but this was six young women all of whom had thought they were boys and they were all of them lesbians who had been misled by their early gender non-conformity into thinking they must be boys and they had gone various power stages down the medical pathway and one of them was 23. was this very articulate young woman who had suffered from anorexia in her teens and at 18 had stumbled upon the idea that she was trying to starve away her curves because she was meant to be a boy and by 21 she had all her sex organs removed Amazon testosterone she had no breasts no uterus no ovaries she had to be heard her hair was receding and by 23 when she still wasn't feeling any better she still had an eating disorder she one day had the thought how can an operation namely a hysterectomy that only a woman can have turned me into an and that bounced her all the way back to I am a woman that is just a fact about me and so I sat there and I listened to these young women and you know I have a very soft spot for gay kids I have a gay son myself he's never had gender dysphoria it's important to say that he's never had any theory that he's a girl or anything like that but I have a soft spot for these kids because they're quite non-conforming and you know Finding their way finding your way as a teenager is difficult anyway but for these kids it's a little bit more difficult because as they're growing up they're also realizing they're different I mean how many of these children do you think are just simply gay anyway well I mean according to the Tavistock Clinic which is the UK's main gender identity Clinic for Children the great majority of the children they see are same-sex attracted there's a strong statistic they could have been perfectly happy because yes so we are turning potentially healthy gay adults into sterile straight simulacra of the opposite sex and one of the points you'll make I think is that there are certain parents who would rather have a trans child and a gay child and yes is that part of the motivation yeah and I don't think it's always stated up front and you know some people think that that's very implausible but I think that they they don't realize the dynamic in some families and In some cultures as in you know local cultures and school or whatever it's really hard to be gender non-conforming like right bone deep gender non-conforming I don't mean someone like me who's a fairly normal woman but did a PhD in maths I mean somebody that everything about your style and your taste and the way you move and your interests just really screams you know camp for your boy or Butch if you're a girl and you have to have you have to be let a lot of freedom to be yourself and not a lot you know nothing has to be made of this by the grown-ups around you and it's things start to be made about it you start to question yourself and think like why am I so different like why am I a boy who only likes the girls and why am I a girl who only likes the boys what's wrong with me and then the thought comes up in your own mind was I meant to be a girl was I meant to be a boy like we knew this already in about 2000 the research had been done the the the papers have been examined we know that the gender non-conformity comes first in these kids and the gender dysphoria the distress is a result of the gender non-conformity and the meaning that is made of that so if no meaning is made of it you just grow up and you might be an unusual straight person but you're quite likely to be gay but if a lot of meaning is made out of it you interpret that as being that there's a woman inside or there's a man inside and then the people around you may think that too and your parents may find this very hard like a man who's always wanted a boy to take to the football and you know he he can the best will in the world he may fail to not seem disappointed yeah and the same with the mother who wanted a daughter who went to ballet and to go shopping with and so on and she gets some little rough and tumble character who just wants tree climbing and rugby you get the impression that you're a big disappointment to your parents and this Dynamic can unfold between them both and what you need is family therapy really from someone supportive to point this out to you and to guide you gently through and instead you end up in a gender clinic and they say oh your child's gender identity oh you have a little trans boy you have a little trans girl yeah was in in the past we've just said well she's a tomboy and and yeah well with a girl you would have plural Boys the boys they tried to straighten them out yes horrible yeah but the girls was much easier you just let them out tell them to climb some trees and look back when they're 16. yes um I'm perfectly happy to address a trans person by their preferred name and prefer preferred pronouns I think it's just a matter of politeness really um what I objective is the um insistence that I am a woman I mean you're not a woman you're I'm perfectly prepared to call you she if you if you like and recall you whatever your preferred name is but to say I am a woman is a debauching of language and that's where I draw the line I've become much more Hardline on this and I would like not to be I would like I would have started where you are but what I've learned is that somebody who expects to be called she also expects the words woman and female and mother and sister and daughter and it's very hard if you give away sexed language to explain why this person cannot in all circumstances be treated as a woman so often people do this Preamble it happens to me less now but two years ago when my book came out it happened a lot they would give a preamble to any interview with me in which they said uh you know of course neither of us is transphobic and we're very happy to use people's names and pronouns and treat you as a woman or treat you as a man and I started to think like what do you mean by treat somebody as a man or a woman because we've got rid of all the unjust and unjustifiable differences between the Sexes and the way we treat people now with equalized pension age you know my mother had to leave her job when she got married in the Irish Civil Service because there was a ban on married women we've got rid of all that stuff and now treating somebody as a woman means either I just noticed that they're a woman in in a space like any other space where it just doesn't actually matter what what sex people are or it means we're in a single sex space and they shouldn't be there let's we'll come on to that in a moment but if you want to try and explain why you have to use sex-based language so I have to say the reason this person cannot come in here is because he is a man yes and if I say she I'm already I mean it is do you make a distinction between people who've gone through the ordeal of surgery and and being castrated or whatever and having their breasts removed whatever than people who just simply stand up and say I am a woman or I am a man um it does seem to me that there's you you also since you sort of paid your dues if you if you if you've subjected yourself to I mean you're really serious about it you're really Earnest about it no not just a frivolously standing up and saying I've decided I'm a woman today sort of thing I don't make any distinction because I don't think that being a woman or a man is the sort of thing that you pay a price to be yes it's just a very base fact about you but more than that um you know in a space where a man is not supposed to be I don't know whether he's been castrated or not I'm telling from his secondary sex features and they don't change if he's been through the surgery but the other reason is that in international human rights law there can't be any Distinction on the basis of whether the person has been castrated because it's basic it's a basic principle that's been adjudicated on now in several courts is that you can't make something conditional on getting yourself sterilized because it's human rights if you used to do that so if you say to people uh you you know you've paid your dues if you cut the bits off and that'll give you the the reward is that we'll now treat you as a woman or we'll treat you as a man um you are inducing people to go through a really horrific surgery that is and to give up oh yeah something so that cannot be a legal line no and then the last thing I'd say is like they paid their dues to whom like well I mean like to the other people around them you know if you come into a women's space who have you paid your duties are the wrong phrase but but no I've heard it sure you've shown you're serious about it you should you've shown that you're I mean somebody who let's talk about sports for a moment somebody who who's a a moderately good swimmer as a as a man but kind of mediocre and then suddenly just says I am a woman yes and because he says I'm a woman he's then allowed to go and break all the records of female swimming um that seems to be to be unserious you you're just saying you're you're a woman because you want to say you're a woman whereas if you've been if you've been through the surgery but he's still not a woman no no but but but there's a sort of feeling that he really means it he's sincere about it I mean I could say I was sincere about being astronaut it doesn't make me an astronaut and and the surgery doesn't make any difference to your um your sporting performance so if we're protecting what it is to be female in a sports category which we are that's how sports categories work you know we protect under 18s over 35s paralympians flyweights yeah the thing that we're protecting is femaleness and the fact that a man is very very serious in wishing to be seen as female doesn't move his category no that's true but okay let's take the example of the astronaut that you just mentioned just say I I'm an astronaut and you're obviously not but if on the other hand you've gone through the rigorous training of an astronaut and you've and you've if you put yourself through all the all the the it's really rather hard craft to become an astronaut you've proved you're serious about it but I've also become an astronaut so that's that you might not become you might be not good enough to become a restaurant then I would not be an astronaut well you wouldn't be an astronaut but but you've you've tried yes I mean I just I don't think that male and female are are prizes for effort they're just observations of categories that we are yes yeah okay I mean it keeps the numbers down there's that yes but um you know for a long time we didn't see trans like men who identified as Trans in women's sports because they did set a surgery Rule and at the time the surgery was really only done on people in their 40s and older yeah so you didn't see any Prime aged men and now that it's just a testosterone level is all that many of the sporting bodies require that you lower your testosterone and I mean honestly they can't check that it's just a it's just a paper rule it's not a real one younger men can identify as women and so now we're actually seeing men who are you know pretty good athletes and who are then world record Breakers as women yes but it's all wrong like if we're protecting the female category then no male Advantage belongs yes if there's that simple if we're going to have separate female um athletic competitions at all then then and if we don't then there will be no women who win anything yes I mean you could say everything's open you're just a human you and you're going for for everything and then as you say um women wouldn't wouldn't win anything yes maybe gymnastics but the gymnastics is an interesting example because male and female gymnastics are very different like the one thing that women really have an advantage in is flexibility yes but male male gymnastics yes they're flexible but mostly they're strong so they do very different things they just do different events for the men and women neither sex would be any good in the others yes okay um there's a lot in your book about changing rooms so we better we better talk about that um uh tell us a bit about that I think another thing that people often give away when they start to think about this is they think well you know I understand that you need female only spaces if they're say rape crisis centers or you know really specialist services but they think like you know oh what about public toilets and maybe even changing rooms like have cubicles and they miss the point that these are sort of mass arrangements for the convenience of the half of humanity that experiences rape at the hands of the other half of humanity that experiences the two most common sex crimes which are voyeurism and exhibitionism and are just they're an inclusion measure for women so the first female public toilets were brought in so that women didn't experience what was called the urine release which meant that women had to stay near the home because they needed to be able to go and you know I mean women had to take off clothing from the bottom half of them to go to the toilet so men don't you're quite vulnerable when you're weighing and so women in the Victorian era like would have to always be able to be aware that there was somewhere they could go to way otherwise they could get assaulted and it was it was the factory girls actually who campaigned for the first public toilets and because they were they were getting sexually assaulted if they tried to wee during a factory day they weren't able to to work outside the home and then you think like all the special situations that women need um just just ordinary spaces like toilets and changing rooms for like women menstruate as I said women take off more of their clothes to go to the toilet we take much longer uh young girls in particular like little girls are at risk like if you if you're a man who's out with your daughter who's six seven eight nine and you want to send her to the toilet you want to be able to pop her into the women's lose and know that there's only women in there because she's really at risk actually if it's a mix-sec space then there's Muslim women and there's women who have been right who are survivors of sexual assault and who can have really serious flashbacks in enclosed faces if there are males there with them and now we're losing all of these spaces they're either going gender neutral or they're going self-id like they'll put a sign up saying you know use whichever space you feel most comfortable in and about a year ago at sex matters where I work with Maya for stature in there we put out a call for evidence as to why people cared about Single Sex spaces and we did hear stories about specialist spaces like Rape Crisis centers but mostly we heard about toilets and changing rooms and this phrase got said over and over again people wrote us almost essays about it they said you know I went along to my local swimming pool and there's a bloke who caused this other woman who's Now using the changing room and I've never told anybody I'm in my 50s now but I was raped when I was 14 and I never told anybody and I found myself in this enclosed space and I looked around and there was this bloke and I froze and I remembered everything terrible that had happened to me and I left and I never went back so women are being pushed out of public spaces Again by the loss of these spaces that were introduced in order that we could play a full part in public life you were telling me before we started uh which I didn't know that um competitive swimmers but Olympic types swimmers have to wriggle into their streamline swimsuits and so they don't just sort of quickly put put it on with the way the rest of us do they take how long does it take like it can take up to 40 minutes so I didn't know this when I wrote the book or I would have put it in So at the time I was writing the book and there were a few athletes who were making it into Elite women's sports who were men so Laurel Hubbard was the big example at the time who's a weightlifter a new Z weightlifter a man in his 40s but in between the hardback and the paperback Along Came Leah or will Thomas who's a young man who's six foot four who's about 21 22 and who started swimming in American college races and I mean it's bad enough when you look like you see people in their swimsuits you can see who's a man and who's a woman and he's really towering over the women and he doesn't have good technique you know he's just using his shoulder strength and not even kicking his legs and he still wins and then I heard one of the young women who had to compete against him describing what it is like doing competitive swimming so they wear these streamlined suits and the the sort of the compression suits that like just make you very um cut through the water fast and very very hard to get on and the compression doesn't last all that long so you change suit every time you race and you also don't wear that suits when you're doing your warm-up and there's dozens of events you know all the different lengths and strokes and there's maybe many competitors in all of them they're these big open changing rooms and you're running in you strip completely naked you put on your practice suits you go out you do your warm-up you come back in your strip completely naked again and then you start this miserable business of shimmying into your race suit which is incredibly tight and you have to sort of wriggle and bounce and wriggle and bounce and get it up over your hips and then regular and bounce yourself in completely naked through all of this and all around you everyone else is doing the same thing and there's this six foot four bloke and in case anyone wants to know no he has not had surgery and no there are not cubicles and no you cannot hold a towel in your way and that's what you're doing and these poor girls like the girls on his own team at the University that he's at but all the women who had to compete against him if they complained they were told that they were bigots at Riley Gaines who's the one of them who spoke about the most was warned by her University that if she kept talking about it she would not be taken on to medical school told she's a bigot by somebody senior in the University Yeah by this by the sports team by the EDI team in the University EDI meaning Equity diversity and inclusion told her that they'll be referred for counseling the women of the University uh that we're um Leah Thomas is I think it's University of Pennsylvania the girls on his own team because they complained anonymously and they finally found someone to send their complaints and they were told they would be referred for counseling to learn to cope with their transphobia so they to to um to cope with losing basically I'm baffled by why this is also one-sided I realized there are two different points of view here but how has one side managed to kind of capture the dominant um dialogue really the dominant half of the dialogue and and constantly it comes up that you've if you descend from that you're called a bigot and so people don't want to descend because descents um so I don't want to call it Cardis but but um it's it's pardonable characters because nobody wants to be called a bigot but why does all the abuse go one way why does it why is it such a yeah why did all the bullying go one way I mean there are so many different answers to that and like you know like I think they all reinforce each other and one of them is because this is a linguistic movement and there is no sense in which Leah Thomas is a Woman except that you say he is you must silence people it's the only way in which you can keep the fiction going if people can say what they see in front anyway in which he can keep the fiction going but why does he have these are better than the campuses yes who um I mean you can't ignore the fact that this is for the benefit of men you know like female sports has always been fifth rate like it gets much less funding you know these girls are told they're told things that nobody would tell a male athlete like that you know it's for the joy of taking part why do you care about winning I think in America it's become so associated with the the very very polarized political system so you know the and everyone everyone tends to take their political opinions as a package that's not an American um thought solely but in America it's so polarized that they're really very specific packages and if you want not to take the opinion the gender identity trumps sex then you're a republican you have to be a Conservative Christian you have to be anti-abortion you have to think that women belonging to this kitchen you know and so if you don't want those things well you've got to come over here and give up women's sports and say that men can be women and say that you know there can be a female penis and so on and then I mean there's a sort of an evolutionary point to make here like sometimes when you look at a giraffe or a platypus or something and you say how did this come to be you could answer that by sort of going back and I think you did this in your beautiful book and which one was it the the one where you go back in the the Tree of Life backwards quite thick one oh the ancestors tale that's lovely yes that book so you can go back and you can you can actually answer that question or you can just say look that's how Evolution works you know so we have we have this is an emerging ideology some would say neo-religion and out of the many many bizarre things that people could believe this is the one that made it and you could then Point At You know the internet um the arrival of sex change surgery the fact that we're all online too much uh social media places where kids congregate without adults and talk to each other without adult oversight the cowardice of the ioc the international Olympic Committee which is a dreadfully corrupt organization I mean you know it allowed the cheating by the East German women dopers to go on in full sight for 20 years and has never sorted that out and never taken the medals away from them you know they just don't care the show keeps on the road as far as they're concerned so there's just all these different things that happened and you know the result is what we see as opposed to me being able to say I would have been able to predict this in advance I'd never predicted the Platypus either yes the Platypus wasn't the lead when it was first sent to the museum well exactly so this is a platypus in a way yes is this is there a tension between the LGBT yeah um is the is the tea a little bit more I mean is there some opposition between the LGB on the one hand and the T on the other on the other I mean depends who you ask and depends what you think these are if you think these are identities and especially if you think in American identities so in in the American way of thinking there is the you know the white supremacist the the sisette white male who runs the world and everybody else is oppressed by that person and the more ways in which you're oppressed kind of the better in this culture then lgbtqia plus plus you know all of those things are you know you're not CIS hit yes I meaning CIS and heteronormal heterosexual um on the other hand if you actually just think that LGB is a shorthand for people who aren't heterosexual that people are either homosexual or bisexual and you understand those as people who have unusual sexualities which you know has been until very recently a major reason that people have been oppressed like as in sent to jail given electric shocks cast out by their families like really bad things then what the hell is T doing in there like tea is an identity it's not a sexuality and more than that t is a an identity that undermines the very basis of sexuality because if you're trans you move category or in your mind you move category from male to female and that means you change sexuality as well so a straight man becomes a lesbian yes and that's not very much what most lesbians find very helpful for their no I mean there's attention lesbians do feel threatened I think don't they absolutely yes I mean you could it works both ways like like a lot of things to do with sex you know formally it works both ways like a woman who identifies as a man like a straight woman who identifies as a man becomes a gay man and this is increasingly popular among teenage girls to identify as gay men I think they're not going to have much success when they get older it's not going to go very well because that's not how gay culture works but the other way around you've got men who are bigger stronger more sexually aggressive you know lesbians are the people who've always found it hardest to keep their footing in the alphabet soup like I have a lot of lesbian friends now doing this work and they'll tell you that the LGB groupings never paid attention to their needs they paid attention to gay men's needs and so now a lesbian-only group will often find usually find itself under pressure to admit heterosexual men who think of themselves as lesbians and then when you add to that the fact that there's a very common male sexual interest a fetish in cross-dressing and that there are significant numbers of men who find it very sexy to think of themselves as lesbians probably as many of those as there are actual lesbians you're like well you know these people come into your spaces and now it's not a lesbian space anymore yeah yes one thing that really pisses me off it it came up a moment ago is that is that um I've been kind of politically on the left all my life and I find myself now being blamed um somehow it well I find that that people think I must be right wing because because the only people who agree with me about this tend to be politically on the right that's not really true but but they they often think it is I mean it do you find that I mean there's a very significant movement here in the UK on the left of the women who came up through the unions and to you know very good organizers who are sex realists and so I think here in the UK it's really easy to say oh look at Woman's Place UK I mean JK Rowling look at her she's not exactly right-wing so you know it is often said but it's an American thing to say it's because of the American polarization and it's part of the Americanization I should have said that that's American oh it gets said to us too I mean I get told that I'm funded by the Heritage Foundation you know that I'm getting money from shadowy right-wing American groups I'm not you know it's it's a joke among the women like you know that I work with you know people are saying have you got any of your far-right money yet this must be stuck in the post you know no we haven't we don't get funding from them um it is very irritating and I suppose I find it less irritating because I never thought of myself as either left or right wing I wasn't even a left-wing student politician I'm um I've always been a very include me out person like I I I've voted for every party every every one of the three main parties here honestly don't know who I could vote for now uh but you will find that in this in this movement the the people who are willing to speak on this issue um are often people who have been through some Crucible beforehand and those can be good bad or in different things as far as I'm concerned lots of brexiteers lots of anti-vaxxers uh lots of Evangelical Christians um people who have had some formative experience like I think probably you sticking with atheist rationalism while the new atheist movement degenerated into gender woo you know you've already been cast out in some way and if you've already been cast out well you've got used to it you know what it's like and you know that you can survive it and so I do see a lot of very varied people who have already experienced being cast out right Well we'd probably better come to a close would you like to um tell us a bit about your organization's sex matters as we as we close sure so anyone who's read my book will have uh met Maya for stature who is the person I shape the chapter about Britain otherwise known as Turf Island around Turf being trans exclusionary radical feminist and it's what we get called for believing that sex is real yes do do tell Maya's story yeah so Maya worked for she was a specialist in tax International tax flows and developments and she worked for a think tanker called the center for Global development which is based in Washington and they had a An Arm based in London and at the time in 2017 the government was thinking of changing the law to allow for gender self-id meaning that you would be able to get a new birth certificate stating whichever sex you liked just by asking obviously insane when you put it like that but anyway they were about to do it and Maya thought but in development sex is actually a really important variable so you know maybe we should talk about this maybe we should talk about our gender self ID destroys the bases on which we do a lot of the work that we do and that was fine initially with her colleagues in London but colleagues in America because all of this gender stuff comes from America I like everything else yeah yeah we live in America now all of us they complained and said she was transphobic and cut a long story short she lost her job so she went to the employment tribunal and she lost a bit about what uh end of 2019 that must have been no end of 2020 um as the book was you know as I was writing the book and in the employment tribunal the judge James Taylor said that her belief that there are two sexes the Sexes are immutable and sometimes recognizing that is important for women's rights that's her belief that was not worthy of respect in a Democratic Society and so she deserves to lose her job and I mean the way that the law was written it's not just deserved to lose her job it would mean that anyone could discriminate against her at will they could turn her away from a bar they could refuse every employer anywhere provided with any Services because this is the law that protects us against discrimination in employment and provision of goods and services what he was saying was that she was a Nazi she was literally literally equivalent to being a Nazi or somebody who says we want to bring back slavery so I knew Maya by this point and she's a very brave woman um and very very dogged so she had to go to the employment appeal tribunal which the original ruling was overturned in its entirety I mean the judge just didn't know what he was talking about and that set precedent so now with the belief that sex is binary immutable and that matters is a protected belief in UK employment and prevention yes that president has set so now in a workplace if you say I think we need to have men's and women's toilets because there are two Sexes and women need them they can't say are you bigger okay I I've just found in in your book The the questions that the lawyer on behalf of the company that got rid of her asked um on what basis did she think male people couldn't become female could you name philosophers who agreed with her I couldn't have a wife a lot of us or they got to do with this biologists you want to ask um how could she know someone's sex if she hadn't been present at their birth doctors assign sex by looking at newborns and using guesswork so she had to answer all of those things under oath and um the reason it's a philosophy is because the protected characteristic in the equality Act is religion or belief and she was claiming a belief you can't just protect facts it does it at which the room packed with women supported erupted and laughter I'm not surprised yes and then after all of that judge Taylor said thus you know her belief was a novel belief that was not protected because it was too harmful to other people's rights so anyway Maya set up with some lawyers including um her her Barrister and your Palmer this organization sex matters and I left the economist to go and work for it because honestly I feel in some ways that this is you know a generation defining battle actually because it's a battle against reality as you said also against Free Speech against women's rights against gay people's rights and it's a battle to keep children from being indoctrinated because children are being lied to all of them they're being lied to about their bodies about human nature about sexuality and they're being misled all of them and for some of them that's leading them together me too um well thank you very much Helen once again Helen's book is trans when ideology meets reality thank you very much indeed well thank you for having me on thank you [Music]

Channel: The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins

Views: 575,752

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Id: hu72Lu5FqE4

Length: 51min 3sec (3063 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023