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“This is the medical scandal of the 21st century” - Helen Joyce
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Helen Joyce is a journalist, author and feminist campaigner. Her first book, ‘Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality’, was an immediate bestseller and named by The Times, The Spectator and The Observer as one of their books of 2021.
It tells the story of how national laws, company policies, school curricula, medical protocols, academic research and media style guides are being rewritten to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex.
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Buy 'Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality' here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Engagement
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello it's Will here. Before we get stuck into this week's show, I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has been leaving us their ratings and reviews. It's a wonderful way to help us grow Australiana, and it's super quick and easy. If you are yet to do so, please leave us one now so we can remain in the good graces of the mystical, algorithmic podcast gods that control our destiny. Now, cue the jingle.
Introduction to 'Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality'
00:00:40
Speaker
G'day, and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. I stared at my screen for at least 30 minutes yesterday, grasping for an introduction to this interview. In the end, nothing I wrote came close to matching the clarity, the rationality, and the incisiveness of the opening remarks to Helen Joyce's book, Trans, When Ideology Meets Reality. Helen has kindly allowed me to share them.
Gender Self-Identification and Societal Impact
00:01:08
Speaker
This book is about an idea, one that seems simple but has far-reaching consequences. The idea is that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare instead of their biology. It's called gender self-identification and it is the central tenet of a fast developing belief system which sees everyone as possessing a gender identity that may or may not match the body in which it is housed.
00:01:33
Speaker
When there is a mismatch, the person is transgender, trans for short, and it is the identity, not the body, that should determine how everyone else sees them and treats them. The origins of this belief system date back almost a century, to when doctors first sought to give physical form to the yearnings of a handful of people who longed to change sex.
00:01:55
Speaker
For decades, such transsexuals were few and far between, the concern of a handful of maverick clinicians who would provide hormones and surgeries to reshape their patients' bodies to match their desires as closely as possible. Bureaucrats and governments treated them as exceptions to be accommodated in society with varying degrees of competence and compassion.
00:02:17
Speaker
Since the turn of the century, the exception has become the rule. National laws, company policies, school curricula, medical protocols, academic research, and media style guides are being rewritten to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex. Facilities that used to be sex separated from toilets and changing rooms to homeless shelters and prisons are switching to gender self-identification.
00:02:45
Speaker
Meanwhile, more and more people are coming out as trans, usually without undergoing any sort of medical treatment. This book explains why this has happened and how far it has happened so fast. Helen Joyce, welcome to Australiana.
Helen Joyce's Career Shift
00:02:59
Speaker
Oh, thank you for having me on. For everyone who is listening, Helen and I have been fighting tech issues the last 20 minutes and she's been in a mad rush around her house to find an adequate makeshift studio. So, Helen, thank you very much for that.
00:03:12
Speaker
I've displaced my husband from his office. He knows his role. Very good. So, Helen, I want to start with you. You have had an unusual journey to the cold face of the culture wars, as it were.
00:03:26
Speaker
You studied and attained a doctorate in mathematics. You worked in academia. You then worked for The Economist for several years, including stints in some of, I would argue, the most prestigious journalism roles you can possibly get anywhere in the world, international editor for The Economist, finance editor for The Economist. I imagine they're not particularly easy jobs to give up. Why did you give them up to write trans and then to focus on advocacy on this issue?
00:03:54
Speaker
I mean, it wasn't a sudden decision and it wasn't a single decision. What happened was when I was international editor at The Economist in 2017, I did stumble across this issue actually because the editor in chief mentioned it to me. So the international section is a sort of short section of The Economist that runs a long read every week on a different issue. And it was a great job, you know, finding people to write about all sorts, editing things, writing myself on occasion. And she said to me one
00:04:21
Speaker
one week at lunch and she said that she kept hearing from children that such and such was coming home and saying they were trans. And this wasn't something I'd come across. I had heard, you know, in a very, very minor way that there were people who were transsexual and I haven't given that any thought. I sort of thought, you know, oh, doctors know what they're doing. I know there's an operation that's called something like a sex change. I didn't know really what was involved in it. And, you know, I'd never even got to the point of asking myself
00:04:47
Speaker
you know, can people change sex? Like the answer is obviously no, but I hadn't even got to that point. So I looked into it then and ended up writing an article myself because I really struggled to find an author when I was astonished by the inability of my own inability to do journalism the same way that I've just been doing journalism for that point more than a decade of the Economist.
00:05:08
Speaker
You know, interviewees acted in a very different way than they ever had on any other subject. They wanted to know who else I was talking to. And unless I was really parroting their line, which is trans women are women, trans men are men, it's a matter of self-identification, it's nothing to do with a medical issue, unless you're willing to just parrot that wholesale, they wouldn't talk to you. So I ended up writing a piece and really being convinced that there was something very strange here.
00:05:32
Speaker
And then over the following year, I started following this on social media and seeing what else I could find out. And I became quite disturbed by what I found out. As I say in the introduction to the book, this is actually a wholesale societal change, societal and political change. And it's not the minor issue I had thought it was originally. The first question people always ask you is, aren't there very few trans people? Isn't this a tiny problem? But actually the
00:05:57
Speaker
The claim that's being made is a claim about everybody. And we all have a sex. So all of us are either men or women. What is a girl is with her children. And the claim that was being made is that the reason that a woman is a woman is because she thinks she's a woman. And the reason a man is a man is because he thinks he's a man. And this is circular. Like what is it they think they're thinking? It's a non-definition. So I wrote another article in 2018 and in fact it ended up being published in Colette.
00:06:24
Speaker
By then I was genuinely concerned because there's not much that we make a fuss about people being men and women anymore. We don't say that women can't vote or that women can't enter the professions. We only really talk about people's sex when people's sex matters. So we only talk about people's sex when we're having sex-separated spaces, for example, or when we're having sports that are for women only to
00:06:45
Speaker
acknowledge the fact that men are very much stronger. That's what testosterone does to you during puberty. So saying that you are whatever sex you say you are blows a hole through the idea of having sex separated spaces at all. And also, it's bloody sexist. Because, I mean, people, I get very condescending emails sometimes exclusively from men, I have to say.
00:07:06
Speaker
I get many horrible emails from women too, but I get exclusively the condescending ones are from men, the ones that say male and female are sexes and men and women are gender roles. To which you want to say, well, was I being a man when I got a PhD in mathematics then? Because that's hardly the gender role of a woman. It was my husband being a woman when he stayed home with the kids when we moved to Brazil when I was the Brazil correspondent for The Economist who couldn't get a visa to work. I mean, either you think that men and women are sexes and nothing can cast you out of your sex.
00:07:36
Speaker
I can behave in as unwomanly a way as I like and I remain a woman. Or you think it's possible to be so unwomanly that you don't count as a woman and so unmanly you don't count as a man. So that was a sort of long way of saying that I became very worried about it and I became convinced that someone should write a book about it but I didn't think it should be me. I was the finance editor at The Economist by that point. Very busy, great job, working all the time on something completely different.
00:08:01
Speaker
And then I met kids who had been put, well, they were young people by that point, but while they were still children, they had been put on the path, the transgender treatment pathway, and it had led them to very grave medical harms, up to and including sterilisation. And that was the day I decided that, you know, I should write about this properly, I should do what I could, because I had discovered what seemed to me to be a big story, a very big scandal, in fact.
00:08:26
Speaker
But I was still at the Economist, so the Economist had been reasonably supportive on all of this. Like, you know, I wasn't writing about it there anymore, I was doing other jobs, but they didn't treat me like other journalists had been treated. They let me do my own thing on that as long as I was doing my job. And then I took some time off. I took a token of, I think, five months of unpaid leave to write the book, to write the proposal and then the book. And then the book came out and I was continuing to work at the Economist by then as the Britain editor.
00:08:51
Speaker
So as you say, these are great jobs. And if anyone had said to me 15 years ago, I started at The Economist in 2005, that I would be international and then finance and then written editor. I wouldn't have believed them and I would have thought my dreams that it would come true. But I had thought that maybe the book would lay at all to rest and it was, you know, not for everybody. I don't mean that. I mean for me.
00:09:11
Speaker
It was driving me completely mad, the circular definition and this very illogical thinking pattern. And I wanted to write it all down to my satisfaction and then move on, but I couldn't move on. Because the thing is, they are still sterilising children. They are still destroying women's sports. They are still putting rapists in women's jails. So I had to make the very tough decision and the decision I made with the editor's blessing was to leave. So yeah, it wasn't easy.
00:09:37
Speaker
I want to zoom in on that first meeting that you had with detransitioners, without wanting to lead the witness. I've heard you tell a story that I think with Constance Kisson and Frances Foster about one particular detransitioner that you met on that day, which really compelled you to speak up about this. Would you mind telling me that story?
Detransitioner's Experience
00:09:56
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. I found her testimony deeply upsetting. I've found many testimonies since deeply upsetting, but she summed it all up really for me.
00:10:05
Speaker
To explain, I think that this is a problem for everybody because I think it's a policy problem and a democracy problem and free speech and liberalism and institutional problem when you tell lies and insist that there are the truth. But the specific harms are done most to three groups, which is women, gay people and children. And the reason is those are the people that matters most too, that we define sex properly and clearly. Obviously everybody who has a sexual orientation, it matters to say what sex is.
00:10:32
Speaker
But those of us who are straight, we're the majority, so it mostly doesn't rub up against us. And for men, it's not common for women to be able to force themselves on men. But it's very common for men to force themselves on women. And in particular, men who say they're women are making a statement that if they're heterosexual, they're actually lesbian. So a heterosexual man who identifies as a woman is a lesbian. So you're seeing a lot of men forcing themselves into lesbian spaces, lesbian meetups, dating apps, organizations and so on.
00:11:02
Speaker
So it's a real problem for lesbians. And then for children, because children's identities are still in formation and because children believe what grownups tell them. So it's quite easy to auto suggest to children that if there's something wrong with them or they're unhappy, it's a problem of their sexed body. So this girl really was all of those things. Now, by the time I met her, she was 23, but she'd had a very, very difficult teenage years.
00:11:25
Speaker
She's lesbian. She'd always been hyper, hyper in front of him. Actually a very dainty little character. Like when I say she's butch, I don't mean she's big and strong. She's kind of sweet, but she'd be a baby butch, they'd say. And she had a very severe eating disorder. You know, she was hospitalised to save her life several times. And she was bullied for being lesbian. She said that she didn't like to call herself a lesbian because that's a porn category.
00:11:51
Speaker
you know, men looking at two women together in porn sites and they call it lesbian porn. So she was deeply unhappy and really primed by the things that had happened to her to blame her sex and her sexuality. And then she stumbled upon the idea of being trans, being a trans man. And within a week of having ever heard of this idea, she believed that she was a boy and that that was why she had an eating disorder because she was trying to starve away her curves.
00:12:17
Speaker
So she went to a therapist who said that that was exactly right, and that if she went from testosterone, had her breasts removed, and all the rest, that she would no longer feel distress and it would cure her eating disorder. And she told her parents, and her parents didn't know anything about this, but they'd seen their daughter nearly die, so they were like, okay, great, if this saves your life. But if you fast forward some years to when I met her,
00:12:41
Speaker
She had taken testosterone, her voice had broken, she now had facial hair, she had no breasts, she had her ovaries, which was removed at age 21.
00:12:49
Speaker
She was preparing for a phalloplasty, which is this gruesome operation where they take part of your forearm or your thigh and turn it into a sort of tube that they're attached to your groin. Very high complication rates. Obviously not anything like a functional penis, but anyway, that's what they do. And she was still suffering the after effects of a hysterectomy. So she went online to try to find like how long you meant to feel bad after a hysterectomy, because they haven't given her any idea. They just said you'll feel better. Now it's actually, it can be a year.
00:13:17
Speaker
you feel okay after a hysterectomy. It's a major operation. My mum wasn't going out for a year after hers. And she found these lovely support groups of women who had had hysterectomies because they had cancer or because they had endometriosis. And they were great to her. And then one night she said, as day I met her on these other detransitions, she said, one night this thought popped into her head, which is, how can an operation that can only be done to a woman turn me into a man?
00:13:45
Speaker
And it was as if she had hit a wall and bounced all the way back. And within a week, she thought everything she had done was nonsense. Everything they had said to her was nonsense. She still had all the problems that she'd had when she went into it. She still hasn't moved as a widow. She's still depressed. Her body dysphoria, the hatred of the female parts had just moved after she'd got her breasts off and moved to her hips. But now she was sterile. And who knows what other health harms by messing around, by losing her ovaries. I mean, the ovaries are mutually serious,
00:14:13
Speaker
seriously important organs for them, you don't need them for no reason. And I just sat there and I thought they're sterilising gay kids, because most of the kids they see in the gender clinics around the world, at least then, I mean, the social contagion has gone so far now that it's affecting all sorts of kids. But at that point in 2019, most of the kids they were seeing in the gender clinics were gay, or going to grow up gay.
00:14:36
Speaker
This makes me reflect on a comment that I've heard from a previous guest on this podcast. She made the comment that some parents want a trans daughter more than a gay son. And it leads me to ask the question, how much of this is an unfortunate by-product on vulnerable gay children, teenagers? And how much of this is a deliberate and conscious attack on gay people and the gay community?
00:15:03
Speaker
I don't think much of it is a deliberate attack in the sense of somebody sitting there and saying, I bloody hate gay people. But I think there's a lot more homophobia out there than people think there is. And I think homophobia is a less simple thing than people think it is. By now, I have a lot of gay friends, both male and straight, and I have a gay son as well as a straight son. And, you know, it's not an easy path to adulthood, being a gay teenager. You know, you're different. When you finally realize why you're different, you know, the fact is that you're going to be a minority. It's going to be hard to meet people.
00:15:33
Speaker
whichever sex you are, your same-sex friendship groups are complicated now in a way where they're not for straight kids. Because there's always the possibility of sexual attraction, like either you feel it and they don't return it, or they're worried that you'll feel it, and they don't feel comfortable with you around the way they would with a straight friend of the same sex. And also, there's a strong connection between being quite gender non-conforming and being gay, and the gender non-conformity can be very early.
00:15:58
Speaker
And particularly for boys, there's a really strong cultural dislike of very gender nonconforming boys. So boys can grow up with an awful lot of shame about being gay. And then for girls, I mean, you know, being a tomboy has always been more culturally acceptable than being a quote unquote sissy. But this thing about lesbians and porn, like this is huge. Like it is, you know, young women, lots of young women say that they don't want to use the word lesbian. They say they're queer because they don't want to say lesbian. Lesbians almost embarrassing to say.
00:16:28
Speaker
I mean, either because they think it makes you sound like, you know, you're in your sixties and you don't wear a bra and you want to go and live in a commune somewhere. I know lesbians like that and good on them, but anyway, that's not all of lesbianism, is it? Or because it's this porn category thing, like men say, oh, can I watch? Or, you know, all you need is a good fuck. So it's not that people are like, I don't want any gay people. It's that there's a lot of internalised homophobia and there are parents who
00:16:56
Speaker
can't understand why their little boy is the way he is, don't like it at all, think that they should take away his dolls and stop him from wanting to dress up in mum's jewellery and take him off to rugby and toughen him up.
00:17:11
Speaker
And those parents, I mean, it's the worst thing you can do, that's the way that you solidify the desire for the things this child actually wants. But that child is now ashamed, he still wants those things, but now he's ashamed. And then if that parent comes across the explanation that really this little boy is actually a girl, that can seem to some of them like, oh, that makes such sense, you know? And then you see it, especially with the little boys, the very little boys, they make such cute little girls, like when they grow their hair and
00:17:35
Speaker
Now they're an ideal flancy, like they always wanted to be. They're just the girliest, girliest, girliest girls. And no one's thinking, well, what happens when puberty comes along? But you've got this kid who maybe for three, four, five years has thought, like, it's completely forgotten that he's a boy, actually.
00:17:48
Speaker
This is particularly disconcerting when you see so many Hollywood celebrities that seem to have this desire or inclination to dress up 10 year old boys as girls. What's your future plan for this? Childhood and parenting and educational professionals, they're meant to be thinking about keeping things open, rolling clothes and things down for children.
00:18:13
Speaker
But parenting is always a balance between boundaries and freedom. And obviously every parent gets it wrong sometimes in those different ways to do it well. But roughly speaking, you're trying to give your children structure, safety, tell them what's right and wrong, set rules about things like bedtime, good behaviour, that sort of stuff. But also trying to open up as many doors for them as possible so that they can be the most authentic person that's possible for them to be.
00:18:42
Speaker
that they can find things they're passionate about. But we don't close things down, especially not close things down like we're making them sterile. Because the thing is, these little kids that they've presented to the world as members of the opposite sex, the only way out of this is puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones. And if you do puberty blockers early enough to basically stop puberty,
00:19:03
Speaker
and then go on cross-sex hormones, you won't ever become a fertile human being. You won't ever grow up to have adult fertility. So you're not just infertile. I mean, I was infertile, both my children are by IVF, and they are my husbands and my gannies, my eggs and his sperm. But that's infertility, and fertility is something that you could treat. Sterility means that you just don't even have the function. So they're creating sterile people. They're turning gay, healthy, fertile people into a sterile facsimile of the opposite sex.
00:19:33
Speaker
And when you face that, full on, and say it like that, you realise that what you're looking at is for who the medical scandal of the 21st century is. This is, I have to say, human rights abuse. It's such a minimising phrase, human rights abuse, for what's going on here and many other major human rights abuses too. You know, it's the sort of thing that we will be writing about in textbooks in 50 years' time and saying how did this ever happen.
00:19:57
Speaker
This insight is at the intersection of the two groups, this issue that I really struggled to get into the mind of, and that is parents and the doctors who enabled this.
Parents' Dilemma with Trans-Identifying Children
00:20:08
Speaker
Can we take them in turn? I've heard you talk about parents with respect to this issue as the Japanese soldiers in the Pacific after the war is over and they don't know it's over. And for that reason, you've said that this is part of the reason that makes this such a difficult social issue to try and move past. Can you expand on that for me?
00:20:26
Speaker
So the thing is that when a parent has a child come to them and say, mum, I'm trans, that child has already been self-radicalizing online. It doesn't come out of nowhere. They will have picked it up in school, but they will also have got it online. And unless they're very tiny, there are these tiny kids who just say, I was always meant to be a girl, I was always meant to be a girl. It's both basically boys. But the vast share of children now who identify as trans are fairly teens and it's mostly girls.
00:20:54
Speaker
So those girls have found this idea online and it's their equivalent of self harm andorexia, you know, the social contagions that teenage girls do seem to be prone to. But they'll also have learned a whole load of scripts and a whole load of rebuttals. And so they come preloaded.
00:21:10
Speaker
with, you know, my parents could be transphobes if they say anything that's not just brilliant. They hate me. Anyone who doesn't affirm my gender identity is genocidal and wants all trans people dead. Like they figure all this stuff and everything you say, it rolls off them as if they've been already indoctrinated into a cult and you don't know what to say. Like getting people out of cults is really hard because
00:21:32
Speaker
an effective cult has its believers feeling that the world is against them and that they already know the answer to anything likely that you might say and it's not a helpful answer. So that comes along to you as a parent and you have to decide what to do. You look into it. I know behind the scenes some parents have done this and have made both sorts of decisions.
00:21:56
Speaker
And you're open-minded at first. You've never heard of this. You didn't know about it. You probably think you're very liberal. You wouldn't mind having a gay child. Maybe you're a floating voter. It doesn't matter, whatever. But you're not prejudiced. You don't want to be prejudiced. You want to do the right thing by your child. And you find people like me, and people like me say, no child is close. This is a sociocultural category that's been invented and not for the benefit of children.
00:22:23
Speaker
And then you find other people saying, of course, trans has existed throughout history. Some people are trans, get over it, but also your child will kill themselves unless you go along with it. The weaponisation of suicide is perhaps the most wicked thing that the transgender lobby does. And you're going to have to decide. There's no openness. There's no way of just taking the middle road through. My boy is really a girl and no, my boy is really a boy or for a girl. And once you've decided, you are now all in.
00:22:51
Speaker
especially if you've decided to go along with social transition and their medical transition. Because it's not reversible, even the social transition isn't reversible. And so now you're going to have to not listen to people who disagree with you, who say anything that raises doubts in your mind, because the doubts are the most painful thing. So I mean, I'm thinking of a particular parent who did talk to me before deciding to transition his daughter, and who went ahead and did it. I don't think I'm the most evil person in the world who says the most horrific things about me.
00:23:21
Speaker
it's blocked me on social media, of course, but, you know, I mean, I don't know what he does, he just use an alt or something and he screen grabs things and then says horrific things about me, you know, he isn't the only one. And it's not because I don't talk about him at all, like I don't interact with him at all, but I am a standing approach. And by now, because this is a phenomenon more of middle class, well educated, white people,
00:23:45
Speaker
It is, like, it's very overwhelmingly the sort of people who work in politics, the media, multinational business, PR, you know, all the sort of influency-type professions. So, I mean, there's loads of people who have transitioned their children at, say, the BBC, there's some at the Guardian, there's some in pretty much any publication. And then those people, anything that you write that's in any way evidence-based, or even not just 100% pro-trans all the time,
00:24:12
Speaker
is an approach to them, so it makes it very difficult to cover it properly. It's one of the reasons, one of the big reasons, I think, why this issue has been so bad at coverage.
00:24:20
Speaker
This speaks to it being a culture-bound syndrome as opposed to necessarily a scientific phenomena. And it goes to a wonderful little clip between you and Peter Bogosian who's also been on Australiana. It was actually the catalyst for wanting me to speak to you because Peter Bogosian is one of the great brains in the world. And as you are speaking to him on this and see his brain being prodded and influenced and reshaped as he was initially believing to my way that I understand it that
00:24:48
Speaker
This is, in some respects, a culture-bound phenomena, but there are also some legitimate instances of trans-in inverted commas. You don't think there is any legitimate instance of trans-in inverted commas. You think that's entirely culture-bound. I mean, I don't even know what legitimate means. That's why I was struggling with it because I struggle with the wording here. I mean, people's feelings are legitimate and
00:25:11
Speaker
Culture-bound syndromes cause, you know, so to explain to people, culture-bound syndrome, even if we go back further than that, we used to talk about what a somatizing syndrome is. Basically, there's a lot of the unhappiness and illness that human beings suffer. It doesn't have a sort of a very obvious physical cause. It's not caused by, you know, an infection or a broken bone or something like that. It's caused by psychic dispersal relief, and then it manifests on your body. And that does not mean it's false or fake.
00:25:41
Speaker
people can die of these things. And a lot of it is always in your abdomen, because we've just got loads of squishy stuff. Between your shoulders and your groin, there's just a lot of squishy stuff and it's very hard to tell what's hurting. And if you think about it at any point, probably something's hurting there. There's just so much going on that if you focus on the midriff, you'll find that something's a bit uncomfortable. So people who are
00:26:03
Speaker
miserable for whatever reason, often feel it on their bodies. I mean, I had this when I was trying to decide what to do with the Economist. I had very bad stomach pains because I loved the place, I loved my job, but every day I felt I was doing the wrong thing.
00:26:18
Speaker
And so I kept getting awful stomach pains. And I promise you they were real stomach pains. But as soon as I stopped and left, they stopped. It's not illegitimate to have somatizing experiences. And so I don't say anyone who's had severe anxiety would be able to empathize with what you're saying and the feeling in the chest. And I mean, it can be in your breathing and another friend who was going through a lot of grief at work. And funnily enough, both her parents and her husband are people who are in psychological professions.
00:26:47
Speaker
And she was talking to me on the phone and she was saying, my migraines, my god, the headache every day I give them to work, I can barely see. And she said, this is ridiculous. Like, I know that this is what happens. And you sort of feel like because you know this is what happens, you should be able to stop it, but you can't. Anyway, that was a lengthy preamble to saying, it's not about legitimate or illegitimate.
00:27:05
Speaker
The point is that when people have these experiences that dis-ease, discomfort in their body, they're very real, but they're shaped by beliefs in your culture. So if you believe that women suffer from hysteria and that that's a wandering womb and that it comes up and it chokes them, women act like that.
00:27:23
Speaker
And the history of the two centuries in which we've had modern medicine, because that's all we've had doctors with any sort of moral authority for, doctors and patients co-create and co-shape the symptoms into a recognisable syndrome. And there's fascinating medical history on this, their syndromes come in and out of fashion. So I think it's absolutely unarguable now that most of what trans is, is a culturally armed syndrome. That said, that's mostly the teenagers.
Cultural and Historical Context of Trans Identities
00:27:50
Speaker
There probably always have been
00:27:52
Speaker
some people, basically men and boys, who have very, very, very strongly felt, spontaneously felt, the feeling that they're meant to be women and meant to be girls. Now for the little boys, that's overwhelmingly about them being people who are going to work gay. And for older men, it's more complicated. Like a man who in his 40s or 50s came out as a woman, anything up to about 10 years ago, that man was either a youngish gay man who had given up trying to butch up and decided that life would just be much easier as a woman.
00:28:22
Speaker
or he's a man who has a sexual fetish about an erotic fixation on the idea of himself as a woman. And the question is, can he be happy enough just by cross-dressing for a lot of purposes, or is he going to have to do it all the time to be happy? And they've made it the most difficult for all of the rest of us to incorporate, because the more they're fixated on this and the more it is not just about the clothes and it's about the body, the more they require everyone else to play along.
00:28:50
Speaker
And it isn't really everyone else, it's women. And 50 years ago, that man might have been happy dressing as a woman and then getting a job that only women really did, like secretary or a shop girl. But now that we have so far fewer demarcations between what's appropriate for many women, that man wants to do things that only women can do. And by now, there's nothing that only women can do except things where we need to keep all men out.
00:29:16
Speaker
That's change in women's rape crisis centres, domestic violence shelters, sports, toilets, you know. So for those men, becoming a woman means using things that only women can use. Straightaway means they trample on women's rights. And that's the central problem for me, is that these men have been legitimised by doctors.
00:29:37
Speaker
Like you said two things, you said the parents and you said the doctors, and I think you talked about the kids. But if you think what the doctors thought they were doing at first, because I talked to some of them, retired, retired doctors who were, you know, in the first wave of doing this seriously in the 1970s or so, they knew they weren't changing people's sex. Sometimes they'd even get people to sign in a piece of paper soon, but they understood they weren't even their sex changed.
00:30:01
Speaker
What they thought they were doing was taking very, very, very strange people with a really hard to treat, basically impossible to treat delusion.
00:30:12
Speaker
and making them a bit happier. And because there were so few of them, and basically because they're sexist, they didn't think what this meant for women. What the implicit and sometimes explicit promise they were making was, if you take testosterone, if you have your genitals operated on so you're no longer looking at your testicles, and you have this cavity that will make you look a bit like a vagina, and if you grow your hair long and you wear women's clothes, women will accept you as a woman. They'll let you into places that only women are allowed. But they never asked women.
00:30:40
Speaker
And then step by step, you know, now, certainly we don't require the surgery anymore. Very few trans-identified people actually have surgery on their genitals. We now have this idea that a man is a woman just by saying so, so now we're just totally physiologically normal men, we're just obviously men, feeling that they have the right to come into women's faces, and for them it's a neurotic fixation for some of them.
00:31:02
Speaker
These are not unintelligent people who are performing these operations. These are not unintelligent people who are advocating this quite the opposite. You would have seen, no doubt, a recent clip that's come out of Neil deGrasse Tyson with On Trigonometry, obviously an incredibly intelligent person, but it was shocking.
Intellectual Paradox in Trans Ideology Support
00:31:21
Speaker
We'll include the clip in the show notes. It is like bonkers to see someone who is obviously intelligent tying themselves in knots and getting incredibly angry, trying to defend
00:31:30
Speaker
a ludicrous position. And you can see Konstantin and Francis both just kind of going, this is surreal and bizarre. How has this captured not just so many institutions, but so many institutions that are meant to have so-called intelligent, well-educated, informed people, particularly in the sciences? I think the anger is very interesting. It was fascinating. I mean, you see, I'm not angry. And I have every reason to be angry.
00:31:58
Speaker
I mean, it's my rights that are being destroyed, not his. You know, I'm the one who has people following me down the street shouting, fuck, I'll enjoy something. When I was at the Economist, they would report me to my employer and try and get me to lose my job. And, you know, I'm the one who's under fire here. And yet I'm able to maintain a calm voice. And part of the reason for that is that I think I have a logical argument to make and I don't want to detract from that. Anger is what people do and they know very well. It's bluster.
00:32:27
Speaker
Now, I don't want to speculate about a person I don't know. So if I can just make a general point, which is that sometimes when people come out very strongly on this issue, they've got skin in the game. There's a family member or somebody else that they feel a personal loyalty to who basically requires them.
00:32:45
Speaker
to take a particular side. When people are in bad faith and they know they're making bad faith arguments on the wrong side, they shout, they storm out, they tell you you're a bigot, they do the you're as bad as Hitler sort of argument.
00:33:04
Speaker
But I also don't know his particular situation. He also said something that you hear a lot about. He didn't quite say it like this, but he was kind of saying man and woman are social roles. Like he was saying, he really seems to say that women would get breast implants to be more women. Now, I don't know if he's got a cognitive problem, actually. And I'm not trying to be funny here because most people can tell the sex of another person in instantaneously and they're not able to stop themselves from telling the sex of the other person. But some people are face blind.
00:33:34
Speaker
more of them are men than women. Men are also very good at telling the sex of people that it's less important to men than it is to women, so they're not as good as women. And sex recognition is actually male recognition. If you're wrong about whether a woman is a woman or a man, it's not dangerous, whether you're a woman or a man. If you're wrong and you think that a man is a woman, that's dangerous for both sexes, for a man because a man is somebody who might fight you, and for a woman because a man is somebody who might hit you or rape you.
00:34:01
Speaker
So it's possible, and this is just speculation, but I've looked at some men, not so much in the autographs types, and I thought, are you one of the tiny minority of people who can't tell people sex? Like, are you one of these blokes who sees long hair and tits and thinks female? I mean, some men are like that, as far as I can tell, because there are people, there are trans women, as in men who identify as women, who wouldn't pass to me, you know, on a dark night at the bottom of the covered hole for a second.
00:34:28
Speaker
And then there's other people saying, yeah, you know, it looks great. So so I do wonder if that's actually because I don't think the big tits make somebody look more like a woman. I mean, it's just ridiculous to me. And if he's not one of those people, then he's saying something enormously sexist. He's saying that
00:34:46
Speaker
performing femininity is what makes you a woman. And I mean, yes, women perform femininity. I'm a straight woman. I mean, I'm in my fifties now, but when I was in my teens and twenties and even my thirties, you know, I performed femininity because I'm straight and I want men to find me attractive. Women do, of course, do that.
00:35:01
Speaker
I don't think it made me look more or less like a woman. It made me look maybe more attractive, which is a different thing. I sometimes look at men and I think their definition of a woman is, would I father? And that's basically what he was saying, the bigger the tits, the more womanly she is. For God's sake, Nina, listen to yourself.
00:35:18
Speaker
I think this is something, I think this is what really angered a lot of people with that Dylan Mulvaney controversy and his ongoing kind of social media is whatever social media antiques. And that is not that people are transphobic, which is what some people said in response to people who got upset about Bud Light or Nike, but that it is the notion of this performative, almost erotic version of femininity.
00:35:45
Speaker
which is insulting and I think when you see the dances and the clips and all that sort of thing, I think it's that notion of performing as a woman, which again, I can't empathize with, but I imagine for women, must be incredibly insulting. Things if you want to do it, you want to do it. Women like dressing up to go out sometimes and so on. It's just not what makes you a woman. I don't know why, but I do know. The last thing I'll say about this is
00:36:13
Speaker
I was going to say a totally untrue thing, which is I don't know why people can't distinguish between just the bedrock biological reality of male and female, and then all the other things like your feelings, your performance, your appearance, on top of that. And the reason is, and this comes back to your initial question about intelligent people, our brains didn't evolve to be right. They evolved to give us an evolutionary advantage. I mean, that's just tautological. That's what evolution does.
00:36:40
Speaker
And if you think what gives people an evolutionary advantage, a lot of the time it's going along with their tribe. So whatever intellectual commitments Neil deGrasse Tyson and many other people have, it's to a group who have already prior commitments to what they call trans rights. And then what clever people do,
00:37:02
Speaker
when they need to find arguments for something in order to stay part of their tribe. Clever people are better at this than stupid people. They confabulate, they make reasons for themselves that sound plausible enough that they're able to believe them if they don't look carefully and they're very, very, very, very good at fooling themselves about what's going on because they've got brain power. So that's what I was watching about in order to blast Iceland. I was looking at a man who was
00:37:23
Speaker
incredibly effectively for himself because he's clever enough to be able to do it well. But of course to the rest of it's just transparent. Like if you don't have the same intellectual commitment or ideological commitment to the idea that trans women are women, you can see what he's doing. It's obvious, but he can't see it himself. And that's the purpose of it. He can't see the lie, which allows him to say the lie in a way he thinks is convincing, which allows him not to be cast out of his tribe.
00:37:47
Speaker
The obvious follow-up question to that, and we're entering the Pedagogian realm of epistemology here, is for people who do have those beliefs, is there any way of influencing them or persuading them to see your argument or to see rationality? I mean, a prior question to that is, do you even want to try to persuade them? I mean, most people still are not ideologically committed to this point of view. If you ask questions in language that people understand,
00:38:16
Speaker
most people do not think that trans women are women. The language is, of course, very deceptive, so you have to be very careful how you ask it. This is all about language. This is what also stuns me about this whole debate, is this is all about the control of words. Because it's an entirely linguistic phenomenon. The only way that you are trans is that you say you're trans, that's it. There's nothing else you're allowed to do. It isn't even about performing femininity anymore. As soon as you say, well, this bloke with a beard,
00:38:40
Speaker
you know, says he's a woman, like he's not even performing femininity. And then you get told, oh, you're policing the gender. Like you wouldn't blame a woman if she had long, you know, some women do grow beards, especially in menopause, you know, you get some sprout extra hairs every day. Like if I didn't pluck my chin hairs, am I not being a woman? You know, it's very bad faith that they're saying. So first they say, oh, it's a gender role. And then they say that people form their genders in different ways. So they've, it's like a ball and cup game, you know, the ball isn't anywhere.
00:39:09
Speaker
Do you want to persuade people who have become very ideologically committed to this position? If your aim is public policy, I think that's fairly much a waste of time because most people don't think that. I don't care what people believe. People believe all sorts of idiotic things that I don't believe. I don't care if there are people who believe in astrology or hominography. I'm not religious myself. I don't care what religions other people believe in. As long as we're able to keep a secular world order,
00:39:37
Speaker
in which those beliefs are private beliefs and they're not allowed to influence. I don't have to pay even lip service to them and they don't influence the world I live in. I don't want to go and live in a state like Saudi Arabia where some people's beliefs are imposed on everybody else. And that's what's happening now, of course, with the trans belief system. But if you personally do want to change somebody's mind, the two reasons I can think of that you might want to do that are one,
00:40:00
Speaker
Your political party has got captured, or your headteacher at your child's school has got captured on this issue. And the other one is that it's someone close to you, maybe your own child. You have a really difficult job and it would do you well to go and look at the literature on getting people out of cults because that's what you're going to have to do. Absolutely does not work to just present them as chapter and verse evidence.
00:40:23
Speaker
And as I already said, they probably have been freeloaded with rebuttals to everything which you can possibly think of saying. And in fact, you're just making them resist you more because you are going through the script that they've learned is the likely one.
00:40:37
Speaker
So I'm a parent who says something like, oh, darling, you're never even very boyish when you're little. Or, oh, but sweetheart, I mean, you know that you don't mind if you're a lesbian or something. They're saying things that that girl has already read, parents are allowed to say, and that they are the things that transphobes say. So you can't do that. There's a great book that's about to come out, I think. I don't think it's quite come out yet.
00:41:02
Speaker
It's by Stella O'Malley, Sasha Iad, and Lisa Marchiano. So three great therapists in different places, two in America and one in Ireland. And it's in kids' solo trains.
00:41:12
Speaker
And it's got great advice for parents who are put in this situation. I mean, to sum it up, open minded, curious, supportive of everything else in the child's life, tried to make gender less of an issue. Anything else the child likes doing, do that. And then advice for non parents, like I think Peter Bogosian is excellent on this. And he's even written a book co-authored a book on how to record impossible conversations on how to talk about things that
00:41:38
Speaker
royal people up to this extent. And it's things like, you know, ask questions rather than make statements. And if you can say to a child something like, you know, that's really interesting, what makes you think that? Or, huh, that sounds really tough to feel like that. And just let them speak. Or if you think there's something that you want to show them, ask if there's something they'd like to show you. Like listen more than you speak. And don't hector.
00:42:06
Speaker
And then more generally, if it's like a sibling or a friend that you're falling out of and they're saying, why are you falling out of them? Don't talk about it. If your sibling or friend isn't in a position of power on this subject, like they aren't running a school or a hospital or they aren't an elected politician, leave them half their beliefs. For God's sake, don't be bothering them about it. And then they might come back to you. I've heard now, by now I'm hearing quite a lot of people saying things like, I fell out of this friend three years ago over this and
00:42:32
Speaker
I got an email from a writer who was saying, you were right, I was saying this thing about sport. If you do have to try to persuade somebody, sport is good. But just say one or two sentences. Just say something like, God, you know, I saw this thing about girls having to compete against people who are born male. And it just seemed very unfair to me. And then shut up.
00:42:52
Speaker
I've got a pretty strong libertarian streak. I'm all for that line of thinking that says leave people to have silly beliefs if that's what they so choose. There are two caveats here. The one caveat is still a bit annoying. Like I chuckled when I heard you say this in a previous interview where you said, look, I'm a mathematician, right? Now for me, one plus one has to equal two and just putting up with this bullshit really annoys me. I accept that as a caveat, but still that is not in and of itself a good enough reason to stop people thinking a certain way. And I get that.
00:43:21
Speaker
What does become more problematic is when these views then infringe on your freedoms. And this brings us to your recent conversation with Jordan Peterson, which has now been censored by YouTube on the grounds of hate speech.
Censorship and Free Speech in Trans Debate
00:43:34
Speaker
I guess the first question is, do you know why that was censored? And then the second is, well broadly, what are your reflections on that? I mean, we don't know for sure. The email that was sent to Jordan, because it's his channel, so we brought it forward, but it's just saved.
00:43:47
Speaker
grounds of hate towards a protected group or something like that. We think, because I've had two conversations with Jordan and it's the first one, we think it's because we called Elliot Page and then Page and she her. So we referred to a woman as a woman. So the second conversation that I did with him, which I think was great, and we really enjoyed it, he didn't push it, he just put half an hour of it on YouTube.
00:44:08
Speaker
and the rest is available on other platforms, including Twitter and also on podcast platforms. So, I mean, we have to fight to be able to use our language in more ways than I realised when I started doing this. Like, I would always have said free speech was really important to me. So when you say free speech absolutist, people think that you mean you want to be able to say, you know, bring back slavery or, you know, cite, you know, Nazi talking points or something.
00:44:37
Speaker
I mean, I think those of us who call ourselves free speech absolutists rule out incitement to violence, attempting to overthrow the democratic order, and then the boring one of sharing copyrighted material. So within those very, very broad constraints, like about where the American First Amendment is, that's where I am. I mean, it's not just because
00:45:00
Speaker
I don't like being censored. I mean, I really don't like being censored. And it's not just because what I'm being censored about is a bloody medical scandal on human rights abuse, although that's a pretty good reason to not be censored. It's because I can't think when I can't speak. Like, if I have to call men women and women men and, you know, use she her for obvious males and so on, I just can't keep my head straight.
00:45:24
Speaker
So it's stopping me from actually thinking, and it's making me stupid about how to do that. And that, you know, I mean, the Neil deGrasse Tyson's a good example of this. People say such stupid things in this center. It's more stupid than they say on anything else. Like, you see all these people who on Twitter say things like, if you say something about toilets, they'll say, ah, but your toilet is at home with gender, and you're true, and you're like, oh, God almighty. I don't have strangers who are coming to the toilet at home. Like, how are you saying something that stupid? The answer is because they're not talking about it. We're stupid when we can't talk.
00:45:54
Speaker
So funny that you say that, you know, I mentioned in the intro that I really struggled writing some opening remarks to this interview and I'm usually relatively good at that and I quite enjoy it. And I was trying to think to myself, why is this so bloody hard? Like this, it is like this issue makes you stupid. I find absolutely bizarre. Uniquely, uniquely so. There is literally nothing else that is so hard to talk about and therefore nothing else that you're so stupid on. I mean, the last reason I would give for the
00:46:20
Speaker
enormous importance of using clear, sex-based language here is that you can't set, you can't write laws or set policies or have rules or regulations in which the language is barred from saying the thing that you need to distinguish. So, I mean, I'm thinking a lot about schools at the moment and about this, Kansas schools guidance that's meant to be coming out here in the UK, and it's been delayed several times.
00:46:44
Speaker
And the government seems from what's being leaked to have got itself to a place where it understands what the justification is for having single sex toilets, changing rooms, dormitories and sports in schools. But they're really hung up on this question of whether a child who's trans identified could insist that the school
00:47:00
Speaker
caused them by the opposite sex pronouns. This is another very, very, very clever bit of misdirection by the trans lobby, like this thing of my pronouns, my preferred pronouns, my pronouns are she, her. Pronones are things that other people use of you, and they use them just to describe what they see, but they also use them when they're explaining whether or not you can go into sex-separated spaces. So imagine you have a school that has a child, let's call this child Joseph, and Joseph now starts to identify as Josephine.
00:47:29
Speaker
Joseph comes in and he says, I'm Josephine Sheher. And where the government seems to have got itself is that the school has to say, oh, oh, hello, Josephine Sheher. We will tell all the teachers that you are Josephine Sheher. We will tell the other students that you're Josephine Sheher. We can't make anybody call you that because they also have free speech rights, unless you, for example, say you'll kill yourself otherwise, in which case we may decide that we're going to have to know. That's ridiculous in itself, because that's encouraging children to
00:47:56
Speaker
go for emotional blackmail. But by the way, Josephine, she hurt, you can't use the women's toilet, the girls toilets or the girls changing rooms and you can't play the girls sports. And Josephine says, Why? I'm a girl. And you're stuck saying that Josephine, you're the special sort of girl who can't do any of those things. What's that special sort of girl? Oh, a trans girl? Are you transphobic? So unless I can call Josephine a boy, I can't say why Josephine can't go into the girls faces.
00:48:22
Speaker
So it's really, really important that we hang on to the language that we need in order to save only women who go into women's faces, only men who go into men's faces. No man can play in women's sports. If I have to call those bloody men women, I've lost the argument.
00:48:37
Speaker
Hmm, this is really interesting. This reminds me of another conversation we did recently with Brendan O'Neill. His most recent book, the first chapter is memorably titled Per Penis, which he says is just such a sad, bizarre summary of the age in which we live. Yeah.
00:48:54
Speaker
But his thoughts on this, I thought were quite interesting and instructive and that he said something along the lines of, I initially went along with the whole pronouns game because I'm, you know, British and polite. But he said, the more I think about it, and this goes to what you just said, the more doing that enables a lot of the problems downstream that therefore lead to really practically harmful consequences. And I think that really resonated with me. You know, you see it in America at this point and, you know, they call like someone like E. Thomas, who was a man.
00:49:24
Speaker
who calls himself a woman. Now, I mean, if you're being polite, and if you're well educated, you might say Lea Thomas is a trans woman, she, her. But in America, the tendency now is to call Lea Thomas female, maybe trans female, but a trans female is a female who identifies as a male because female is not an identity. It's a biological reality. It's a category that it doesn't justify to humans. I mean, there are plants that are female and male, so they don't have identities at all. You know, they're
00:49:52
Speaker
They're tiny animals, like little spiders who are male and female. So it's just so stupid to call something like the autonomous trans female or female, but that is what has happened in America and that's what you start with.
00:50:03
Speaker
trans woman, she-her, then you get wife, woman, daughter, sister, mother, and then you're at female, and then, you know, you've got laws that were written about male and female people, which America does, for example, Type 9, which says that women in universities and colleges in America are allowed to have single-sex spaces of various sorts and must have women's sports. But this is now taken to apply to Leah Thomas, because Leah Thomas is now female.
00:50:34
Speaker
So you've just completely destroyed the entire law without changing one word of it, because you change the meaning of the words. And so I don't bully other people about their pronoun use, because part of my free speech position is that everyone has to decide how to speak. And also, I'm aware that almost nobody dives straight in at the not doing it, it's not playing along. They go in bit by bit. And if you scare them too much at first, they won't go in at all. But I myself will no longer call any man a woman.
00:51:03
Speaker
We've established pretty resoundingly that this is a culture-bound phenomenon, but that then opens up a door to a series of more uncomfortable questions. This also goes to a lot of the conversations I've been having recently. It says, if this is a culture-bound phenomenon, there must be problems inherent within our culture that is driving that.
00:51:24
Speaker
So, I've spoken about this with John Anderson, Pedagogyan, Constance Kisson, a lot of very intelligent people, and they point to a couple of things. They say, A, the decline in organised religion has created a vacuum, and that vacuum has been filled with some troubling alternative ideologies and moral frameworks. I understand you're not religious. I'm not particularly religious either, but I can understand the value of it in giving a type of belief, a framework for people to have their beliefs.
00:51:52
Speaker
Religion isn't going to make a comeback anytime soon. I think it's probably fair to say by very difficult, broad question, Helen, is if this is a culture-bound phenomena, if there are inherent problems within the culture, what would you identify them as being? Then maybe after that we can start thinking, what are some practical ways that we go about making improvements in that regard? It's a good question, and maybe my answers are going to be a bit underwhelming.
00:52:21
Speaker
something that's so broad. I mean I do see this as the long run outworkings of some trends that are largely or at least partly good, that brought us some good things, among them liberalism and individualism. So I don't want to go back to a communitarian world in which your future is entirely mapped out by the family that you came from and the class that you came from, the country you came from and so on. I think we gained a lot by allowing
00:52:50
Speaker
more people to, you know, go off to university or whatever. But I mean, you know, we've got to the point, there's nothing left. There's no real gains left on the individualism and liberalism front. And these very long run trends, they do the tendency to just keep going, like, you know, they've got a momentum of their own. And at some point, maybe somewhere around, you know, post-modernism, post-structuralism into queer theory, somewhere along that, I think some philosophers would say around Rousseau,
00:53:20
Speaker
even earlier, there's this idea that we're born perfect, and society ruins us or breaks us, and it does that by categorising us, by forcing us into an imperfect self, and that the perfect self is the free self, and that we are the self-made self, and that anything that's imposed upon us can only deform us. I mean, I just, you know, a conservative might very well be the, you know,
00:53:43
Speaker
the person who, by personality, feels exactly the opposite, that we're born evil, that we're people who have to be redeemed by hard work, by societal structures, by organised religion and so on. And I mean, you can see both of those having a purpose, but one of them has been allowed to spread and one of them has been very much shrunk in our culture. And so when you are at the point that you think that categories are oppressive,
00:54:09
Speaker
And some catacombs are oppressive. I don't want to be born into a religion that I can't leave. But I mean, for some people, it's not oppressive, it's supportive. It's the thing that gives their life structure and meaning, you know? But when you've gone past all of those and you arrive at the body, I mean, there are even people who say, state writing down that you're male or female at birth, but that categorization is oppressive. You know, you've arrived right at bedrock, fundamental physical reality. And you're seeing knowledge in that.
00:54:39
Speaker
So that's one. And then another one is some wrong terms that I understand why they were taken by feminists, but they are wrong terms. And that is the very understandable dislike that a lot of feminists have of any argument that says there's anything innate that's different between men and women other than just the raw fact of which sex impregnates and which sex gets pregnant.
00:55:03
Speaker
And I mean, you know, this isn't hard for me to repudiate because evolution is my organizing principle. And evolution doesn't leave vantage on the table. So for every mammal, everything about the mammal is organized to support either the female reproductive system or the male reproductive system. It's not just the reproductive systems themselves. Like everything about my body is organized for more than 200 million years of evolution, because that's, you know, they've been mammals for more than 200 million years. So for more than 200 million years,
00:55:33
Speaker
Mammals, bodies have been shaped as male or female. And the idea that that wouldn't affect everything about me is silly. To me. But a lot of feminists think that as soon as you say that, what you're saying is that women are
00:55:46
Speaker
the sorts of people who like, you know, picking up other people's socks. And I mean, whatever about women liking babies more than men, which I think is unarguably true and you can totally see why, but we don't like picking up other people's socks better. We don't like being the supporting actresses better than men do. So I have a lot of sympathy with the impulse to deny any differences between men and women other than the really, you know, grossly physical
00:56:09
Speaker
And then, you know, those feminists get themselves into real trouble when they say men are more violent. They talk about male violence. And then they say it's entirely culturally created. Well, every single culture that has ever been almost all violence has been male. I mean, my feeling is that male violence is a natural phenomenon that we have to punish severely in order to stop it. And the reason we have to punish it severely is because it's so natural. If it wasn't natural, we would just claim it out of people.
00:56:33
Speaker
But I don't feel that being a feminist means that you have to think these silly things, but unfortunately a lot of feminism has gone that direction.
00:56:41
Speaker
It's something which I find really difficult to grapple with with identity politics more broadly, and that is that so many of these identity politics trends are motivated out of the innate goodness of people, but they are then warped into ends, which then have very, very dangerous consequences.
Future of Trans Policy and Women's Rights
00:56:59
Speaker
That kind of leads me to my final question, and that is, where does this end? So it feels like recently
00:57:06
Speaker
have been some really promising developments. Felt like the closure of the Tavistock clinic in the UK was a really important moment in the UK. Where do you feel we're at, I guess, if we're looking at a trend line for this movement and where do you think this ends? Different places, different countries. I mean, yes, the Tavistock was a good moment, but I'm sorry to say that the four replacement clinics may be as bad or worse because there's four of them and they'll be less crucial in each of the results. Clinicians who worked at the Tavistock
00:57:34
Speaker
are applying for jobs at them, the NHS spec for them is not as clear as it could be. This ideology has gained such a hold that it's now as if you have, you know, Japanese knot weed or bind weed in your garden.
00:57:48
Speaker
And it takes a long time to eradicate that sort of thing. And you can't just do it by pulling things up and then walking away. You've got to pull it up and keep going back and keep pulling it out. So I think there's an awful lot of work to be done in getting rid of. Deradicalising the organisations that have put this in and their HR policies and their service specs. We've got a lot of charities now who are entirely devoted to destroying the idea of sex and law and policy as their modus operandi and as their reason for being.
00:58:15
Speaker
So they are going to keep going. There's just an enormous momentum behind what you might call sex denialism. I think we will probably win here in the UK because the legal framework is pretty supportive of sex-based rights. It's a supple, mostly well-written, well-organised legal framework that has been very badly misrepresented by the lobby groups. But we can use the legal framework to fight back against the overreach. It's going to take a long time.
00:58:41
Speaker
I think it's quite possible that in America you will see a rupture between red and blue states. And this could end up being another bit of American exceptionalism. So, I mean, America is a country that seems uniquely poor among developed, established democracies at solving really difficult policy questions in a way that gains the most important thing in a democracy, which is loser's consent.
00:59:09
Speaker
loses consent is the idea that when you lose an election or you lose a policy argument, you'll accept that at least the process for reaching that position was legitimate. So I think most people in the UK would feel
00:59:23
Speaker
Even if they're anti-abortion, they understand that it was debated in Parliament and there's a law and it's settled. Even if they're anti-gay marriage, they understand that they're in the minority and that they lost since they had to get over it. In the US, these problems don't get solved in the legislature very well. And that's why America has such problems with guns.
00:59:42
Speaker
That's why it has such problems with incredibly expensive pharmaceutical and health care. And, you know, as the other ones I would say, abortion is the other obvious one. And all three of those, I'm not saying they're perfect anywhere else, but there's a democratic settlement. And there isn't a democratic settlement in America on those. And at some point, you've painted yourself into a corner and you can't have a democratic settlement on it. You know, arguably, there are just too many guns now in America to do what every other developed country did, which is to mostly bomb guns.
01:00:11
Speaker
And the healthcare is so expensive that the lobby groups are so powerful that you can never get yourself to a place that you can just organize healthcare in a more usable way. And we've seen what happens with abortion where there was no loser's consent. The people who disagree with abortion felt rightly on my opinion, by the way, that it was allowed, was not legitimate. They never accepted that they lost. So we could end up with this on sex-based rights in America. It could be that America just doesn't solve this.
01:00:41
Speaker
And the trouble is that if you don't solve this democratically, it benefits one side and not the other. If you can't say what the two sexes are, then you don't have sex-based rights and separated spaces. So the other side's one. And it could just be like that. It could be that women in America under without the right to women's sports, women's changing rooms, women's homeless shelters, et cetera, et cetera. And that's just too bad.
01:01:10
Speaker
And the longer it goes on for, the more people are invested in keeping it that way, the more men have presented themselves as women, the more they've got themselves into positions where that's absolutely vital to them, and they become then the roadblock to fixing it.
01:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's something which I'm very worried about in Australia as well. Gender Self ID has infiltrated our Sex Discrimination Act. There's a, there's going to be a landmark case, Giggle V Tickle, Farsi Queen. Yes, well I guess, I know about this case, yeah. And we've spoken to Sal on this podcast as well, and that's going to be next year, and that will have an immense impact on how this issue is considered from a legal perspective in Australia. You have to win it as fast as you can, because every person who takes advantage of self-ID laws to get
01:01:51
Speaker
a document that says they're the sex they're not, or they have no sex, that person probably would be grandfathered in if you try and change the law again. And with some justification will feel hard done by if you then start to reassert sex-based rights. I mean, imagine you're one of these blokes and you've got your cock chopped off because you were promised that that would allow you to go into women's faces in sports and so on. And then, you know, five years later, they'll say, sorry, no, thanks. My God, have you ever been sold a bill of goods?
01:02:21
Speaker
So I can totally see why those men are enormously enraged by it. I can't stop fighting them, but the more of those men there are, the harder it is for us to get back to where we are, where we need to be.
01:02:33
Speaker
Well, that is in essence why it is so important that you are having these types of conversations, Helen. It's why your book is so important in this debate and why I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone that is listening. I was slightly intimidated going to this conversation because I've seen you have conversations with some of the world's best thinkers and run rings around them intellectually. It's quite impressive to watch.
01:02:55
Speaker
Please keep doing what you're doing because, as I said, it takes both a great deal of intellectual clarity and logical thinking, which you have in spades, but a great deal of courage as well. So it makes you, I think, one of the really impressive figures of our time. Thank you very much for your time and for doing what you're doing.
01:03:13
Speaker
Oh, thank you. That was a very embarrassing closing, but anyway, fine. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.