What's Causing the Trans Explosion？ - Helen Joyce
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per minute
206.83638
Harmful content
Misogyny
56
sentences flagged
Toxicity
69
sentences flagged
Hate speech
94
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Summary
Helen Joyce is the Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters and the author of Trans, a brilliant book that we do have, but because it's in a box somewhere in the new studio, it is in a box somewhere . We wanted to have Helen Joyce on the show because, as you know, we have had many, many people on this show to talk about this issue, and we have been keen to have her on for a very long time.
Transcript
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One of them was 23 and she had been very severely bulimic in her teenage years
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and had been hospitalised a few times because she was going to die otherwise.
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And then when she was 18 she unfortunately looked up online
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if it was possible to get your breasts removed without having breast cancer
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And a week later she had decided that she was a trans man.
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And when she went to a gender clinic, the therapist said to her
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that's why you're trying to starve yourself because you're not meant to have curves
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And so she told her parents and her parents were delighted
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because they had seen their daughter nearly die
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and they were like, yeah, yeah, if this is going to save you, you do this.
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So she got her ovaries removed, her uterus removed, she took testosterone,
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she was getting ready for phalloplasty which is the most brutal surgery imaginable
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where they take off an enormous chunk of either your leg or your arm
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So she looked online then, you know, what do I do after a hysterectomy?
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Because she still felt terrible because they lied to her
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about how easy all these operations are, hysterectomies are really tough operations.
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And she found all these sites of women who had uterine cancer
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or, you know, that sort of thing and they were very supportive.
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She started talking to them and then one day this sentence floated into her mind
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and it was just, how can an operation that is only done on women
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And it was like the whole thing, the whole past five years just unwound.
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And she was back and she was like, all of this was nonsense.
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And I listened to her tell this story and I just sat there and I thought,
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oh fucking hell, they are sterilising gay kids.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is somebody we've been keen to have on the show for a very long time.
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She's the Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters and the author of Trans,
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a brilliant book that we do have, but because she's one of our first guests in the new studio,
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For anyone who doesn't know who you are, tell everybody who are you,
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what's been your journey through life, how are you sitting here in that chair talking to us?
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I studied mathematics and then I became a journalist.
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And from 2005 until earlier this year, I worked at The Economist doing various jobs.
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But during that time, I got interested in this strange new idea that men could be women
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And I eventually became so interested in that, I wrote a book about it called
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Trans When Ideology Meets Reality, which came out now a year and a half ago.
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And then became so interested that I left that job and go and work with Sex Matters,
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which is a human rights organisation, which focuses on sex-based rights.
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So the human rights that are sex-based, that require you to notice who's male and who's female.
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Well, that's what we wanted to talk with you about.
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However, as you know, we have had many, many people on the show to talk about this issue.
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And I suppose the curious thing about you is, is it your mathematics background that you're sort
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of just like, you know, zero is zero and one is one.
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Because a lot of people are more flexible, perhaps, on these issues.
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I mean, I think I'm quite a pragmatic person, but I didn't start from there.
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People normally, it's they notice and they think what's happening in schools with indoctrination
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of kids, or they notice that there are men playing in women's sports because they say
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they're women, or they notice that women's spaces, like refuges and so on, are under threat.
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Or they just notice the sexism of saying that how you perform sex stereotypes is what makes
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And of course, I think all of those things too.
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What I noticed first was that if you say trans women are women, that's logically equivalent
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to saying a woman is anyone who says they're a woman.
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So in mathematics, a circular definition doesn't get off the ground.
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Like if I just say, you know, a chair is anything that we define as a chair, it doesn't give
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You actually need to give some outside input into the definition.
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And that bothered me because it just didn't seem right.
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But I didn't know for a while, like why, what sort of problems it would create.
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So for me, the journey in was that sort of, you know, highfalutin, whatever, intellectual
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journey, like, you know, this doesn't sound right.
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This doesn't sound like something that you can base laws and policies and rules and regulations
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And so if proved, you know, if you destroy a core definition like that, it's amazing how
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it pops up all over the place in rules and regulations and laws.
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Because although we don't make many distinctions between men and women anymore the way that we
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used to, like it used to be only men who could vote or only men who could own property or
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only women who could do this, that or the other, there are still differences.
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And those differences are reflected in law in places where they need to be.
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Maternity leave, rape crisis centres, you know, sports, those sorts of things.
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And we're watching that breakage ripple out through an entire system of rules, regulations,
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institutions, governments, charities, all sorts.
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Because I'm quite persuaded by the argument that, and I don't hear many people making
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this argument, but I'm sort of thinking about more and more that it is the development of
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technology that allows people to, you know, transition more effectively, if you like, and
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to pass more as other sects and so on, that sort of opened this up.
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And because of that, we're now in the position there are other people who go, well, it's the
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I think like all really interesting and strange phenomena, it's a perfect storm.
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Like a lot of things arrived at the same point together.
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I think there probably have always been people who have thought that they would like to be
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the opposite sex or that they were meant to be the opposite sex.
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And we used to know until we'd forgotten, like, how that worked out, like, how that happened.
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And so, you know, in the 70s and 80s, there were these prospective studies where they identified
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little boys who said ardently that they thought they were meant to be little girls.
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And they followed them into adulthood and what they were was gay.
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Because there's a strong, very strong link between being really highly gender nonconforming
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in childhood, early childhood, and growing up to be gay.
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They don't, they're not born thinking I was meant to be a girl or I was meant to be a boy.
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They look around them and they think, why am I so different?
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Why does my dad drag me out to rugby matches and grab my Barbie doll away from me or whatever,
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So those kids, they learn from the society that they're in that they should have been
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And so some of those kids just grow up and they work out they're gay and that's fine.
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I mean, I should say it's not all that they're gay.
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But anyway, it's just like strong statistical link.
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And then along came medical technology that allowed, you know, some surgeries and so on,
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quite brutal surgeries and not terribly effective still.
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Then I do think the academics had something to do with it.
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Um, you know, there's this whole move since, you know, postmodernism, what they call the
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postmodern turn, which is when you stop thinking that words describe reality and you start thinking
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And the thing is, both of those things are true.
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They, you know, they make things happen, but they also describe reality.
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I can't just say any word means what I like and still live in a world where, you know,
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trains run and operations are successful and, you know, that sort of thing.
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So the postmodern turn is like moving away from the reality and towards the words.
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And then they just get like kind of intoxicated on this and unmoored from anything.
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And I would say that's the last of the pieces I would pick out that, um, you know, in an
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internet world, in an online world, you forget that you're actually a physical being very
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Like you live through your avatar, you see people on screens, you're not doing manual
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Um, you know, we're, we've delayed childbearing.
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You just, you just can actually pretend much more successfully that men and women are just
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So, yeah, I mean, that's not all of it by any means by the book, if you want to know the
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But, you know, those are the bits I'd pick out to get us where we are, where we say that
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there's no difference between men and women or that men and women are arbitrary categories
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But Helen, there's also as well, several strands to this because, uh, the people or normally
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men who transition later on in life are very different, like we say, to young boys who
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want to transition, but also the young girls who will then want to transition to be boys.
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That's a completely different thing entirely as well, isn't it?
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Men and women are different and their motivations for wanting to be the opposite sex are very
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Some people are, you know, on a spectrum of bisexuality in between.
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So those people are going to have different motivations as well.
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And you see, it's funny how you see the differences between men and women more clearly when you
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look at men and women who don't want to be men and women.
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So, I mean, by and large, the women who transition are lesbian if they're adults or they're teenage
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girls who are going through adolescence and finding it tough.
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But for girls, you know, there's a whole, you know, it's earlier than it used to be.
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You may be 11 when men start gawping at your tits and, you know, it's not very pleasant and
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And then you look online and you say, why do I feel so uncomfortable with my body?
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But now the advice is if you think you may be trans, you probably are.
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Yeah, I mean, they're very effeminate little boys and there's still a lot of homophobia
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You know, there really are people who look at a little boy in a dress who says that his
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favourite toy is a Barbie doll and think, hmm, we'll see about that.
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And I mean, you know, the fact is probably three to five percent of men are erotic cross
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But we knew that, you know, those surveys were done before this latest pretense that men
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They find this an erotic idea to be a woman, to inhabit the role of a woman.
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You know, you would have kept that at the weekend and cross dressing parties, maybe, you know,
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Now you're stunning and brave and that lady comes and you get, you know, you get societal
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plaudits for what is actually just an erotic interest.
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So are you saying that some men or a lot of men who transition later on in life, it's
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I mean, you can see that if you look, if you actually look at the, you know, the chat rooms
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and the Reddit, the subreddits and so on, clearly it is.
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I mean, they're not, you know, they're not dressing in dowdy women's clothes.
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They're not heading, you know, they're not putting on t-shirt and jeans and heading out
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to, you know, pick up the shopping and the kid from nursery or something.
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It's all about heels and lipstick and, you know, yeah.
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I mean, it's just quite obvious once you stop thinking that it's an identity and start thinking
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And so why is it, why isn't it that we've been able to have this discussion in a frank
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Well, the thing is that there's a big difference between that particular erotic interest, the
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interest in being a member of the opposite sex and other erotic interests, which is that
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So if a man's entire erotic identity is wrapped up around being a woman, he's not, it's not
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about pretending to be a woman, it's about being a woman.
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And the moment when you say, you know, you know, you don't pass or, well, you know, fair
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enough, like play at being a woman if you want, but don't use the women's toilets or something
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It can't, it's not a role play in the way that the magic is ruined.
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So it's the love that would really rather you did not speak its name, which is not a
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And so for those people, part of the erotic interest is in stopping people talk about the
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fact that it's an erotic interest and also getting other people to play along because
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you can't be a woman or be a man really on your own anymore.
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Like, it's about moving around the world as that.
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And that, you know, because there are no places that you can go and be a woman or be a man
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anymore, except places that only men or only women are meant to go, it actually means that
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you must go and try and use women's spaces.
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You know, everyone can wear what they like now.
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Like, you know, in a big city like London or somewhere, you can wear what the hell you
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A man can go around in makeup, lipstick, nail polish, anything he likes.
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He doesn't have to say he's a woman to do that.
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So to be a woman, you've got to go and use women's changing rooms and women's toilets.
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And so what percentage of men who convert into women later on in life?
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So what you've just described and how many of them are suffering from severe gender dysphoria
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and they're taking these steps in order to make themselves feel better, I suppose.
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I mean, somebody who is doing this for erotic reasons may also feel very grave gender dysphoria.
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And the second part of the answer is nobody knows because nobody's doing this research.
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Like, nobody's asking genuine questions in comprehensible language.
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Like, if you look at any of the mainstream research on gender issues now, they talk in
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this distorted ideological language where they call males females and females males.
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And they use the wrong questionnaires for people.
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Like, you know, if you look at the research on children, for example, post-social transition,
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they would use the questionnaires for the target sex, not the real sex.
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So they're saying things to girls like, do you feel gender dysphoric when you have to
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Well, of course not, because she doesn't stand up to pee.
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Because they're pretending this girl is now a boy.
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So the research is just unbelievably crap.
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You actually have to read the whole thing to find out what the hell they did.
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And then you'll find out that probably the research itself was rubbish.
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So I can't answer you any of these sort of how many numbers.
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But the other thing I would say is that gender dysphoria is something that society creates.
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So there's not a set amount of gender dysphoria.
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There's not a set number of people who are likely to develop gender dysphoria.
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You know, if you live in a society where gender roles are very strict and where the only way
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that you can do things that you really want to do is by pretending to be the opposite sex,
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or if we encourage these things by certain sorts of pornography or so on,
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I mean, I would say most of these men who have an erotic fixation on becoming a woman
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I do think we have to think, like, how do you accommodate someone who's that miserable?
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Ideally, like, stop them from getting that miserable in the first place.
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But after that, yes, they do need accommodation.
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I'm not trying to be unsympathetic when I say it's an erotic fixation.
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Like, erotic fixations can be pretty miserable.
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I don't think you're being unsympathetic at all.
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And actually, I love the way you are very clear about it.
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And it's funny to me that people would say that you're hateful or bigoted when you're just
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describing these things in a very neutral way, actually, I would say.
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And it's interesting what you say, because only a few days ago, Oli London, the guy who
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He's very sound, having come through that whole process and now realized it was a mistake.
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But that was one of the things that really struck me about what he said, because he said,
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well, society tells you you can be anything, so why can't I be Korean?
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And that, to your point about there's not a set amount of gender dysphoria, I mean, that,
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to me, is the really scary part of this, which is someone is looking online, they are feeling,
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as you said, that they don't quite fit in, a point that Oli made many, many times.
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He said, well, I went to Korea and suddenly I felt like I fit in, so maybe I'm Korean.
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But there have always been lots of people who didn't fit in, who were bullied at school
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or whatever. But now, just open your phone and the answers are all there.
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Yeah. And it's funny how some things you're allowed and some things you aren't.
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It was very controversial that Oli London said that he was Korean, but if he had been an
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American person who said they were black, as we saw with Rachel Dolezal, that was just
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social death. The woman became a global hate figure for saying that. A white woman who said
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that she was black and she had the hair and the skin color that allowed her to do a fairly
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decent pretense of that. So, you know, you ask yourself, why is it okay for a man to say
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he's a woman, but it's not okay for a white person to say that they're black? And, you
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know, in academia, the reason is that these are in completely separate fields. One of them
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is in critical race theory and one of them is in queer theory. And in critical race theory,
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it's like whiteness is original sin. I mean, it literally is that. If you're white, you must
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atone for that for the rest of your life and you will never be finished atoning and you will
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never get to the point that you can say you are not racist. Sorry, mate. You have to be
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anti-racist all your life, you know? And so you could never allow a white person to identify as
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a black person then because they can identify out of their sin, right? Whereas if you move
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over to queer theory, this is this postmodern field where categories are evil and we make
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utopia by destroying categories. So, you know, if you're theorizing male and female within that,
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it's good to destroy the categories. But I think that's a contingent explanation. Like,
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I don't think it's chance that those two fields grew up the way they did. Like, I think critical
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race theory very much follows on from American history of race, like from the, you know, because
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it just doesn't make any sense anywhere else. It doesn't make sense there either. But what I mean
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is, you know, you can see where it came from. Whereas you look somewhere else and it's just
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obviously imported. Whereas the queer theory thing, the reason that that's where sex landed
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is because there are men who want to be women and they want it more than anything else.
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And those men have the drive to make it happen because it's their erotic drive. They have the
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money because some of them are rich. They have nothing else to be thinking about. So they make
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it happen. Because the way that you can kind of see this must be the case is if you look at what
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trans activism is, it's not what you would do if your concern was trans people. I mean, trans people do
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have poor health outcomes, poor mental health, low income, all of those things. So you would
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have policies focused on that. But actually, the policy is exclusively focused on gender self
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identification, which is legally changing your sex, which means that you can go into spaces for
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the opposite sex. So the policy is clearly formed for the benefit of people whose fixation is to count
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as the member of the opposite sex, not people who just want to try and get by while being highly
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unusual. You know, I was watching a documentary on Rachel Dolezal and it was after she was exposed
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and she went to do a talk at this university. And the talk was done to black students. And this girl
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put her hand up afterwards and went, I don't think you can call yourself black. And she was like, why not?
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And she went, because you haven't earned the right to be black. And I found that so interesting. I was
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like, no, she can't call herself black because she isn't black. But you haven't earned the right.
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Odd, isn't it? Very odd. The equivalent I've seen of that in trans is when people say that
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trans women are better women than what they would call cis women. And I'd call actual women
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because they worked for it. Because it didn't land on their lap. Nothing lands on anybody's lap in
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the way of which sex they are. Like, you know, when an egg meets a sperm and they combine, they form a
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male person or a female person. That's the way it works. It is that simple.
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Do you think part of it as well is just that, you know, when I grew up, it was more kind of,
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you know, it was sort of better to be a boy. You know, boys were cooler. And now you just see
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slogans. The future is female. Women are doing better in the workplace. They're earning more
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money. More of them are going to university. It's a women's world. It's a woman's world.
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Yeah. So I would say that the teenage girls definitely think that it'd be better to be a boy.
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Like, I think it's very easy to say the grass is greener. Like, you know, you experience,
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you know, you think periods, you know, getting boobs early, whatever. And you think,
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oh, and you're seeing pornography as well, by the way, and thinking,
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fucking hell, is that what I'm meant to do? That was disgusting. So those things would chase a girl
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away. But then for boys, I do think there's something to what you say, because there's this
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new category that we're seeing of teenage boys transitioning. And that was never a group.
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Like, it was always the young ones or the adult ones, right? So these teenage boys,
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you look at them and you think, I mean, maybe there's something erotic going on here,
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but it doesn't sound right. And I mean, these are not people I've spoken to much,
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because this is a group that's really just emerging now. But talking to therapists who
00:21:26.480
talk to them, it is partly about this, you know, being totally online. Like they're just
00:21:32.320
immersed in computer games all the time. But also, they've bought into the idea that of toxic
00:21:37.660
masculinity. I mean, toxic masculinity was meant to me, there is a type of masculinity that is toxic,
00:21:42.760
which is true. There's also toxic femininity, right? But it's turned into, if you're masculine,
00:21:48.620
that's toxic. Right. And so you want to identify out of that. You can't identify out of being white.
0.97
00:21:54.340
You can't identify out of some things. But you can always say that you're non-binary,
00:21:58.040
or you can identify as the opposite sex, because that's allowed. And so some of these boys, yeah,
00:22:04.000
definitely, they think like, that would be nice. Girls don't have to try as hard.
1.00
00:22:08.180
And, you know, girls get things bought for them. Girls don't have to take the initiative,
1.00
00:22:14.260
which is very scary for a teenage boy. Like the idea that you're going to have to grow into the man
00:22:18.940
who goes out and business success, you know, and you can look at girls and think that's really,
1.00
00:22:23.420
that's easy. What they're doing is easy. You know, put on makeup, do your hair, wear a short skirt,
00:22:28.640
get people to fall over when they look at you, you know, completely unrealistic, of course. But that's
00:22:33.560
my point is it's a very unrealistic idea. So yeah, I think that really is happening now for poor
00:22:38.080
boys. And just touching on the girl issue for a moment, we've talked about gay girls,
00:22:47.140
girls who have got autism. Is there a link as well between, so when I was a teacher in a secondary
00:22:53.800
school, and this was about 10 years ago now, I taught in an all-girls school for a brief period
00:22:58.020
of time, there was always a percentage of the girls who had bulimia, anorexia, body issues for a variety
1.00
00:23:05.740
of different reasons. Has that now sort of metamorphosised into trans or is the bulimia
0.63
00:23:11.500
and the anorexia still there? I think part of it's metamorphised, but also their comorbidities,
00:23:17.220
as the doctors say, that you see them together. So very often you'll see a kid, like some of the
00:23:21.540
kids who are seen at the gender clinics now will have five or more conditions. Wow. So you'll be
00:23:25.940
talking about somebody who is on the autistic spectrum, is trans identified, is cutting themselves,
0.99
00:23:30.200
has an eating disorder and is anxious. And unfortunately you walk into a gender clinic
0.95
00:23:35.020
with that combination of things and they go, oh, you're trans. Like instead of saying,
00:23:39.200
show me your arms, can I see those marks on your arms, please talk to me about that.
00:23:42.600
Or, you know, you're very thin, can we talk about that? You know, so...
00:23:46.420
So you're getting someone, sorry to interrupt Helen, but I think this is important to emphasise,
00:23:50.500
you're getting someone who's clearly extraordinarily distressed.
00:23:53.840
And you're going, oh, well, your explanation for this is the right one. Okay, let's go along with it.
00:24:02.120
That is a very kind way to put it. The day I decided to write my book, because I've been
00:24:06.320
thinking about it for months and I had been wondering whether I was the right person,
00:24:10.020
because I was the finance editor of The Economist at the time. It's not really very obvious subject
00:24:14.020
for a book for that person. But also I just knew that it would mean that I essentially had to
00:24:20.320
abandon everything else I was trying to do, because you're not allowed to talk about this and talk
00:24:27.040
It's just... If you try and do something else, people will just not hire you, not get you
00:24:32.000
to come and talk. You know, you don't get to do... You don't get to just be a commentator
00:24:36.480
on anything else if you talk about this, because they will just not use you. So you know that
00:24:40.840
it's just a life-changing decision to write a book like that.
00:24:43.280
I hadn't thought of that. But so basically, if you start talking about trans...
00:24:47.040
You will not be able to talk about anything else. You will not... You will ruin everything
00:24:50.860
else. You will be dropped by people. If you look at the few sports people, for example,
00:24:54.600
who've spoken on the trans issue in sports, they just don't get to be, you know, just commentators.
00:25:00.360
They just get dropped for other things. But so the day I decided to do it was the day that I met my
00:25:04.760
first detransitioners. And as it happens, they were all girls and all lesbian. But that's absolutely
1.00
00:25:09.560
not the case generally. That's just what this group was. And one of them was 23. And she had been
00:25:15.220
very severely bulimic in her teenage years and had been hospitalized a few times because she was going
00:25:20.480
to die otherwise. And then when she was 18, she unfortunately looked up online if it was possible
00:25:26.460
to get your breasts removed without having breast cancer. Like she wanted for reasons to do with
1.00
00:25:30.200
weight. Like she was trying to get rid of them. Like they were tiny, but she wanted to get rid of
00:25:34.020
them. And she found top surgery. And a week later, she had decided that she was a trans man.
00:25:39.540
And when she went to a gender clinic, the therapist said to her, that's why you're trying
0.89
00:25:46.380
to starve yourself. Because you're not meant to have curves because you're really a boy.
00:25:51.040
And so she told her parents and her parents were delighted because they had seen their daughter
00:25:54.540
nearly die. And they were like, yeah, yeah, if this is going to save you, you do this. So she got her
00:25:59.180
ovaries removed, her uterus removed, she took testosterone. She was getting ready for phalloplasty,
00:26:04.340
which is the most brutal surgery imaginable, where they take off an enormous chunk of either your leg or your
0.99
00:26:08.800
arm and turn it into a fake dick. And you know, the A, it's very non-functional and B, enormous
0.99
00:26:14.160
numbers of complications. And, you know, none of it made her any happier. Like she was still starving
00:26:19.780
herself. So she looked online then, you know, what do I do after a hysterectomy? Because she still felt
00:26:26.520
terrible. Because they lied to her about how easy all these operations are. Hysterectomies are really
0.77
00:26:30.720
tough operations. And she was only 21 when she had hers. And she found all these sites of women who had
00:26:37.600
uterine cancer or, you know, that sort of thing. And they were very supportive. And she started
00:26:42.660
talking to them. And then one day, this sentence floated into her mind. And it was just, how can an
00:26:47.620
operation that is only done on women turn me into a man? And it was like the whole thing, the whole past
00:26:55.260
five years just unwound. And she was back and she was like, all of this was nonsense. And I listened to
00:27:01.160
her tell this story. And I just sat there and I thought, oh, fucking hell, they are sterilizing
0.99
00:27:06.400
gay kids. And you just think, that's a human rights abuse, if I've ever heard of one.
1.00
00:27:12.760
Do you know, that is the most horrible story that is just awful. And the odd thing to me is that we've
00:27:20.920
somehow ended up in a position where not endorsing that and not supporting that makes you uncaring and
00:27:28.800
unsympathetic. She was kicked off Twitter. She was kicked off Twitter because a trans woman said to
00:27:34.140
her, how am I any less of a woman than you? You don't have a uterus either. And she said, because
1.00
00:27:40.340
you're a man. She lost her Twitter account. A woman who had been through that, a woman who had been
00:27:45.260
subjected to gross medical negligence and human rights abuse for just pointing out that a woman
00:27:53.220
having her uterus removed is not the same as a man who wishes to be a woman and that doesn't have
1.00
00:27:58.180
a uterus, obviously, because he's a man. You know, when you describe it in that way, and,
0.83
00:28:03.280
you know, we've got, we're going to have a couple of people who are detransitioners coming on the show
1.00
00:28:08.260
in 2023. And I've talked to people like that. And there's all sorts of other things going on.
00:28:16.400
When it's described in this way, I mean, I don't think there's anybody in their right mind who could
00:28:22.400
be on board with this. I struggle to imagine. However, as long as the issue is kept superficial,
00:28:29.260
then you are a bigger for not accepting people the way they are and whatever. And it's sort of
00:28:34.060
easy to maintain that way. But this is medical malpractice. There's no question about it. That
00:28:39.380
is what it is. And it's absolutely awful. And it's brutal. However, I heard you talking to our good
00:28:45.940
friend Winston Marshall about yet another aspect of this whole thing that's almost more horrible even
00:28:52.260
than that, which is sex offenders in prison and being conflated with trans to some extent. Talk
00:28:59.100
to us about that. I mean, when I started looking into all of this, there were a few things that I
00:29:03.800
thought, like you, that as soon as you said them clearly, nobody could disagree with you.
00:29:08.140
And one of those was that if you allow anyone to say that they are whichever sex they choose,
00:29:15.020
you will end up moving rapists into women's jails. Like that's just like a theorem, you know,
00:29:19.700
and it doesn't even take very many steps. And I thought as soon as I said that to somebody who
00:29:24.040
said trans women are women, that if I said to them, yeah, but if that's the case, then we will
0.99
00:29:27.500
end up putting rapists in women's jails. They would go, oh, yeah, I didn't think about that.
1.00
00:29:32.160
Turns out they don't. Turns out people don't give a fuck. They don't care about prisoners,
1.00
00:29:37.640
I think. I don't think it's they don't care about women prisoners, particularly. No, no,
00:29:41.140
it's just prisoners. So it's a black box. Prisons are black boxes. You don't see what
00:29:45.180
goes on inside them, but you're pretty sure pretty terrible things go on inside them.
00:29:48.860
And there's an undertone of, well, those people deserve it.
00:29:51.420
And not always just an undertone. I mean, even people who think of themselves as good liberal
00:29:56.520
people who believe in the rule of law and so on will say that, you know, a paedophile deserves
00:30:01.440
what he gets in prison. That surprised me because I don't think that. I believe in the rule of law.
00:30:07.320
I think, you know, we have a justice system because we don't want that sort of extrajudicial
00:30:12.160
way of thinking about things. I'm sorry, I just don't think it's right.
00:30:15.900
And then when you think about women in prison, you don't even need to be thinking about the
00:30:19.640
arguments about whether paedophiles deserve what they get in prison because women in prison
0.64
00:30:23.280
are so unlike men in prison. Like one day I looked at the statistics and I thought, you know,
00:30:28.580
there is nowhere you will see the difference between men and women more except on the maternity ward.
00:30:34.540
So if you look at prisons, right, nearly all prisoners are men, like 96%, something like that.
00:30:39.720
And of those, about a fifth are sex offenders. So you've got tens of thousands of violent
00:30:44.740
prisoners who are men and maybe 20,000-ish or 15,000-ish who are in for a sex offence.
00:30:51.600
Now we know that most rapes don't get reported. We know that even the ones that get reported
00:30:55.240
don't lead to convictions. So loads of the other prisoners are going to be rapists too.
00:30:59.500
They just weren't ever caught. Because these are violent men who are willing to break the law,
00:31:03.240
right? Some of them will be rapists. Tens of thousands of rapists, right? You've got 4,000
0.87
00:31:08.580
women, roughly, 3,500, 4,000 women, mostly in there for non-payment of fines, often TV licence,
0.84
00:31:14.960
soliciting, drug offences, theft, that sort of thing. Most of them have experienced domestic violence.
00:31:21.580
Most of them have suffered very much at the hands of men, you know, specifically. Very few violent
00:31:29.740
offences and really almost no sexual offences. And the sexual offences are often in partnership
00:31:36.560
with somebody else. Women who go to jail for sex offences, it's often that they worked with a man
0.96
00:31:40.900
to create child pornography. Or, you know, they were soliciting, they were part of a brothel type
0.95
00:31:45.920
situation. It's not because they force themselves on people. It's hard for women to force themselves on
1.00
00:31:50.200
people. Anyway, so that's, so you just talk about unbelievably different populations. And add to that
00:31:56.240
the fact that men are much, much stronger than women. Now you've got some men that you can say,
0.90
00:32:01.440
would you like, would you like to say that you're a woman and move over there? Like, male prisoners
1.00
00:32:06.380
are not, male prisons are not very nice. Like, I don't know how naive you have to be to not think
00:32:11.720
that this is going to lead to some strategic decisions to transition. Is it, do you think they're
00:32:17.280
not naive or they just, I interpret it as they don't want to think like that? So for instance,
00:32:24.200
it's, it's like, you know, the migrant crisis where you hear somebody on the left go, I think
00:32:29.960
they should just all be allowed to come here. And you go, well, you're not really thinking about
00:32:34.800
the long-term implications. You're not thinking about the impact that's going to have on people.
00:32:38.940
You're not thinking about the impact that's going to have on what's going to happen further
00:32:42.840
down the line. You're just showing your care for people who are struggling. I think that's not a
00:32:46.460
good analogy because, you know, solving the migrant crisis would actually take serious effort.
00:32:51.200
Like you'd actually have to do something and you'd have to spend money and you'd have to think about
00:32:54.160
policies and you'd have to accept, you know, maybe more or fewer drownings, but some drownings,
00:32:59.120
whatever, like it's tough, tough choices have to be made. There's no tough choices here. We've got
00:33:02.880
male prisons and female prisons. There's literally no problem. We were doing it the right way before.
0.80
00:33:07.820
I think it's, you know, this word privilege is overused, but it's mostly just badly used.
00:33:14.140
It's privilege. It's the fact that the people who are talking about this are never going to be there
00:33:17.560
themselves. You are looking at the people who are in the hardest situation in the world when you're
00:33:22.900
looking at some of the prisoners, especially these women in prison. You know, these are women who are
0.90
00:33:26.760
away from their partners, their children, their partners have left them, you know. It's just people
00:33:32.480
that, you know, I'm literally, I'm never going to be there. And so if you are attached to this
00:33:38.640
ideology for reasons to do entirely with virtue signaling, in my opinion, this is a very inconvenient
00:33:44.460
thought, the thought that prisons are a place that show that this was a bad thing to do. And the thing
00:33:50.240
about prisons is you can lock them off. They're black boxes. You can just not pay attention to what's
00:33:53.960
inside them. So they do. You know, it's a price that you're willing for someone else to pay.
00:33:58.760
Well, exactly. Right. And I suppose this is where the conversation about erotic,
00:34:05.060
the erotic side of it comes in, because are you arguing that there are no people who might be
00:34:13.400
claiming to be a trans woman who are also not a threat?
1.00
00:34:20.500
I don't, I didn't think you were, but I just wanted to check.
00:34:22.720
Yeah. So I don't think that trans women who are men are any more or any less likely in general
00:34:29.560
But then because they are men, they're a threat.
00:34:31.080
Exactly. Men are, men commit nearly all the violent crime. Men commit nearly all the sexual
00:34:34.780
offenses. Men are much stronger than women. But also it's not just about threat. Like I think
0.97
00:34:39.580
whenever I talk about prisons to policymakers, somebody will say, but how many rapes are there?
00:34:45.780
Or you talk about changing rooms, they'll say, how many rapes are there? I mean, we have changing
0.97
00:34:49.680
rooms and separate prisons partly to stop rapes, but also just because it's kind of embarrassing
00:34:53.780
undressing in front of people of the opposite sex. Like, you know, modesty is a thing. And most
0.98
00:34:59.940
people feel more comfortable in intimate situations with people of the same sex. You know, it's not
0.99
00:35:05.620
that you necessarily, I mean, like if in my workplace, if we were to switch to go gender neutral
00:35:11.400
toilets, I actually don't think I work with anybody at The Economist who would have caused me
00:35:15.320
problems. I still don't want them in the bloody changing rooms with me. If they're men, it's that
0.97
00:35:18.960
simple. So, yeah, I mean. The reason I raise that point is I suppose my concern there would be
00:35:28.120
that a trans woman who is just a trans woman, right, being forced to be in a male prison
0.50
00:35:37.120
makes her very vulnerable. Yeah, you make a very, very good point. Or them or her. Yeah, whatever.
00:35:41.600
You say whatever pronoun you want. That person is going to be much more vulnerable as a result
00:35:46.200
simply of the fact that they identify as trans. Well, probably, probably as a result of the fact
0.99
00:35:50.780
that they appear feminine or female to whatever extent they do. Yeah. So that's, that's an excellent
00:35:56.440
point. And that points the way that we should think about these problems. So, you know, if trans
1.00
00:36:02.360
women are women, then trans women belong in women's prisons. Whereas if we accept that trans women are
1.00
00:36:06.660
an unusually vulnerable group of men, well, then we think, how do we deal with this unusually vulnerable
00:36:10.540
group of men? And actually prisons have a lot of groups of vulnerable men. Young men are very
00:36:14.960
vulnerable in prison. Gay men are very vulnerable in prison. Police officers are very vulnerable.
0.58
00:36:19.540
So by the way, are pedophiles and other sex offenders. And this is not me saying that trans
1.00
00:36:23.620
women are sex offenders. I just mean that prisons manage very vulnerable groups. They may have to
1.00
00:36:27.960
manage gangs. They try and keep drugs out. You know, this is just another vulnerable group of men
00:36:33.160
and should be thought of that way. So for example, perhaps a separate wing would be a good,
00:36:40.720
And if you think, although I don't anymore, but if you think that allowing people to present as
00:36:47.540
members of the opposite sex is a good treatment for this feeling of gender dysphoria, then you may
0.99
00:36:52.220
need to have a separate accommodation for them in order to accommodate that, because that's not
00:36:56.480
something you normally accommodate in men's prisons. But you don't think transitioning of any
00:37:00.380
kind is good? I don't have any evidence that it is. I mean, maybe it is for some, but I just don't
00:37:05.820
think that research is being done. There are people who will tell you that they're much happier,
00:37:09.560
and I can't tell them that they're not. But I mean, I also know that, you know, the only decent
00:37:14.960
long-term results of following on people who have gone through the full transition surgery and so on
00:37:21.900
doesn't show that these are people who have normal levels of mental health. But they're 20 times more
00:37:26.980
suicidal, for example, as in likely to complete a suicide. Now, they might have been worse if they
00:37:32.780
hadn't transitioned, of course, but I'm saying it's not like it turns somebody into someone who has no
00:37:36.860
problems anymore. No. Well, I mean, we have had people on the show, Buck Angel, Rose of Dawn,
00:37:44.520
Debbie Hayton, for example, who would all say that transitioning was the right decision for them,
00:37:49.300
and it really helped them, and they're living the life that they want to be living.
00:37:54.000
Now, but just think, though, if you had gone through that amount of surgery and so on,
00:37:58.760
are you somebody who can seriously say, you know what, this is a bit of a waste of time?
00:38:03.780
Well, clearly, a lot of people are saying that now, detransitioners.
0.99
00:38:06.500
Well, I think that's because they're actually, they're distraught. Like, the only way that you
00:38:10.800
can know whether a medical treatment is better than doing nothing is by doing what I call prospective
00:38:14.920
studies. You start from before the treatment, and you offer different treatments, and you follow up.
00:38:20.600
So it could be that you've got people who say, you know, this was great, I do feel better.
00:38:24.500
They might have felt better without doing it. Like, you just don't know. And far be it from me to say
00:38:29.740
that these people would have been happier if they hadn't transitioned. I can't say that.
1.00
00:38:33.380
Yeah, neither can I, but my sense of, I mean, Buck Angel, we did remotely, but Debbie and Rose of
0.71
00:38:39.080
Dawn, when we had her in particular, my sense, and look, what does my sense matter? But it was
00:38:45.000
that these are people pretty comfortable with who they are. Yeah, yeah. But I just don't know.
00:38:48.940
It works for them. Yeah, it works for them. And that's fine. I don't know Rose, although I follow
00:38:53.560
her on Twitter, and I do know Debbie. But if you think, like, what does living as a member of the
00:39:00.260
opposite sex mean? I come back to this thing of it means using spaces that aren't intended for you.
0.99
00:39:06.700
So accommodating transition is something that society has to do, and nobody asked the rest of us,
00:39:12.640
and in particular, nobody asked women. So if you can transition, and that's what will make you
00:39:18.100
happier, but that means that you're going to be going into spaces where frankly, you're just not
00:39:22.240
welcome, you're in a very difficult position. Like, are you going to transition and not use those
00:39:27.420
spaces? Would you have transitioned if you'd known you weren't going to use those spaces?
00:39:32.920
Because the doctors haven't been asking. The doctors never asked. They just said to these blokes,
00:39:38.780
like, usually they would have a real life test first, a year or two, before surgery. And we should say
00:39:43.920
really, so that anyone listening to this, hardly anyone has surgery. Literally nearly hardly anyone
00:39:48.820
who calls themselves trans has had any sort of surgery. So we are talking about physiologically
0.99
00:39:52.900
normal people for their own sex, usually. But if you want to go through that surgery,
00:39:57.600
they will say to you, live as a member of the opposite sex for a year or two. What they mean is
0.87
00:40:01.280
dress, makeup, whatever, and go into the women's toilets, go into the women's changing rooms,
0.59
00:40:06.460
see if women shout at you and shove you out. Of course, they're not going to shove you out.
1.00
00:40:10.920
They're terrified of you. You're a bloke who's willing to overstep women's boundaries to the
1.00
00:40:14.840
extent that you've come into the women's changing rooms. That's a very scary man. So what happens is
00:40:20.400
the women leave as fast as they can. And then at the end of that year or two years, you go back to
1.00
00:40:24.560
your doctor and you say, gosh, that was a huge success and lovely, beautifully integrated into
00:40:28.420
the changing rooms. They do the surgery and now you keep using the changing rooms. But you know,
00:40:33.220
I'm sorry, this is not okay. None of this is okay. So if saying some people will be happier if
00:40:39.280
they transition means that those people get to use spaces they're not entitled to, I'm not okay
00:40:43.340
with it. Let's talk a little bit about the ideology because, I mean, it's just weird.
00:40:58.340
It is weird. You're just going, I don't understand this. The leaps of logic.
00:41:03.080
The, the, the, and you, you try and read this kind of, cause I've tried, I've sat down and
00:41:09.500
I've read this stuff and I'm, but I can't get my head around it. What's going on?
00:41:16.720
I mean, partly I think it's cause it's basically a new religion and you're not meant to get your
0.99
00:41:21.180
head around religions. Specifically, you're not meant to. Any attempt to get around it is
0.99
00:41:26.160
showing that you don't have faith. So to me, it's very like, I was brought up Catholic,
00:41:30.000
although I no longer really believe and I feel your pain. Yeah. Okay. So, but you know,
00:41:34.460
three gods in one. I remember the mystery of the Trinity. Yes, of course. Right. So you're not,
00:41:38.640
you're not meant to try to understand that. And you're certainly not meant to say, okay,
00:41:43.140
three gods equals one. Therefore, in any equation in all of mathematics, three equals one. Yeah.
00:41:49.420
You know, it's, it's, it's ineffable. It's a mystery. And so there's an aspect of that about it,
00:41:54.020
that you're not meant to try to explain it. You're just meant to, to recite the creed and the
00:41:58.780
creed, you know, trans women are women. Have you ever seen any of these things where they have
1.00
00:42:01.600
protests and there'll be a call and answer, very like a religious call and answer. So somebody who
00:42:06.220
has the mic will bellow, trans women are women. And then everyone goes, trans women are women.
00:42:11.400
And it just reminds me of Lord hear us, Lord graciously hear us. So yeah, I don't think
00:42:16.460
you're meant to understand it. You're just meant to accept it. Because, and then there's another,
00:42:22.260
and I'm loathe to talk about this because, but I feel we have to talk about it because it's,
00:42:27.180
it's what's going on now. And then the kind of, the fact that a lot of these people who created
00:42:33.600
some of these ideologies had to put paedophilic paths. Yeah. And again, I feel uncomfortable
00:42:41.060
talking about it. But you're meant to feel uncomfortable talking about it. That's,
00:42:44.300
that's the point. You're meant to feel uncomfortable. So you don't talk about it. So we don't do our
00:42:47.780
child safeguarding. That's the way it works. But so, so let's have the conversation. So what's
00:42:52.520
going on with that? I mean, I don't think that paedophilia is a big part of any sort of motivation
00:42:58.240
on trans specifically. The fact is that queer theory, this idea that boundaries are bad,
0.64
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you know, innately suspicious things, and that we can redefine everything. And, you know, we can turn
00:43:11.300
the world upside down. That's very useful for paedophiles. So I think it's almost the other way
00:43:15.380
around. So this is an ideology that is useful for paedophiles. So it will attract them. So if you ever
00:43:20.520
talk to a child safeguarding expert, they'll say to you that if you work with vulnerable people,
00:43:25.540
specifically vulnerable children, you have to be super suspicious minded. And you have to make that
00:43:31.140
really clear to everyone. Because if you don't, you become a beacon, which attracts the wrong people,
00:43:36.920
because other people are being careful and you're not. So queer theories like that, it attracts the
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00:43:42.600
wrong sort of people. Because in other places, there are people going, hmm, why does that bloke want to
00:43:47.380
call himself a woman and get into the women's prison? You know, why does that man have this
00:43:51.120
weird obsession with the fact that childhood is a, you know, post-industrial Western concept?
00:43:56.800
But in queer theory, they're like, oh, that's interesting. You're querying childhood.
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00:44:00.520
So of course, in come the bloody paedophiles into that field. That's the way it works.
0.99
00:44:04.460
Again, by no means everybody in queer theory is a paedophile. It's the other way around.
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00:44:08.820
Oh, you're making the opposite point. You're making the point is that...
00:44:14.700
So where are we getting these? Do you remember last, I think, I can't remember, it was,
00:44:18.820
I think it was in the course of the last year, we had this, what was it called? The show in Bristol?
00:44:26.240
Yeah, I have a, the lyrics I still remember. I wish I didn't. I have a penis in my pants.
00:44:31.740
Touch it, touch it, touch it. And all this kind of stuff.
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00:44:34.080
I can't open Twitter without some fucking drag queen twerking her ass in a three-year-old's face.
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00:44:42.720
I mean, I don't think that most of the people involved in Drag Queen Story Hour are paedophiles.
00:44:47.620
I think that they're very careless, and so there will be paedophiles coming in.
00:44:51.020
But so why are they so interested in dealing, in getting in front of children?
00:44:54.940
And why are the parents there just clapping this along?
00:44:58.040
So the getting interested in being in front of children is because of the Jesuit thing,
00:45:02.160
give me the child until he's seven, and I'll show you the man.
00:45:04.760
So if you want to teach children, if you want to teach people, if you want the world to think
00:45:09.380
that male and female are arbitrary categories, start with kids.
00:45:13.380
And specifically, little kids are good for this, because little kids do think that what
00:45:17.280
makes you a man or a woman is your clothes.
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They think that if you take a boy doll and you dress it to be a girl, it becomes a girl doll.
00:45:25.440
Now, actually, that's true for dolls, because dolls don't have sexes.
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00:45:29.920
But by the time they're six or seven, they've worked out that it's the body.
00:45:33.460
So interrupt that process, and you've got people who will really think that trans women
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00:45:38.040
And then just in a very pragmatic level, drag queen story hour means getting blokes dolled
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00:45:44.260
up to look like really, really hyper-sexualized parodies of women, to come into schools and
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00:45:53.540
There's nothing better for preparing them for thinking that trans women are women.
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00:45:56.680
And then if you look at what they read as well, they read gender identity bullshit.
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00:46:01.680
They read all these stories about, you know, non-binary teddy bears and a dolphin who thought
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00:46:06.060
he was a boy, but he's really a girl stuff, you know.
00:46:11.860
I don't think it's for paedophilic purposes, although I think it's an easy avenue for it.
00:46:19.160
We're back to the fucking virtue signaling, aren't we?
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00:46:22.920
I mean, you have a small baby, but it's very boring being at home as a mother with a toddler.
00:46:31.720
Why do you have to take them to a drag queen story hour?
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00:46:33.740
Well, maybe you like to drag yourself when you're in your teens or twenties or even maybe
00:46:40.500
Like it manages to be both boring and quite kind of terrifying at the same time, which is
00:46:45.320
Look, drag is a legitimate part of the creative arts and always has been.
00:46:50.420
But suppose you were in your twenties or thirties, like you had nice girls nights out and you
00:47:03.420
I suppose another way of looking at it is, you know, well, we go to the pantomime.
00:47:12.160
I haven't seen that much twerking at pantomimes, mate.
00:47:16.340
It's sometimes called the fallacy of the beard.
00:47:18.840
So it's meant to be about where there are things that really are different things, but
00:47:24.620
So you've got somebody who is clean shaven and then you give them like one hair.
00:47:34.400
I don't actually know how many hairs there are in a beard, but let's say it's 10,000.
00:47:38.620
But there was no point in between where, you know, where it was clear cut, whether it
00:47:44.280
So then somebody says, well, nobody has beards or everybody has beards.
00:47:47.860
Like another example would be to say, you know, dusk.
00:47:54.480
So this is a bit of a long preamble to saying, yes, there's a bit of drag in pantos.
00:48:07.380
They're not reading you bullshit about, you know, non-binary penguins or whatever the
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00:48:18.880
It's not aiming over the heads of the kids, at the grownups who just want to have a laugh
00:48:23.780
So, you know, these are different things, even though it'd be hard to say where the boundary
00:48:33.420
Helen, we're coming towards the end, and there's a couple of very important questions
00:48:43.680
And number one in my mind is, I've sort of gone through this year, 2022, so this may go
00:48:50.700
out next year, may go out this year, thinking, well, look, we're making progress in the UK,
00:48:55.500
right, you know, the Tavistock, Mermaids, you know, the GRA, all of this stuff.
00:49:01.960
Are we doing well on this issue in this country?
00:49:04.320
Yes, we are making progress, and we're making more progress than anywhere else as well.
00:49:08.740
It's going to get worse before it gets better, because they all had they had it their own
00:49:17.380
There were just a lot of things changing behind the scenes.
00:49:21.400
And the specific people who are going to be most angry are those who have made irrevocable
00:49:26.560
choices on the basis that the rest of us would go along with those choices.
00:49:31.900
Most of all, the parents who transition to their own children.
00:49:35.060
Because if you transition your own child, you're in effect making a promise to that child
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00:49:38.900
that the whole world is going to step in line for the entire rest of that child's life.
00:49:43.520
And now there's people like me saying, actually, that's not going to happen.
00:49:46.560
You can tell your boy that he's your daughter if you like, but he's not going to be able to
00:49:49.640
play in women's sports, and I'm going to fight tooth and nail to get him out of women's
1.00
00:49:58.040
They've bet their lives on an ideology that we're now fighting back against.
00:50:06.520
And the other thing is, this isn't a tipping point kind of situation.
00:50:09.680
Like people often say, if we reach the tipping point, it's the wrong analogy.
00:50:16.380
We've watched it turned out our institutions were rotten.
00:50:19.640
Like any institution that you could go to and say, is it all right if the men can count
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00:50:24.180
And they didn't say you're having a laugh, fuck off, is a rotten institution.
1.00
00:50:39.800
You know, what do you do with the IOC, you know, the International Olympic Committee
00:50:45.940
I mean, we don't have control over it, but it's rotten, you know?
00:50:48.980
And so I think it's just going to be absolute hard graft for years and years to try to get
00:50:58.400
And it's not like, you know, the world was a perfect place before that.
00:51:07.820
And all of those things on hold just because we've got to try and fix this idiotic problem.
1.00
00:51:14.460
I think this is the most important one because I agree with you and with myself that we're
00:51:23.800
But we talked about where this has come from, right?
00:51:29.560
Part of that is all the other stuff that we've discussed today.
00:51:32.660
And those are quite fundamental things that have changed.
00:51:37.460
And we, I think it's fair to say technology is going to keep advancing.
00:51:43.380
It's going to get, I mean, Ollie London, who sat in that chair four days ago, whenever
00:51:46.820
it was, spanked a quarter of a million dollars to be Korean.
00:51:52.180
Yeah, I think it's 70 or 80 surgeries, he said.
00:51:57.080
And if a 20-something-year-old guy who's on Instagram and TikTok and whatever can just
00:52:05.040
go and do that, it's going to get more accessible.
00:52:09.880
The social media stuff isn't going away, I don't think.
00:52:12.900
I mean, we could maybe talk about what they could be doing.
00:52:15.740
But how do we ensure that in this technologically advancing society, more of this stuff doesn't
00:52:27.280
I mean, free speech is the fundamental issue for me, because I don't think so much of this
00:52:32.580
would have happened if we'd been able to talk more freely.
00:52:35.460
Now, a lot of the non-talking has been because people haven't been brave enough.
00:52:39.920
And often for very good reason, they're afraid of losing their jobs.
00:52:42.220
And if you're afraid of losing your job, I can't blame you for staying quiet.
00:52:47.980
So it's also been censorship on social media, via law, and just via employers being captured.
00:53:00.560
So I would say first, free speech, because then we can talk about it clearly.
00:53:03.620
And like you said earlier, that people wouldn't go with this if they understood what was being
00:53:08.360
Well, I mean, the reason they don't understand it is because we're forced to use this idiotic
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00:53:11.580
language by calling men women, or calling men she, because that's what they think of
0.99
00:53:16.380
May I quibble with that somewhat, Helen, just because I think there's another piece to this,
00:53:24.440
They've got families, they've got jobs, they've got bills to pay, they've got all sorts of other
0.94
00:53:30.680
And here comes along this perfectly rational, very nice woman called Helen Joyce, and wants
1.00
00:53:35.340
them to think about people chopping their dicks off.
0.98
00:53:37.540
And, you know, or not chopping their dicks off, or, you know, some man who they've never
0.99
00:53:43.260
met a trans person, and now I have to think about this.
0.99
00:53:49.560
And I think that that is actually a big part of it, too.
00:53:55.900
So, you know, people don't want to think about Brexit, they don't want to think about interest
00:53:59.060
rates, they don't want to think about migrants, they just want, they pay the government to
1.00
00:54:03.860
But the people who are being paid to sort it out, they're cowards, but also they can't
0.78
00:54:09.640
think through the issues if you can't write them down or say them logically.
0.94
00:54:12.660
You have to be able to keep saying men who think they're women.
00:54:16.320
You know, men who think they're women should be allowed into women's sports is nothing like
00:54:19.580
as convincing as trans women should belong in women's sports.
0.99
00:54:28.680
And then I would say, yes, technology, but more than technology markets.
00:54:33.660
Like, it's not just that that surgery was available or all those surgeries were available
00:54:38.540
It's that there were people willing to provide them.
00:54:41.100
And so in America, you know, where healthcare...
00:54:44.020
This is the problem is he tried to get all this crazy surgery in this country and he couldn't.
00:54:50.940
Well, Armenia, I think Thailand, somewhere, like all over the place.
00:54:58.580
And within America, the way it is, there's going to be marketised healthcare.
00:55:01.380
Like, it's the world's biggest marketised healthcare system.
00:55:08.740
I don't know if this is right, but I think Olly London probably has body dysmorphia.
00:55:12.540
I think it's going to move to something else, I'm afraid.
00:55:15.520
I hope that he can find stability, but someone like that tends to just keep going.
00:55:20.600
Well, what's interesting is we employ someone who has gender dysphoria and religion has actually
00:55:26.140
been a really helpful thing to Olly and to them to deal with that issue.
00:55:35.780
And it's a very supportive way to look at the world.
00:55:37.640
So hopefully his newly found Christianity or re-found Christianity is the answer.
0.99
00:55:42.240
But, you know, and so then to move away from the individual who I don't know and I'm not
00:55:45.100
as healthcare professional, you know, people who do these like Michael Jackson style levels
00:55:51.540
It's not like you cut a bit off your nose and think, now my nose is perfect.
00:55:54.600
You just keep cutting bits off your nose, you know.
00:55:59.000
But if you bring it back to gender, if you can't use spaces for the opposite sex, why would
0.97
00:56:07.400
I think that by changing the world in such a way that we have gender self-ID in single
1.00
00:56:13.560
sex spaces, we are encouraging people to transition.
00:56:17.500
And if we stopped doing that, we would discourage transition.
00:56:20.920
So I do think there's a policy tool available to us, which is to return, and this is why I
00:56:25.640
work for Sex Matters, to return to the importance of sex-based rights in law and everyday life.
00:56:32.280
And I mean, the most important thing that we can do on this, in this country, in the
00:56:37.100
law, you probably have heard of the Equality Act, it's the overarching thing, nine protected
00:56:41.940
It's the thing that stops discrimination in employment and provision of services on the
00:56:46.780
basis of sex, religion, race, et cetera, et cetera.
00:56:50.300
In that, it's not clear whether sex really means sex, or whether it means sex as modified
00:56:59.900
The single most important thing that we could do in the coming year in this country is get
00:57:04.360
a small amendment, and there's a procedure for doing this.
00:57:06.960
This all sounds very techie and very nerdy, but these are my favourite things, when there's
00:57:09.920
like a two-line thing you could do in a law, to say in the Equality Act, sex actually means
00:57:15.420
sex, the thing that was on your birth cert when you were born.
00:57:17.200
If we did that, then we could start having the cascading work in the other direction,
00:57:22.000
back into sex meaning sex in single sex spaces, sports, et cetera, et cetera.
00:57:27.220
There is a petition to ask the government to do this, that Sex Matters set up.
00:57:32.000
That's the most important thing that people could do, is sign that petition, get a Westminster
00:57:36.000
Hall debate, encourage the government to do it before Labour come in.
00:57:39.940
And then we could start moving back, reclaim single sex spaces, stop encouraging people with
1.00
00:57:46.000
this draw, telling them that if they self-ID, they can use the opposite sex spaces.
00:57:51.960
And then they won't feel as gender dysphoric, because this is the thing that annoys me,
1.00
00:57:55.580
is that the thought that you could do it encourages the gender dysphoria.
00:58:00.860
Do you think things are going to get better if we get a Labour government?
00:58:08.000
I mean, in some other ways, maybe yes, because we're very much at the tail end of a long,
00:58:16.320
You know, so, I mean, it's not like I'm massively invested in this government.
00:58:22.320
I mean, of course, all the bad things of the last 12 years have happened under the Tories.
00:58:28.220
But there are more people in the Tory party who understand that this is a serious issue
00:58:34.800
It's been an absolute pleasure, Helen, speaking with you.
00:58:40.060
It is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
00:58:45.100
It's something that we are talking about, but we're talking about it completely the wrong
00:58:50.360
So there's a lot of talk about mental health, and if you have a child in school, you know
00:58:55.340
that they're literally doing about the worst things they could possibly be doing for children's
00:59:00.760
mental health, which is encouraging rumination, telling children to think about, you know,
00:59:09.620
Incredibly bad idea, all of that, unless you're with a professional.
00:59:16.620
We are creating a mental health crisis among children.
00:59:21.440
It's going to get worse, because we're doing all the wrong things with our children.
00:59:30.540
You know, friendship groups are becoming more atomised and less close.
00:59:34.580
And then we're teaching them nonsense in schools.
00:59:37.240
We're teaching them nonsense about their bodies, their identities.
00:59:43.600
You know, the sort of the anti-bullying efforts are just all the wrong ones.
00:59:46.840
And, you know, we're not actually making people more kind and generous and supportive.
00:59:51.620
We're making them more ready to complain and expect the grown-ups will step in and sort it out for them.
00:59:57.220
We are creating a mental health crisis in our kids.
00:59:59.720
And I think it's the most serious thing that we should be all talking about and doing something about.
01:00:08.680
And we're going to ask you a couple of questions that our supporters have submitted that only they will get to see on local.
01:00:17.700
We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show.
01:00:23.640
And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:00:32.180
The gender identity ideology beast is like the many-headed Hydra.
01:00:37.180
But which is the head that, when chopped off, will be the fatal blow to this dreadful, damaging creature?
01:00:53.640
The next musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
01:00:57.060
The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
01:01:02.320
including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
01:01:06.320
Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here.
01:01:13.140
Now through June 7, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.