TRIGGERnometry - What's Causing the Trans Explosion？

00:00:00.320 One of them was 23 and she had been very severely bulimic in her teenage years

00:00:05.900 and had been hospitalised a few times because she was going to die otherwise.

00:00:09.460 And then when she was 18 she unfortunately looked up online

00:00:12.840 if it was possible to get your breasts removed without having breast cancer

00:00:15.640 and she found top surgery.

00:00:18.120 And a week later she had decided that she was a trans man.

00:00:20.780 And when she went to a gender clinic, the therapist said to her

00:00:25.700 that's why you're trying to starve yourself because you're not meant to have curves

00:00:30.000 because you're really a boy.

00:00:31.380 And so she told her parents and her parents were delighted

00:00:33.300 because they had seen their daughter nearly die

00:00:35.320 and they were like, yeah, yeah, if this is going to save you, you do this.

00:00:38.240 So she got her ovaries removed, her uterus removed, she took testosterone,

00:00:42.440 she was getting ready for phalloplasty which is the most brutal surgery imaginable

00:00:45.820 where they take off an enormous chunk of either your leg or your arm

00:00:48.700 and turn it into a fake dick.

00:00:49.940 So she looked online then, you know, what do I do after a hysterectomy?

00:00:53.820 Because she still felt terrible because they lied to her

00:00:56.060 about how easy all these operations are, hysterectomies are really tough operations.

00:01:00.000 And she found all these sites of women who had uterine cancer

00:01:03.680 or, you know, that sort of thing and they were very supportive.

00:01:06.960 She started talking to them and then one day this sentence floated into her mind

00:01:10.920 and it was just, how can an operation that is only done on women

00:01:14.880 turn me into a man?

00:01:16.680 And it was like the whole thing, the whole past five years just unwound.

00:01:20.680 And she was back and she was like, all of this was nonsense.

00:01:22.680 And I listened to her tell this story and I just sat there and I thought,

00:01:26.220 oh fucking hell, they are sterilising gay kids.

00:01:40.400 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:43.200 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:44.340 I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:01:45.500 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:50.680 Our brilliant guest today is somebody we've been keen to have on the show for a very long time.

00:01:55.220 She's the Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters and the author of Trans,

00:01:58.760 a brilliant book that we do have, but because she's one of our first guests in the new studio,

00:02:02.720 it's in a box somewhere.

00:02:03.580 But it is a brilliant book.

00:02:04.460 Helen Joyce, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:06.320 Thank you for having me on.

00:02:07.280 It's a real pleasure to have you on.

00:02:08.840 For anyone who doesn't know who you are, tell everybody who are you,

00:02:11.840 what's been your journey through life, how are you sitting here in that chair talking to us?

00:02:14.800 Well, a long time ago, I was an academic.

00:02:16.920 I studied mathematics and then I became a journalist.

00:02:19.580 And from 2005 until earlier this year, I worked at The Economist doing various jobs.

00:02:25.220 I finished with being Britain editor.

00:02:27.560 But during that time, I got interested in this strange new idea that men could be women

00:02:32.260 and women could be men.

00:02:33.740 And I eventually became so interested in that, I wrote a book about it called

00:02:37.360 Trans When Ideology Meets Reality, which came out now a year and a half ago.

00:02:40.940 And then became so interested that I left that job and go and work with Sex Matters,

00:02:44.980 which is a human rights organisation, which focuses on sex-based rights.

00:02:48.760 So the human rights that are sex-based, that require you to notice who's male and who's female.

00:02:52.780 And that's what I'm going to keep doing.

00:02:54.200 I'm not going back to The Economist.

00:02:55.440 That makes sense.

00:02:56.220 Well, that's what we wanted to talk with you about.

00:02:58.700 However, as you know, we have had many, many people on the show to talk about this issue.

00:03:03.500 Yeah.

00:03:03.880 And I suppose the curious thing about you is, is it your mathematics background that you're sort

00:03:08.360 of just like, you know, zero is zero and one is one.

00:03:12.140 And like, I can't stand this.

00:03:14.560 Because a lot of people are more flexible, perhaps, on these issues.

00:03:18.700 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:03:19.700 That is why I got into it.

00:03:21.320 And that's not the usual way.

00:03:22.860 Like, usually people are more pragmatic.

00:03:24.800 I mean, I think I'm quite a pragmatic person, but I didn't start from there.

00:03:27.920 People normally, it's they notice and they think what's happening in schools with indoctrination

00:03:31.340 of kids, or they notice that there are men playing in women's sports because they say

00:03:35.120 they're women, or they notice that women's spaces, like refuges and so on, are under threat.

00:03:40.240 Or they just notice the sexism of saying that how you perform sex stereotypes is what makes

00:03:44.860 you a man or a woman.

00:03:46.880 And of course, I think all of those things too.

00:03:48.620 But that wasn't what I noticed first.

00:03:50.060 What I noticed first was that if you say trans women are women, that's logically equivalent

00:03:55.100 to saying a woman is anyone who says they're a woman.

00:03:57.480 And that's a circular definition.

00:03:58.740 So in mathematics, a circular definition doesn't get off the ground.

00:04:03.980 Like if I just say, you know, a chair is anything that we define as a chair, it doesn't give

00:04:07.600 you any idea what a chair is.

00:04:08.940 You actually need to give some outside input into the definition.

00:04:13.420 And that bothered me because it just didn't seem right.

00:04:16.620 But I didn't know for a while, like why, what sort of problems it would create.

00:04:21.160 So for me, the journey in was that sort of, you know, highfalutin, whatever, intellectual

00:04:26.760 journey, like, you know, this doesn't sound right.

00:04:28.980 This doesn't sound like something that you can base laws and policies and rules and regulations

00:04:34.500 on.

00:04:35.380 And so if proved, you know, if you destroy a core definition like that, it's amazing how

00:04:41.440 it pops up all over the place in rules and regulations and laws.

00:04:44.360 Because although we don't make many distinctions between men and women anymore the way that we

00:04:49.200 used to, like it used to be only men who could vote or only men who could own property or

00:04:52.600 only women who could do this, that or the other, there are still differences.

00:04:56.620 Men are not women and women are not men.

00:04:58.800 And those differences are reflected in law in places where they need to be.

00:05:02.720 Maternity leave, rape crisis centres, you know, sports, those sorts of things.

00:05:07.740 And we've broken all of those things.

00:05:09.200 And we're watching that breakage ripple out through an entire system of rules, regulations,

00:05:15.000 institutions, governments, charities, all sorts.

00:05:18.020 And it's quite horrifying.

00:05:18.840 And where do you think this comes from, Helen?

00:05:21.140 Because I'm quite persuaded by the argument that, and I don't hear many people making

00:05:25.480 this argument, but I'm sort of thinking about more and more that it is the development of

00:05:30.520 technology that allows people to, you know, transition more effectively, if you like, and

00:05:36.000 to pass more as other sects and so on, that sort of opened this up.

00:05:41.380 And because of that, we're now in the position there are other people who go, well, it's the

00:05:45.740 academics in the 60s.

00:05:47.120 And where do you think this comes from?

00:05:49.480 I think like all really interesting and strange phenomena, it's a perfect storm.

00:05:53.540 Like a lot of things arrived at the same point together.

00:05:56.320 I think there probably have always been people who have thought that they would like to be

00:06:00.020 the opposite sex or that they were meant to be the opposite sex.

00:06:03.040 And we used to know until we'd forgotten, like, how that worked out, like, how that happened.

00:06:08.380 And so, you know, in the 70s and 80s, there were these prospective studies where they identified

00:06:11.920 little boys who said ardently that they thought they were meant to be little girls.

00:06:15.100 And they followed them into adulthood and what they were was gay.

00:06:18.220 Because there's a strong, very strong link between being really highly gender nonconforming

00:06:23.000 in childhood, early childhood, and growing up to be gay.

00:06:27.080 So those kids, they look around them.

00:06:29.740 They don't, they're not born thinking I was meant to be a girl or I was meant to be a boy.

00:06:33.180 They look around them and they think, why am I so different?

00:06:35.460 Why are people treating me like this?

00:06:37.100 You know, why do I not fit in?

00:06:38.300 Why does my dad drag me out to rugby matches and grab my Barbie doll away from me or whatever,

00:06:42.940 you know?

00:06:43.600 So those kids, they learn from the society that they're in that they should have been

00:06:47.300 the opposite sex.

00:06:48.380 There's always been that.

00:06:50.360 And so some of those kids just grow up and they work out they're gay and that's fine.

00:06:54.480 I mean, I should say it's not all that they're gay.

00:06:56.540 But anyway, it's just like strong statistical link.

00:06:58.760 Um, so there was always that.

00:07:01.680 And then along came medical technology that allowed, you know, some surgeries and so on,

00:07:06.660 quite brutal surgeries and not terribly effective still.

00:07:09.680 But anyway, those surgeries started.

00:07:12.040 Then I do think the academics had something to do with it.

00:07:15.420 Um, you know, there's this whole move since, you know, postmodernism, what they call the

00:07:19.960 postmodern turn, which is when you stop thinking that words describe reality and you start thinking

00:07:25.420 words create reality.

00:07:26.540 And the thing is, both of those things are true.

00:07:29.720 You know, words do create reality.

00:07:31.300 They, they start wars.

00:07:32.500 They, you know, they make things happen, but they also describe reality.

00:07:36.000 I can't just say any word means what I like and still live in a world where, you know,

00:07:41.460 trains run and operations are successful and, you know, that sort of thing.

00:07:47.120 So the postmodern turn is like moving away from the reality and towards the words.

00:07:52.340 And then they just get like kind of intoxicated on this and unmoored from anything.

00:07:55.680 And then along comes the internet.

00:07:58.140 And I would say that's the last of the pieces I would pick out that, um, you know, in an

00:08:03.480 internet world, in an online world, you forget that you're actually a physical being very

00:08:09.000 easily.

00:08:09.420 Like you live through your avatar, you see people on screens, you're not doing manual

00:08:13.740 labor.

00:08:14.240 Um, you know, we're, we've delayed childbearing.

00:08:17.320 People have fewer children.

00:08:18.540 Lots of people have no children.

00:08:20.480 You just, you just can actually pretend much more successfully that men and women are just

00:08:24.740 more similar than they are.

00:08:26.320 So, yeah, I mean, that's not all of it by any means by the book, if you want to know the

00:08:29.540 whole story.

00:08:30.940 But, you know, those are the bits I'd pick out to get us where we are, where we say that

00:08:34.600 there's no difference between men and women or that men and women are arbitrary categories

00:08:37.900 that we can redefine as we wish.

00:08:39.660 But Helen, there's also as well, several strands to this because, uh, the people or normally

00:08:45.000 men who transition later on in life are very different, like we say, to young boys who

00:08:49.820 want to transition, but also the young girls who will then want to transition to be boys.

00:08:55.100 That's a completely different thing entirely as well, isn't it?

00:08:58.560 Men and women are different and their motivations for wanting to be the opposite sex are very

00:09:02.800 different too.

00:09:04.240 Um, and then sexualities are different.

00:09:05.920 Most people are straight.

00:09:07.000 A few people are gay.

00:09:07.940 Some people are, you know, on a spectrum of bisexuality in between.

00:09:11.320 So those people are going to have different motivations as well.

00:09:14.420 And you see, it's funny how you see the differences between men and women more clearly when you

00:09:18.780 look at men and women who don't want to be men and women.

00:09:21.520 So, I mean, by and large, the women who transition are lesbian if they're adults or they're teenage

00:09:27.700 girls who are going through adolescence and finding it tough.

00:09:31.820 Adolescence always is tough.

00:09:32.940 But for girls, you know, there's a whole, you know, it's earlier than it used to be.

00:09:38.660 You may be 11 when men start gawping at your tits and, you know, it's not very pleasant and

00:09:43.180 you think life would be easier as a boy.

00:09:45.200 And then you look online and you say, why do I feel so uncomfortable with my body?

00:09:49.100 Why do I feel uncomfortable being me?

00:09:50.260 And the answer you'll get is trans.

00:09:51.380 Now, that wasn't true 10 years ago.

00:09:53.820 10 years ago, you got better advice.

00:09:55.700 But now the advice is if you think you may be trans, you probably are.

00:09:59.320 So that's that bunch.

00:10:00.600 And then the little boys.

00:10:02.500 Yeah, I mean, they're very effeminate little boys and there's still a lot of homophobia

00:10:06.000 out there.

00:10:07.180 You know, there really are people who look at a little boy in a dress who says that his

00:10:10.000 favourite toy is a Barbie doll and think, hmm, we'll see about that.

00:10:14.440 And then the adult men.

00:10:15.660 And I mean, you know, the fact is probably three to five percent of men are erotic cross

00:10:20.460 dressers.

00:10:21.340 But we knew that, you know, those surveys were done before this latest pretense that men

00:10:26.200 can be women.

00:10:27.120 They find this an erotic idea to be a woman, to inhabit the role of a woman.

00:10:32.480 You know, you would have kept that at the weekend and cross dressing parties, maybe, you know,

00:10:36.900 between you and your wife 20 years ago.

00:10:39.660 Now you're stunning and brave and that lady comes and you get, you know, you get societal

00:10:44.980 plaudits for what is actually just an erotic interest.

00:10:48.380 So are you saying that some men or a lot of men who transition later on in life, it's

00:10:53.940 an erotic thing for them?

00:10:55.300 It's a fetish almost.

00:10:56.920 Yeah.

00:10:59.100 Okay.

00:11:00.400 I mean, you can see that if you look, if you actually look at the, you know, the chat rooms

00:11:07.700 and the Reddit, the subreddits and so on, clearly it is.

00:11:11.220 I mean, they're not, you know, they're not dressing in dowdy women's clothes.

00:11:13.980 They're not heading, you know, they're not putting on t-shirt and jeans and heading out

00:11:16.700 to, you know, pick up the shopping and the kid from nursery or something.

00:11:21.700 It's very, it's very, very sexualized.

00:11:24.580 It's all about heels and lipstick and, you know, yeah.

00:11:30.320 I mean, it's just quite obvious once you stop thinking that it's an identity and start thinking

00:11:34.760 like, what's your motivation here, mate?

00:11:36.120 And so why is it, why isn't it that we've been able to have this discussion in a frank

00:11:42.280 and open and honest manner?

00:11:44.640 Well, the thing is that there's a big difference between that particular erotic interest, the

00:11:51.240 interest in being a member of the opposite sex and other erotic interests, which is that

00:11:55.200 if you say it, you ruin it.

00:11:56.760 So if a man's entire erotic identity is wrapped up around being a woman, he's not, it's not

00:12:08.100 about pretending to be a woman, it's about being a woman.

00:12:10.980 And the moment when you say, you know, you know, you don't pass or, well, you know, fair

00:12:17.400 enough, like play at being a woman if you want, but don't use the women's toilets or something

00:12:20.880 like that.

00:12:21.320 You've just destroyed the whole thing.

00:12:23.480 It can't, it's not a role play in the way that the magic is ruined.

00:12:27.140 Yes.

00:12:27.820 So it's the love that would really rather you did not speak its name, which is not a

00:12:32.720 phrase I coined.

00:12:33.500 It's another author thought of that.

00:12:35.960 And so for those people, part of the erotic interest is in stopping people talk about the

00:12:40.600 fact that it's an erotic interest and also getting other people to play along because

00:12:44.860 you can't be a woman or be a man really on your own anymore.

00:12:48.200 Like, it's about moving around the world as that.

00:12:52.760 And that, you know, because there are no places that you can go and be a woman or be a man

00:12:56.800 anymore, except places that only men or only women are meant to go, it actually means that

00:13:01.980 you must go and try and use women's spaces.

00:13:04.500 That's the thrill.

00:13:06.600 You know, everyone can wear what they like now.

00:13:08.300 Like, you know, in a big city like London or somewhere, you can wear what the hell you

00:13:11.160 like.

00:13:11.500 A man can go around in makeup, lipstick, nail polish, anything he likes.

00:13:15.220 He doesn't have to say he's a woman to do that.

00:13:16.660 So to be a woman, you've got to go and use women's changing rooms and women's toilets.

00:13:20.640 And, you know, that's the thing.

00:13:23.220 That's the thing they're doing.

00:13:24.640 And so what percentage of men who convert into women later on in life?

00:13:31.160 You make it sound like a religion.

00:13:33.940 You could argue it is a religion.

00:13:35.520 So what you've just described and how many of them are suffering from severe gender dysphoria

00:13:42.040 and they're taking these steps in order to make themselves feel better, I suppose.

00:13:48.180 Well, those things can overlap.

00:13:50.480 I mean, somebody who is doing this for erotic reasons may also feel very grave gender dysphoria.

00:13:55.060 And the second part of the answer is nobody knows because nobody's doing this research.

00:14:00.660 Like, nobody's asking genuine questions in comprehensible language.

00:14:04.900 Like, if you look at any of the mainstream research on gender issues now, they talk in

00:14:09.360 this distorted ideological language where they call males females and females males.

00:14:13.960 And they use the wrong questionnaires for people.

00:14:16.500 Like, you know, if you look at the research on children, for example, post-social transition,

00:14:22.160 they would use the questionnaires for the target sex, not the real sex.

00:14:26.240 So they're saying things to girls like, do you feel gender dysphoric when you have to

00:14:29.620 stand up to pee?

00:14:30.520 Well, of course not, because she doesn't stand up to pee.

00:14:33.060 Because they're pretending this girl is now a boy.

00:14:34.900 So the research is just unbelievably crap.

00:14:37.760 You actually have to read the whole thing to find out what the hell they did.

00:14:41.020 The summary of it will be rubbish.

00:14:42.440 The reporting of it will be rubbish.

00:14:43.560 And then you'll find out that probably the research itself was rubbish.

00:14:46.160 So I can't answer you any of these sort of how many numbers.

00:14:49.560 But the other thing I would say is that gender dysphoria is something that society creates.

00:14:54.240 So there's not a set amount of gender dysphoria.

00:14:56.880 There's not a set number of people who are likely to develop gender dysphoria.

00:15:00.420 You know, if you live in a society where gender roles are very strict and where the only way

00:15:05.060 that you can do things that you really want to do is by pretending to be the opposite sex,

00:15:09.940 or if we encourage these things by certain sorts of pornography or so on,

00:15:13.080 you're going to see more gender dysphoria.

00:15:14.900 I mean, I would say most of these men who have an erotic fixation on becoming a woman

00:15:18.640 are very gender dysphoric.

00:15:20.480 Their bodies cause them great distress.

00:15:22.780 So, you know, it's not an either or thing.

00:15:25.500 I do think we have to think, like, how do you accommodate someone who's that miserable?

00:15:29.180 Ideally, like, stop them from getting that miserable in the first place.

00:15:31.780 But after that, yes, they do need accommodation.

00:15:35.060 I'm not trying to be unsympathetic when I say it's an erotic fixation.

00:15:39.080 Like, erotic fixations can be pretty miserable.

00:15:41.580 I don't think you're being unsympathetic at all.

00:15:43.600 And actually, I love the way you are very clear about it.

00:15:48.260 And it's funny to me that people would say that you're hateful or bigoted when you're just

00:15:52.980 describing these things in a very neutral way, actually, I would say.

00:15:57.000 And it's interesting what you say, because only a few days ago, Oli London, the guy who

00:16:03.560 thought he was a Korean woman, was here.

00:16:05.680 And we had a very good conversation, actually.

00:16:07.360 He's very sound, having come through that whole process and now realized it was a mistake.

00:16:12.720 But that was one of the things that really struck me about what he said, because he said,

00:16:17.860 well, society tells you you can be anything, so why can't I be Korean?

00:16:21.380 And that, to your point about there's not a set amount of gender dysphoria, I mean, that,

00:16:28.300 to me, is the really scary part of this, which is someone is looking online, they are feeling,

00:16:35.300 as you said, that they don't quite fit in, a point that Oli made many, many times.

00:16:39.020 He said, well, I went to Korea and suddenly I felt like I fit in, so maybe I'm Korean.

00:16:42.980 But there have always been lots of people who didn't fit in, who were bullied at school

00:16:46.340 or whatever. But now, just open your phone and the answers are all there.

00:16:51.420 Yeah. And it's funny how some things you're allowed and some things you aren't.

00:16:55.860 It was very controversial that Oli London said that he was Korean, but if he had been an

00:16:58.960 American person who said they were black, as we saw with Rachel Dolezal, that was just

00:17:03.800 social death. The woman became a global hate figure for saying that. A white woman who said

00:17:08.660 that she was black and she had the hair and the skin color that allowed her to do a fairly

00:17:13.540 decent pretense of that. So, you know, you ask yourself, why is it okay for a man to say

00:17:20.120 he's a woman, but it's not okay for a white person to say that they're black? And, you

00:17:24.740 know, in academia, the reason is that these are in completely separate fields. One of them

00:17:29.120 is in critical race theory and one of them is in queer theory. And in critical race theory,

00:17:33.420 it's like whiteness is original sin. I mean, it literally is that. If you're white, you must

00:17:38.420 atone for that for the rest of your life and you will never be finished atoning and you will

00:17:41.300 never get to the point that you can say you are not racist. Sorry, mate. You have to be

00:17:46.000 anti-racist all your life, you know? And so you could never allow a white person to identify as

00:17:50.460 a black person then because they can identify out of their sin, right? Whereas if you move

00:17:54.640 over to queer theory, this is this postmodern field where categories are evil and we make

00:18:02.540 utopia by destroying categories. So, you know, if you're theorizing male and female within that,

00:18:08.920 it's good to destroy the categories. But I think that's a contingent explanation. Like,

00:18:13.080 I don't think it's chance that those two fields grew up the way they did. Like, I think critical

00:18:17.560 race theory very much follows on from American history of race, like from the, you know, because

00:18:23.280 it just doesn't make any sense anywhere else. It doesn't make sense there either. But what I mean

00:18:26.000 is, you know, you can see where it came from. Whereas you look somewhere else and it's just

00:18:29.920 obviously imported. Whereas the queer theory thing, the reason that that's where sex landed

00:18:34.480 is because there are men who want to be women and they want it more than anything else.

00:18:38.740 And those men have the drive to make it happen because it's their erotic drive. They have the

00:18:42.780 money because some of them are rich. They have nothing else to be thinking about. So they make

00:18:46.100 it happen. Because the way that you can kind of see this must be the case is if you look at what

00:18:51.060 trans activism is, it's not what you would do if your concern was trans people. I mean, trans people do

00:18:58.700 have poor health outcomes, poor mental health, low income, all of those things. So you would

00:19:04.200 have policies focused on that. But actually, the policy is exclusively focused on gender self

00:19:09.660 identification, which is legally changing your sex, which means that you can go into spaces for

00:19:14.780 the opposite sex. So the policy is clearly formed for the benefit of people whose fixation is to count

00:19:22.780 as the member of the opposite sex, not people who just want to try and get by while being highly

00:19:27.780 unusual. You know, I was watching a documentary on Rachel Dolezal and it was after she was exposed

00:19:33.920 and she went to do a talk at this university. And the talk was done to black students. And this girl

00:19:40.880 put her hand up afterwards and went, I don't think you can call yourself black. And she was like, why not?

00:19:45.560 And she went, because you haven't earned the right to be black. And I found that so interesting. I was

00:19:50.460 like, no, she can't call herself black because she isn't black. But you haven't earned the right.

00:19:56.060 Odd, isn't it? Very odd. The equivalent I've seen of that in trans is when people say that

00:20:01.140 trans women are better women than what they would call cis women. And I'd call actual women

00:20:05.600 because they worked for it. Because it didn't land on their lap. Nothing lands on anybody's lap in

00:20:13.180 the way of which sex they are. Like, you know, when an egg meets a sperm and they combine, they form a

00:20:19.120 male person or a female person. That's the way it works. It is that simple.

00:20:22.720 Do you think part of it as well is just that, you know, when I grew up, it was more kind of,

00:20:28.260 you know, it was sort of better to be a boy. You know, boys were cooler. And now you just see

00:20:32.840 slogans. The future is female. Women are doing better in the workplace. They're earning more

00:20:37.520 money. More of them are going to university. It's a women's world. It's a woman's world.

00:20:42.540 Yeah. So I would say that the teenage girls definitely think that it'd be better to be a boy.

00:20:46.980 Like, I think it's very easy to say the grass is greener. Like, you know, you experience,

00:20:50.080 you know, you think periods, you know, getting boobs early, whatever. And you think,

00:20:54.180 oh, and you're seeing pornography as well, by the way, and thinking,

00:20:56.480 fucking hell, is that what I'm meant to do? That was disgusting. So those things would chase a girl

00:21:01.180 away. But then for boys, I do think there's something to what you say, because there's this

00:21:05.100 new category that we're seeing of teenage boys transitioning. And that was never a group.

00:21:10.660 Like, it was always the young ones or the adult ones, right? So these teenage boys,

00:21:14.500 you look at them and you think, I mean, maybe there's something erotic going on here,

00:21:18.560 but it doesn't sound right. And I mean, these are not people I've spoken to much,

00:21:22.920 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.

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.

00:22:08.180 And, you know, girls get things bought for them. Girls don't have to take the initiative,

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,

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

00:23:05.740 of different reasons. Has that now sort of metamorphosised into trans or is the bulimia

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,

00:23:30.200 has an eating disorder and is anxious. And unfortunately you walk into a gender clinic

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.

00:23:53.440 Yes.

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.

00:23:58.860 So there was a woman I wrote...

00:24:00.020 She was quite responsible to me from an adult.

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

00:24:23.520 about anything else. It just makes...

00:24:25.880 How do you mean? By whom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:27:06.400 gay kids. And you just think, that's a human rights abuse, if I've ever heard of one.

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

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

00:27:58.180 a uterus, obviously, because he's a man. You know, when you describe it in that way, and,

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

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

00:29:27.500 end up putting rapists in women's jails. They would go, oh, yeah, I didn't think about that.

00:29:32.160 Turns out they don't. Turns out people don't give a fuck. They don't care about prisoners,

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

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

00:31:08.580 women, roughly, 3,500, 4,000 women, mostly in there for non-payment of fines, often TV licence,

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

00:31:40.900 to create child pornography. Or, you know, they were soliciting, they were part of a brothel type

00:31:45.920 situation. It's not because they force themselves on people. It's hard for women to force themselves on

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,

00:32:01.440 would you like, would you like to say that you're a woman and move over there? Like, male prisoners

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.

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

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?

00:34:18.100 No, I'm not claiming that at all.

00:34:19.700 No.

00:34:20.180 No.

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

00:34:27.340 to be threats than men.

00:34:28.720 Okay.

00:34:29.180 Right.

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

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

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

00:34:59.940 people feel more comfortable in intimate situations with people of the same sex. You know, it's not

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

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

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

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

00:36:02.360 women are women, then trans women belong in women's prisons. Whereas if we accept that trans women are

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.

00:36:19.540 So by the way, are pedophiles and other sex offenders. And this is not me saying that trans

00:36:23.620 women are sex offenders. I just mean that prisons manage very vulnerable groups. They may have to

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,

00:36:38.960 would be a good answer. That makes sense.

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

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.

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.

00:38:33.380 Yeah, neither can I, but my sense of, I mean, Buck Angel, we did remotely, but Debbie and Rose of

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.

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

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

00:40:01.280 dress, makeup, whatever, and go into the women's toilets, go into the women's changing rooms,

00:40:06.460 see if women shout at you and shove you out. Of course, they're not going to shove you out.

00:40:10.920 They're terrified of you. You're a bloke who's willing to overstep women's boundaries to the

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

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.

00:40:50.260 I wish I could be more articulate and erudite.

00:40:55.220 So do I, but it's just weird.

00:40:56.600 But it is weird.

00:40:57.340 It's all natural.

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

00:41:21.180 head around religions. Specifically, you're not meant to. Any attempt to get around it is

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

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,

00:43:06.500 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

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.

00:44:00.520 So of course, in come the bloody paedophiles into that field. That's the way it works.

00:44:04.460 Again, by no means everybody in queer theory is a paedophile. It's the other way around.

00:44:08.820 Oh, you're making the opposite point. You're making the point is that...

00:44:12.560 The queer theory attracts them.

00:44:13.620 Attracts them.

00:44:14.180 Yeah.

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?

00:44:24.100 Oh, yeah.

00:44:24.560 Oh, the family sex ed show thing.

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.

00:44:34.080 I can't open Twitter without some fucking drag queen twerking her ass in a three-year-old's face.

00:44:40.780 Like, where is all this coming from?

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.

00:45:04.500 Right.

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.

00:45:19.120 Yeah.

00:45:19.880 Like, a three-year-old does think that.

00:45:21.380 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.

00:45:28.060 But you know what I mean?

00:45:28.760 They think about people, too.

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

00:45:36.600 are women forevermore.

00:45:38.040 And then just in a very pragmatic level, drag queen story hour means getting blokes dolled

00:45:44.260 up to look like really, really hyper-sexualized parodies of women, to come into schools and

00:45:51.040 be called she in front of kids.

00:45:53.540 There's nothing better for preparing them for thinking that trans women are women.

00:45:56.680 And then if you look at what they read as well, they read gender identity bullshit.

00:46:01.680 They read all these stories about, you know, non-binary teddy bears and a dolphin who thought

00:46:06.060 he was a boy, but he's really a girl stuff, you know.

00:46:08.500 So it's actually indoctrination.

00:46:10.060 That's why they're doing it.

00:46:10.920 It's indoctrination.

00:46:11.860 I don't think it's for paedophilic purposes, although I think it's an easy avenue for it.

00:46:15.860 It's because it's indoctrination.

00:46:17.920 Why do the parents do it?

00:46:19.160 We're back to the fucking virtue signaling, aren't we?

00:46:21.680 I suppose it's very boring.

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.

00:46:28.180 Somebody wants to put on.

00:46:29.680 Maybe you like to drag yourself.

00:46:30.520 Why don't you go for a fucking walk?

00:46:31.720 Why do you have to take them to a drag queen story hour?

00:46:33.740 Well, maybe you like to drag yourself when you're in your teens or twenties or even maybe

00:46:37.240 your thirties.

00:46:37.760 I hate the bloody thing myself.

00:46:39.320 It's just so boring.

00:46:40.500 Like it manages to be both boring and quite kind of terrifying at the same time, which is

00:46:44.080 an amazing feat.

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

00:46:55.900 went to a drag bar and so on.

00:46:58.040 It's kind of, you're cool again, aren't you?

00:47:00.660 And you're a cool mom.

00:47:01.480 You're not like boring mom.

00:47:03.420 I suppose another way of looking at it is, you know, well, we go to the pantomime.

00:47:08.820 Yeah.

00:47:09.320 Bloke dresses up as, you know, as a pantomime.

00:47:12.160 I haven't seen that much twerking at pantomimes, mate.

00:47:14.520 I'm not going to lie.

00:47:15.320 Have you heard of this?

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

00:47:22.860 the boundary between them is fuzzy.

00:47:24.620 So you've got somebody who is clean shaven and then you give them like one hair.

00:47:28.220 Have they got a beard?

00:47:28.920 No.

00:47:29.540 Two hairs.

00:47:30.280 Have they got a beard?

00:47:30.900 No.

00:47:31.600 You're talking about me.

00:47:33.120 I don't know.

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.

00:47:37.200 This person has a beard.

00:47:38.420 Yeah.

00:47:38.620 But there was no point in between where, you know, where it was clear cut, whether it

00:47:42.560 was beard or no beard.

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.

00:47:50.140 What's dusk?

00:47:51.000 Is that daytime or is that nighttime?

00:47:52.320 Oh, there's no day or night.

00:47:54.480 So this is a bit of a long preamble to saying, yes, there's a bit of drag in pantos.

00:47:59.040 Yes, there can be smutty innuendo.

00:48:01.520 They're tertiary characters.

00:48:03.180 It's a little bit of it.

00:48:04.480 It's usually older men.

00:48:06.280 It's very far away.

00:48:07.380 They're not reading you bullshit about, you know, non-binary penguins or whatever the

00:48:11.120 hell it is.

00:48:12.240 In school, it's all of those things.

00:48:13.700 It's right up close.

00:48:14.860 It's only that.

00:48:16.020 It's hyper-sexualized.

00:48:17.360 There's no other storyline.

00:48:18.880 It's not aiming over the heads of the kids, at the grownups who just want to have a laugh

00:48:22.240 at some dirty joke.

00:48:23.780 So, you know, these are different things, even though it'd be hard to say where the boundary

00:48:27.960 exactly lay between Panto and Drag Queen.

00:48:31.120 But they're just obviously different.

00:48:33.200 Right.

00:48:33.420 Helen, we're coming towards the end, and there's a couple of very important questions

00:48:37.620 that I want to cover before we wrap up.

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.

00:49:00.720 Are we making progress?

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

00:49:13.600 way for a long time.

00:49:14.680 There was institutional capture.

00:49:15.980 There was nobody calling anything out.

00:49:17.380 There were just a lot of things changing behind the scenes.

00:49:19.640 Now it's all in public, and they're angry.

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

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

00:49:53.120 changing rooms as well.

00:49:54.980 Those people are all in.

00:49:56.900 You know, they've bet the house.

00:49:58.040 They've bet their lives on an ideology that we're now fighting back against.

00:50:02.000 They're going to fight to the death on this.

00:50:03.800 So it's going to be it's going to keep going.

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.

00:50:13.840 We've seen very serious institutional capture.

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

00:50:23.580 as women here?

00:50:24.180 And they didn't say you're having a laugh, fuck off, is a rotten institution.

00:50:27.920 It turned out they were all rotten.

00:50:30.140 This has made them more rotten.

00:50:31.440 And now we have to try and win them back.

00:50:32.880 It's going to be really hard.

00:50:34.280 Like, how do you get back Stonewall?

00:50:36.660 You can't.

00:50:37.240 It's dead.

00:50:37.600 We've got to get rid of it and replace it.

00:50:39.800 You know, what do you do with the IOC, you know, the International Olympic Committee

00:50:43.120 that has allowed men to compete as women?

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

00:50:56.560 back to just where we were.

00:50:58.400 And it's not like, you know, the world was a perfect place before that.

00:51:01.700 You know, there was still homophobia.

00:51:02.760 There was still sexism, et cetera, et cetera.

00:51:04.580 There were still bad things happening.

00:51:06.080 Domestic violence, rape, whatever.

00:51:07.820 And all of those things on hold just because we've got to try and fix this idiotic problem.

00:51:11.880 Well, this is the second question.

00:51:14.460 I think this is the most important one because I agree with you and with myself that we're

00:51:19.160 making progress.

00:51:20.300 Yes, exactly.

00:51:20.860 I agree with me, as I should.

00:51:23.800 But we talked about where this has come from, right?

00:51:27.500 And part of that is technology.

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.

00:51:41.680 It's going to get easier to transition.

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.

00:51:54.200 I've met him briefly once.

00:51:55.100 Yeah, he had a lot of surgery.

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.

00:52:08.160 It's going to get easier.

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

00:52:25.160 happen?

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.

00:52:46.140 People have to put bread on the table.

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

00:53:07.540 said.

00:53:08.360 Well, I mean, the reason they don't understand it is because we're forced to use this idiotic

00:53:11.580 language by calling men women, or calling men she, because that's what they think of

00:53:15.140 themselves as.

00:53:16.380 May I quibble with that somewhat, Helen, just because I think there's another piece to this,

00:53:20.680 which is most people have busy lives.

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

00:53:29.680 shit going on.

00:53:30.680 And here comes along this perfectly rational, very nice woman called Helen Joyce, and wants

00:53:35.340 them to think about people chopping their dicks off.

00:53:37.540 And, you know, or not chopping their dicks off, or, you know, some man who they've never

00:53:43.260 met a trans person, and now I have to think about this.

00:53:45.620 No, just go away, Helen.

00:53:46.760 I don't want to think about it.

00:53:48.100 Completely.

00:53:48.340 I just want to get on with my life.

00:53:49.560 And I think that that is actually a big part of it, too.

00:53:51.600 Oh, completely.

00:53:52.080 And very understandable, by the way.

00:53:53.340 Yeah, and very understandable.

00:53:54.140 But that's true of all policies.

00:53:55.680 Yeah.

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

00:54:02.540 sort that stuff out.

00:54:03.420 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:03.860 But the people who are being paid to sort it out, they're cowards, but also they can't

00:54:09.640 think through the issues if you can't write them down or say them logically.

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.

00:54:22.420 So we need to get the language back.

00:54:24.780 I think that's non-negotiable.

00:54:25.980 Without that, we can't do anything.

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

00:54:37.800 for Raleigh London.

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...

00:54:43.140 But not in this country.

00:54:44.020 This is the problem is he tried to get all this crazy surgery in this country and he couldn't.

00:54:49.240 So he went to...

00:54:50.240 Brazil, I think.

00:54:50.940 Well, Armenia, I think Thailand, somewhere, like all over the place.

00:54:55.320 Yeah.

00:54:55.760 And he could.

00:54:56.940 And so we can't stop that, actually.

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.

00:55:04.400 But what's the point in doing it?

00:55:07.700 Like, I actually think that...

00:55:08.740 I don't know if this is right, but I think Olly London probably has body dysmorphia.

00:55:12.140 Yeah.

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.

00:55:19.640 They find a new thing to do.

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.

00:55:30.700 Yes, I can imagine that.

00:55:31.820 And I say that as a non-religious person.

00:55:33.800 It's another way to look at the world.

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.

00:55:40.680 I hope so.

00:55:41.320 I really hope so.

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

00:55:49.740 of interventions don't tend to stop.

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.

00:55:56.820 So I don't know that we can stop that.

00:55:59.000 But if you bring it back to gender, if you can't use spaces for the opposite sex, why would

00:56:05.660 you do it?

00:56:07.400 I think that by changing the world in such a way that we have gender self-ID in single

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

00:56:41.360 characteristics.

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

00:56:56.940 by a gender recognition certificate.

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

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,

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?

00:58:03.540 No.

00:58:08.000 I mean, in some other ways, maybe yes, because we're very much at the tail end of a long,

00:58:12.680 worn out, 12-year administration series.

00:58:16.320 You know, so, I mean, it's not like I'm massively invested in this government.

00:58:19.280 No, I don't think anyone is.

00:58:20.600 On this issue.

00:58:22.320 I mean, of course, all the bad things of the last 12 years have happened under the Tories.

00:58:25.680 So they hardly have clean hands.

00:58:28.220 But there are more people in the Tory party who understand that this is a serious issue

00:58:32.780 than in Labour.

00:58:34.800 It's been an absolute pleasure, Helen, speaking with you.

00:58:38.100 Our last question is always the same.

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

00:58:48.900 way, and that's kids' mental health.

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,

00:59:05.320 how do you feel?

00:59:06.260 How do you feel today?

00:59:07.060 Let's talk about it.

00:59:07.980 Learn the words about your feelings.

00:59:09.620 Incredibly bad idea, all of that, unless you're with a professional.

00:59:13.360 Just encouraging people to think and feel bad.

00:59:16.620 We are creating a mental health crisis among children.

00:59:19.820 It's already really raging.

00:59:21.440 It's going to get worse, because we're doing all the wrong things with our children.

00:59:25.200 They're not getting out enough.

00:59:26.740 They're not getting enough exercise.

00:59:28.020 They're spending too much time on screens.

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.

00:59:40.180 We're encouraging them to be fragile.

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.

01:00:03.400 Helen Joyce, absolutely brilliant interview.

01:00:07.600 Fantastic book, Trans.

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.

01:00:14.220 So thank you very much.

01:00:15.800 And thank you guys for watching and listening.

01:00:17.700 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show.

01:00:21.800 All of them go out at 7pm UK time.

01:00:23.640 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:00:28.620 Take care and see you soon, guys.

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.

01:01:10.400 The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

01:01:13.140 Now through June 7, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

01:01:17.340 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - January 09, 2023

What's Causing the Trans Explosion？ - Helen Joyce

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