Trans When Ideology Meets Reality My conversation with Helen Joyce 1080p 25fps VP9 160kbit Opus
Summary
TLDREste video presenta una conversación profunda entre el anfitrión y Helen Joyce, autora del libro 'Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality'. Joyce discute la realidad de los sexos biológicos y cómo la ideología transgénero está en conflicto con esta, afectando espacios seguros para mujeres, la participación en deportes y la protección de los derechos de los homosexuales. A través de historias personales y análisis, el video explora temas como la identidad de género, los derechos de las mujeres y la libertad de expresión, resaltando la importancia de enfrentarse a la ideología con hechos y la realidad científica.
Takeaways
- 🔍 La creencia en la realidad y la ciencia como contrapunto a la ideología trans está en el centro de la discusión.
- 📚 Helen Joyce destaca por su libro 'Trans, cuando la ideología se encuentra con la realidad', que examina críticamente la ideología trans.
- 🧪 La biología y la ciencia se presentan como fundamentales para comprender la realidad del sexo biológico, enfatizando su naturaleza binaria.
- 👥 La transición de género, especialmente en niños y adolescentes, se cuestiona por sus implicaciones permanentes y la presión social asociada.
- 🏳️🌈 La distorsión del lenguaje y la identidad de género es un tema recurrente, cuestionando la afirmación de género basada únicamente en la autodeclaración.
- 📖 Otros libros recomendados incluyen 'Daño Irreversible' de Abigail Shrier y 'Material Girls' de Kathleen Stock, que exploran aspectos similares de la ideología de género.
- 🤔 El cuestionamiento y la búsqueda de respuestas sobre las causas y efectos de la ideología trans resaltan la complejidad del tema.
- ⚖️ La discusión sobre espacios segregados por sexo, deportes y derechos de las mujeres subraya la tensión entre los derechos trans y los derechos de las mujeres.
- 🎓 La experiencia de Maya Forstater, quien perdió su trabajo por expresar creencias sobre el sexo biológico, ejemplifica las consecuencias sociales de cuestionar la ideología trans.
- 🛡️ 'Sex Matters', la organización cofundada por Maya Forstater, lucha por el reconocimiento de la realidad del sexo y contra la imposición de la ideología de género en la sociedad.
Q & A
¿Qué libro escribió Helen Joyce que se menciona en la conversación?
-Helen Joyce escribió el libro 'Trans, when ideology meets reality'.
¿Cuál es la profesión actual de Helen Joyce mencionada en el diálogo?
-Helen Joyce trabaja para una organización de defensa llamada Sex Matters.
¿Qué tema central aborda el libro de Helen Joyce?
-El libro aborda el conflicto entre la ideología de género y la realidad biológica del sexo.
¿Cuál es la postura de Helen Joyce sobre la realidad del sexo?
-Helen Joyce sostiene que el sexo es una categoría binaria y clara, basada en la biología y no sujeta a la autoidentificación personal.
¿Qué argumento utiliza Helen Joyce para explicar la diferencia entre sexo y género?
-Helen Joyce argumenta que el sexo está determinado biológicamente y es binario, mientras que el género se refiere a roles y expresiones culturales, que pueden variar y ser más fluidos.
¿Cuál es la crítica de Helen Joyce hacia la autoidentificación de género?
-Critica que la autoidentificación de género ignora las realidades biológicas del sexo y puede tener consecuencias negativas en espacios segregados por sexo, como los deportes y baños públicos.
¿Qué caso específico se menciona en el diálogo que ilustra la lucha por el reconocimiento del sexo biológico?
-Se menciona el caso de Maya Forstater, quien perdió su trabajo por expresar creencias sobre la inmutabilidad del sexo biológico y luego ganó un caso de apelación que estableció un precedente legal.
¿Qué efecto tiene la política de identidad de género en los niños según la discusión?
-Según la discusión, la política de identidad de género puede confundir a los niños sobre su sexo y género, llevándolos a decisiones prematuras sobre su identidad que pueden incluir intervenciones médicas irreversibles.
¿Cómo describe Helen Joyce el impacto de las políticas de identidad de género en los espacios femeninos?
-Describe que estas políticas están erosionando espacios seguros diseñados para mujeres, como baños y vestuarios, al permitir el acceso basado en la identidad de género en lugar del sexo biológico.
¿Cuál es la visión de Helen Joyce sobre la solución al conflicto entre la ideología de género y la realidad del sexo?
-Helen Joyce aboga por un enfoque basado en la realidad biológica y la protección de espacios seguros para mujeres y niñas, manteniendo el respeto y la dignidad para todas las personas, independientemente de su identidad de género.
Outlines
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Mindmap
Keywords
💡Realidad
💡Ideología
💡Sexo
💡Transgénero
💡Identidad de género
💡Derechos de las mujeres
💡Espacios de un solo sexo
💡Autoidentificación de género
💡Deporte femenino
💡Libertad de expresión
Highlights
Introduction to the concept of the 'religion of reality' by a guest, highlighting the conflict between science, reality, and certain oppositions.
Helen Joyce discusses her background, from aspiring dancer to PhD in mathematics, and her transition to journalism and advocacy.
The inspiration behind Helen Joyce's book 'Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality' and the complexities of gender identity.
Discussion on the binary nature of sex and its clear distinction from the continuum of other human characteristics.
Exploration of the distortion of language in the context of gender identity and its implications on society.
Highlighting the opposition faced by those questioning gender self-identification policies and the labeling of such inquiries as bigotry.
Insights into the psychological and societal impacts of gender identity issues on children and adolescents.
The phenomenon of peer pressure among young people to identify as gay or trans to fit in, and the questioning of one's sexual orientation.
The role of teachers and educational materials in promoting gender identity exploration among young children.
Critical examination of the concept of gender self-identification and its impact on women's spaces and rights.
Personal stories of detransitioners and the consequences of medical interventions on gender dysphoric youth.
Discussion on the evolutionary and biological significance of sex, challenging the narrative of gender fluidity.
Examination of the legal and social pressures to conform to the dominant gender identity ideology.
The controversial inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports and its fairness.
The struggle of maintaining a rational discourse on sex and gender identity amidst accusations of bigotry and political polarization.
The foundation and purpose of the advocacy organization Sex Matters, co-founded by Maya Forstater.
Transcripts
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, uh, 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.
There's a character in a a Kingsley Amis 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,
um, that's a typical trope of television to 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 2 years,
realized that wasn't a great idea and went and did a a degree in maths in Trinity College Dublin.
And I stayed and did my master's in Cambridge and my PhD in maths at UCL in London, and then
spent 3 years doing post doc 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 is trans? And I said, I have no idea. Shall 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 3 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 they're evolved categories. And I had to bin 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, um, 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. The one thing that isn't is sex. I mean sex really is binary.
There's no question about it. You're either male or female and it's absolutely clear. You can do it
on gamete size. 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 that seems to me to be a strange distortion of language because we language
is useful as something to express your thoughts clearly. And so I'm bewildered by it, and I was
fascinated to read your book and and I learned tremendous lot from it. While I'm about it,
I could recommend a couple of other books. Irreversible damage by Abigail Shrier,
um, about the particularly focusing on young girls and how they get misled. And this one,
Material Girls by Kathleen Stocker, I've I've listened to this on audio,
so I don't have a physical copy of the book. So I printed out because I got a cover
of it. 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 5 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. 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, isn't it? 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 is called that is that Germaine 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. Know, female people are their own category.
Female and male are actually very profound categories. They're
profound biological evolved categories. Well, evolutionarily, they have to be.
That's a 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. Yes. 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 a uterus popped in and no penis. But so it was the only sense in which
a man can 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 2 or 3 century move towards seeing categories and classification as inherently
oppressive. So people think, you know, 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, ev evolutionary
biology. I mean that they 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, uh, 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, uh, you know, 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 2 sexes and the sex that
you are is 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. Let's not let that stop
her doing anything. She could be an astronaut. She could be president. Well, I
mean, I think we were all sort of when I I was brought up to think that you could
do whatever you wanted to. You you have the power to to to, as you said, be an astronaut,
be be whatever you damn will 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 poofter, 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, uh, 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 a 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 sissy 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'm just very upset to see evidence from your book and others that teachers and doctors perhaps
are latching onto a child who's expresses the slightest doubt about this, and then it affirms
them as being the opposite gender to their sex. I mean, it's worse than that they latch onto it.
They suggest sell it. Yes.
You know, these books for 2 and 3 and 5 year olds say you must examine your gender.
I've got here a quote from a 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,
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 myself in any permanent way,
in my opinion. She was a very bright girl. She's actually written books,
uh, about about science for for children. I was very, very impressive, and I was
really depressed to read her letter that that there there is peer pressure and even teacher
pressure 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, 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, um, 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.
We're guest? Guest, guest. We're
waiting for you. Wait a
minute. They guessed your sex. You you had a penis and yet they guessed.
Yeah. They so they often doctor. 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 0.2%. 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. Yeah. 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 in regard, or something else in between? And then and then stars come behind them 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 do you meant to make of this if
you're 8? Like Right. First off, that you're very boring if you think that 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. Somewhere in your book, there's a a
story about a a mother who said who had 8 children, and she said, and not a single
one of them is boring sis. Is that is that what what she said? So so cis is this very new coinage
that's, uh, with by analogy with trans. Yes. Because what they don't want is you saying, you
know, real women and trans women, or normal women and trans women, or actual women and trans women.
They want there to be 2 types of women, so they need asymmetric words to trans, and that is cis.
Cis. Yeah. On the same side of.
Yes. And so this, uh, this woman, I found this
quote in an enclosed 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 is 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 4. I'm learning so much from her. Sorry. Um, I forget forgotten which way
around of 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 in 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 bomb, that is what, um,
religious cults do. Uh, they they love bomb is the phrase I 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 whatever the thing is,
and you are just gonna get piled on and you will get kicked out. Yeah. 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
20 or 21, you've missed your opportunity. Your own sex organs are not going to grow.
You are 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.
Save her. So 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 minors 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,
even disorders. So that's there anyway, and they're depressed anyway or or Yes. Or bulimic or
or something like that. 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 re reinvent yourself,
you know, you're like a phoenix, you'll rise from the ashes a new person, all your problems will
be left behind. So, yes, though 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 will decrease that risk. Yes. So so it does seem like terrible emotional
blackmail. People like you who are standing up about this, mostly women, I suppose, are getting
an awful lot of persecution. Um, I think you're very brave. And and, um, JK Rowling's very brave.
Kathleen Stock's very brave. Maya Forstater is very brave. Is that
how you pronounce it? Yes. It is. Yes. What gives you the courage?
I mean, that's I don't want to answer for anybody else, although I work with Maya daily,
so I sort of see where she comes from in it. And I know Kathleen and I've met Jo Rowling. Uh, it's my
privilege to have met her. In my case, I was lucky to work somewhere that has a very collegiate and,
uh, 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. Yeah. So far, I was stacked and blurred that there was
no way back. You know? Like, I 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 something very bad was happening. And, you know,
all the people who think that something very bad has happened, they'll pick a different bit of it.
They'll say it's about free speech or it's about women's rights or 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 detransitioners were speaking,
and this would have been, I think, late 2019. And I found it a profoundly upsetting event.
So at this one in particular, there were 6 young women. Of course, there are boys who
transition and detransition too, but this was 6 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 nonconformity
into thinking they must be boys, and they had gone various stages down the medical pathway.
And one of them who 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 and was
on testosterone. She had no breasts, no uterus, no ovaries. She had a beard. Her hair was receding.
And by 23, when she still wasn't feeling any better, when 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 turn me into an Anne? 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 nonconforming 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, uh, the
great majority of the children they see are same sex attracted. There's a strong statistic there.
Been perfectly happy Yes. Going up as Yes. So we are turning potentially healthy gay
adults into sterile straight simulacra of the opposite sex.
And one of the points you make, I think, is that that there are certain parents who would rather
have a trans child than a gay child and Yes.
Is is that part of the motivation? Yeah. And I don't think it's always
stated upfront Um, 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 as 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? We knew this already in about 2000.
The research had been done. The the the the papers have been examined. We know that the gender
nonconformity comes first in these kids, and the gender dysphoria, the distress, is a result of the
gender nonconformity 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 with 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. Whereas in in the
past, we would have just said, well, well, she she's a tomboy and and and you know?
Well, with a girl, you would have. Poor old boys. The boys, they tried to straighten them out.
Yes. Yes. Horrible. Yes. But the girls was much easier. You just
let them out, tell them to climb some trees, and Yes.
You know, look back when they're 16. Yes. Um, I'm perfectly happy to, um,
address a trans person by their preferred name and prefers preferred pronouns. I think it's
just a matter of politeness really. Um, what I object to is the insistence that
I am a woman. I mean you're not a woman. You're you're I'm perfectly prepared to
call you she if you if you if you like, and call 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 hard line 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 it happens to me less now, but 2 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 un, uh, unjustifiable differences between the
sexes and the way we treat people now. Yeah. Uh, we've 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 a in a 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. Luckily, I'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 selling
the thing. Yeah. For me, it is. Do you make a distinction between people who've gone
through the ordeal of surgery and and and being castrated or whatever and and having their breasts
removed or whatever, and people who just simply stand up and say, I am a woman or I am a man. Um,
it it does seem to me that there's also a sense you sort of paid your dues if
you've if you've if you've subjected yourself to I mean, you're you're really serious about it.
You're really earnest about it. You're not just 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, uh, adjudicated on now in several courts is that you can't make something
conditional on getting yourself sterilized because it's human rights abuse 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. You are inducing people to go through a really horrific surgery that is and to give
up Oh, yes. Or something. Yeah. 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 I know like, to the other people
around them. You know? Yes. If you come into a women's space, who have you paid your dues
to, like, just sterilized? Is the wrong phrase, but but but No.
I heard it before. You've shown you're you're serious
about it. You've showed you've shown that you're, I mean, somebody who let let's talk about sports
for for a moment. Somebody who who's who's a 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.
That seems to me to be unserious. You're you're just saying you're 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, actually. But but but there there's a sort of feeling
that he really means it. He 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 eighteens, over 30 fives, Paralympians, flyweights.
Yeah. 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, you know, put yourself through
all the all the the it's really rather a hard craft to become an astronaut. You've proved
you're serious about it. But I've also become an
astronaut. So that's the thing. You might not become you might be
not good enough to become an astronaut, but you you tried. Then I would not be an astronaut. No.
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 forties
and older. Yes. 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.
Uh, 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 to us. If there's if we're going to have separate
female, um, athletic competitions at all, then then Yeah. It doesn't
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, and you and
you go in for for everything. And then, as you say, um, women wouldn't wouldn't win
Anything. Yes. Maybe gymnastics. But but 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 in these days. Yes. Okay. Um, there's a lot in your book
about changing rooms, so we better we better talk about that. 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 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 half 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 2 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 urinary leash, 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, men don't. You're quite vulnerable when you're weeing. And so women in
the Victorian era, like, would have to always be able be aware that there was somewhere they could
go to wee. Otherwise, they could get assaulted. And it was the it was the factory girls, actually,
who campaigned for the first public toilets. Because they were they were getting sexually
assaulted if they tried to weed 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 6, 7, 8, 9, and you want to send her to the toilet,
you want to be able to pop her into the women's loos and know that there's only
women in there. Because she's really at risk, actually, if it's a mixed sex space.
Then there's Muslim women. And there's women who have been raped who are who are survivors
of sexual assault and who can have really serious flashbacks in enclosed spaces 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 Forstater now, 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 calls himself a woman who's now using the changing room.
And I've never told anybody. I'm in my fifties 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 play a full part in public life.
You were telling me, uh, before we started, uh, so I didn't know that competitive swimmers,
but Olympic types swimmers, have to wiggle into their streamline swimsuits. And so they don't
just sort of quickly put put it on 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 sport, who were men. So Laurel Hubbard was the big example at the time, who's a
weightlifter, a New Zealand weightlifter, a man in his forties. But in between the hardback and the
paperback, along came Leah or Will Thomas, who's a young man who's 6 foot 4, 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 the sort of they they're compression suits that, like, just make you very, um,
cut cut through the water fast. And it's 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 suit when you're doing your warm up. And there's dozens of events, you know, all the
different lengths and strokes. And there may be 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
suit, you go out, you do your warm up, you come back and you 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 wriggle 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 6 foot 4 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. Riley Gaines, who's the one of them who's spoken out 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 that they'll be referred for counseling, the women of the university,
uh, that where where, um, Leah Thomas is I think it's University of Pennsylvania. The
girl's on his own team, because they complained anonymously, and they 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 I realize there are 2 different points of view here,
but how has one side managed to kind of capture the dominant dialogue really, the dominant half
of the dialogue. Yeah. And and constantly, it comes up that you've if you dissent from that,
you're called a bigot. And so people don't want to dissent because dissent and so I
don't want to call it cowardice, but but, um, we it it's it's pardonable, cowardice,
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 does all the bullying go one way?
I 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 of you Only way in which he can keep the fiction going.
Why does he have these betters than accomplices who 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 5th 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,
force solely. But in America, it's so polarized that they're really very specific packages.
And if you want not to take the the opinion that gender identity trumps sex, then you're a
Republican. Have to be a conservative Christian. You have to be anti abortion. You have to think
that women belong at the kitchen. You know? And so if you don't want those things,
well, you've gotta 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. Um, which one was it?
The the one where you go back in the the tree of life backwards, quite thick one.
Oh, The Ancestor's 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. Yeah. 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, 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 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 believed when it was first sent to the museum. You know that?
Well, exactly. So this is a platypus in a way. Yes. Is there is there a tension
between when we the LGBT? Yes. 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 tea 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 in the American way of thinking,
there is the, you know, the white supremacist, the the cis het 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 cishet. Yes.
Meaning cis and heteronorm heterosexual. On the other hand, if you actually just
think that LGB is a shorthand for people who aren't heterosexual, like people who 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 tea doing in there? Yeah. Like, tea tea is an identity.
It's not a sexuality. And more than that, tea 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 is tension lesbians
do feel threatened, I think, don't don't they? Absolutely. Yes. I mean, you could it 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
gonna have much success when they get older. It's not gonna 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.
Yes. One thing that really pisses me off, it it it came up a moment ago, is that is that, um,
I've been politically on the left all my life, and I find myself now being blamed. Somehow, it well,
I 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
they often think it is. I mean, 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 it is often said that it's an American thing to say.
It's because of the American polarization, and it's partly Americanization
that I'm said that. That's American. Oh, it gets said to us too. I mean,
I get told I'm funded by the Heritage Foundation, you know, I'm getting money from shadowy right
wing American groups. I'm not, you know, it's it's a joke among the women my you know, that
I work with. You know, People always say, have you got any of your far right money yet? Like,
this must be stuck in the post, you know. No, we haven't. We don't get funding from
them. It is very irritating, and I I suppose I find it less irritating because I never thought
of myself as either left or right wing. Mhmm. 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 I've voted for every party,
every every one of the 3 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 indifferent things as far as I'm concerned.
Lots of Brexiteers, lots of anti vaxxers, uh, lots of evangelical Christians, people who
have had some formative experience like, I think probably, used to King 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 I do see a lot of very varied people
who have already experienced being cast out. Right. Well, we'd probably better better come
to a close. Would you like to tell us a bit about your organization, Sex Matters, as we as we close?
Sure. So anyone who's read my book will have met Maya Forstater, who is the person
I shaped the chapter about Britain, otherwise known as TERF Island, around TERF 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. We we we won't won't hear that.
So Maya worked for she was a specialist in tax, international tax flows and development,
and she worked for a think tank 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 how gender self ID
destroys the basis 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. Yeah. Like everything else.
Yeah. Yeah. We live in America now, all of us. They complained and said she was transphobic, and
to cut a long story short, she lost her job. So she went to the employment tribunal, and she lost,
a bit about what 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 2 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 deserved to lose her job. And, I mean, the way that the law was written,
it's not just deserve 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 to ever employ
her anywhere, provide her with any services because this is the law that protects us
against discrimination in employment and the in in 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 I knew Maya by this point, and she's a
very brave woman and very, very dog doggeared. 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 the belief that sex is binary, immutable,
and that matters is a protected belief in UK employment and provision services. Precedent.
Yes. That precedent is set. So now in a workplace, if you say, I think we need to have men's and
women's toilets because there are 2 sexes and women need them, they can't say, you're bigots.
Okay. I I just found in in your book the 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 she name philosophers who agreed with her? I couldn't remember why philosophers.
What have they got to do with this? Biologists, you want to ask. 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 say that at which at which the room packed with women's support erupted
in laughter. I'm not surprised it erupted in laughter. And then after all of that,
judge Taylor said that, 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 her barrister, Anya 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 to power and sexuality. Bothers me most, I must say.
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.
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