Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights. Helen Joyce talking to Julie Bindel.
Today Oxford Literary Festival held a historic event. This was the first time that any literary festival dared to present a discussion of Helen Joyce's book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, despite it being named as a Times, Spectator and Observer book of the year in 2021.
So controversial was the topic considered that Joyce, formerly a journalist working for The Economist, found it difficult to get an agent to handle it and almost impossible to find a publisher. When they said "controversial" what all these professionals really meant was that they were scared of the bullying tactics used by trans-activists against for instance, J.K.Rowling and Kathleen Stock. Though small in numbers, TRAs are aggressive, well-funded and ruthless in organising boycotts, demanding censorship and resorting to lawfare to silence anyone who refuses to toe their line.
Joyce soon found herself out of a job because of these gangster tactics, and today she was talking to the veteran feminist campaigner Julie Bindel, who has also run the gauntlet of hostility and unpopularity for being a terf. A lifelong socialist, she has been driven to publishing her recent articles in the Daily Telegraph, because the leftwing and liberal press dumped her.
Joyce wrote her book because in her work as a journalist she noticed that gender ideology and self-ID were creeping in and nobody was questioning or even discussing this. Employers were expecting people to add pronouns to their signatures and some of these pronouns looked rather odd. Institutions and organizations were replacing "sex" with "gender". Celebs were parading their "trans" children. Police were trans.
To take on "trans" was to take on the entire establishment.
Joyce wanted to ask questions such as, why is this ideology regarded as progress? Who is impacted by it and how? Are the claims made by gender ideologues (such as that sex is not binary) scientifically accurate, or even consistent with each other? (Answers, No, and No). Are gender-affirming drugs and surgeries safe, beneficial and thoroughly tested? (No) Can children be "born in the wrong body"? (No) Who is promulgating this ideology and who is profiting from it? (Big Pharma).
The fact that gender ideology affects women in multiple ways was attested by the fact that the majority of people attending this event were women. It infringes our rights, our safety and even erases our identity. It also poses a serious danger to vulnerable children and teenagers, who are being offered "trans" as a fix for a range of problems and conditions, which it does not fix. Far from it. Today the atmosphere in the Sheldonian was buoyant, and both Joyce and Bindel got a standing ovation. There was a sense that, after a bitter struggle, the tide has turned and reason can actually win.
Joyce now works for "Sex Matters", the charity founded by Maya Forstater, the prominent terf whose lengthy legal battle to get her job back, although stressful for her, eventually succeeded in establishing the right to be "gender critical" in the UK. It was a legal landmark. She was here today, spoke on the topic of the GRA and got a round of applause.
Hatchet-faced gender bore Judith Butler has just brought out a book entitled Who's Afraid of Gender? The title is a taunt, suggesting that disagreement is based on pusillanimity. In fact it's the gender advocates who reveal fear by banning books and taking aggressive steps against the opposition. I don't think the people who packed out the Sheldonian today were afraid, just fed up with all the gender nonsense. When a hospital requests to know your sex, it is needed to ascertain what organs you have, what illnesses you can suffer from and whether you can get pregnant. Your "gender" tells them none of these things, and is therefore irrelevant. When a sports event divides contestants on grounds of sex, it does so because of the many advantages men have over women in everything from lung size to bone density. To divide them by "gender" is pointless, unless of course you are a mediocre man seeking to win by competing against females. When a dating app asks for people's sex, it is so that participants know what body type and organs any potential partner will have. To divide them by "gender" provides no such useful information.
Gender role was something feminists discussed intensively in the 1970s. But they didn't pretend sex didn't exist. To do so is tiresome, pretentious nonsense that many academics seem to have resorted to in order to find something to say in a business often dominated by sterile verbosity. Replacing sex with "gender" is a switch from meaningful discourse to unmeaningful jargon.
I am going to take Helen Joyce up on one thing. She said that many other people "should have written" her book. Well, some of us did, or something very like it. I was one of more than a dozen co-authors of The New Normal: The Transgender Agenda, which appeared in 2018.
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Normal-Transgender-Agenda/dp/0995683255 ]
If she reads it, she will find that the contributors are experts in a wide range of fields.
Oxford Literary Festival has been scrupulously fair in handling this fiercely contested topic. The organizers ignored attempts to get the event cancelled. A few authors withdrew, probably more out of fear than conviction, but the organizers did not allow this to influence them. Many trans advocates were invited to debate with Joyce but all refused to taint themselves by appearing on the same platform. It's almost as if they're the ones who are scared.
Eventually one trans person agreed to appear in a separate event later in the festival. Anybody who wants to go to it can do so.
You can buy Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality at leading bookshops such as Blackwells.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9780861543724?src=1389975603&isbn=9780861543724
Julie Bindel is the author of Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation. (London: Constable & Robinson).
