Helen Joyce - Trans

 This is a book about an idea, one that seems simple but has far-reaching consequences. The idea is that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology. It’s called gender self-identification, and it is the central tenet of a fast-developing belief system which sees everyone as possessing a gender identity that may or may not match the body in which it is housed. When there is a mismatch, the person is ‘transgender’ – trans for short – and it is the identity, not the body, that should determine how everyone else sees and treats them.

The origins of this belief system date back almost a century, to when doctors first sought to give physical form to the yearnings of a handful of people who longed to change sex. For decades such ‘transsexuals’ were few and far between, the concern of a handful of maverick clinicians, who would provide hormones and surgeries to reshape their patients’ bodies to match their desires as closely as possible. Bureaucrats and governments treated them as exceptions, to be accommodated in society with varying degrees of competence and compassion.

But since the turn of the century, the exception has become the rule. National laws, company policies, school curricula, medical protocols, academic research and media style guides are being rewritten to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex. Facilities that used to be sex-separated, from toilets and changing rooms to homeless shelters and prisons, are switching to gender self-identification. Meanwhile more and more people are coming out as trans, usually without undergoing any sort of medical treatment. This book explains why this has happened, and how it happened so fast.

Developments in academia played a central role. Feminists used to use the word ‘gender’, and some still do, to denote the societal framing of female people as inferior and subordinate to male ones. Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed.But in the 1990s the word was borrowed to signify a discourse – or, in the words of Judith Butler, the doyenne of gender studies and queer theory, ‘an imitation for which there is no original’. And so in these academic fields, which developed on American campuses out of 1960s French postmodernism, a man or woman came to mean someone who performed manhood or womanhood, which were sets of stereotypes – matters of self-presentation, such as clothing and hairstyle, and behaviours, such as choice of hobbies and career – that were meaningful simply because they were performed over and over again. In the past decade, even the tenuous link with objective reality provided by those stereotypes has been severed. In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul.

When the only people who identified out of their sex were the tiny number of post-operative transsexuals, they had little impact on others. But the gender identity that is posited by today’s ideology is entirely subjective, and the group of trans people is far larger. It includes part-time cross-dressers and even people who present as a typical member of their sex, but identify to the contrary – or declare a novel identity, such as non-binary or gender-fluid. What is being demanded is no longer flexibility, but a redefinition of what it means for anyone to be a man or woman – a total rewrite of societal rules.

Gender self-identification is often described as this generation’s civil-rights battle. And it is promoted by some of the same organisations that fought for women’s suffrage, desegregation in the American South and gay marriage. But demanding that self-declared gender identity be allowed to override sex is not, as with genuine civil-rights movements, about extending privileges unjustly hoarded by a favoured group to a marginalised one.

In no society – anywhere, ever – have people been oblivious to the sex of those around them, and certainly not in situations involving nakedness or physical contact. And in all societies – everywhere, always – the overwhelming majority of violence, sexual assault and harassment suffered by female people has been perpetrated by male ones. Single-sex spaces exist for these reasons, not to prop up privilege or pander to prejudice. And it is logically impossible to admit people of one sex to spaces intended for the other while keeping them single-sex. All this is so obvious that it is remarkable to have to say it – and until a few years ago, when gender self-identification started to catch on, there would have been no need.

Most people are in the dark about what is being demanded by transactivists. They understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity. I, alongside every critic of gender-identity ideology I have spoken to for this book, am right behind this. Most, including me, also favour bodily autonomy for adults. A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else.

The other belief systems accommodated in modern democracies are, by and large, held privately. You can subscribe to the doctrine of reincarnation or resurrection alongside fellow believers, or on your own. Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognise other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them.

Underlying my objections to gender self-identification is a scientific fact: that biological sex has an objective basis lacked by other socially salient categories, such as race and nationality. Sexual dimorphism – the two sexes, male and female – first appeared on Earth 1.2 billion years ago. Mammals – animals like humans that grow their young inside them, rather than laying eggs – date back 210 million years. In all that time, no mammal has ever changed sex (some non-mammals can, for example crocodiles and clownfish). Men and women have therefore evolved under differing selection pressures for an extremely long time, and these have shaped male and female bodies and psyches in ways that matter profoundly for health and happiness. The distinction between the sexes is not likely to be at all amenable to social engineering, no matter how much some people want it to be.

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This is not a book about trans people. I will present the scientific research into what causes gender dysphoria and cross-sex identification. But I will not seek to balance stories of those for whom transition has been a success, and those for whom it has been a failure. Whether or not transition makes people happier is an important question for individuals and clinicians, especially when it involves irreversible hormonal or surgical interventions. But it is irrelevant to evaluating the truth of gender-identity ideology, and to whether self-declared gender should replace sex across society. To draw another analogy, whether a religion makes its believers happy is irrelevant to the question of whether its god exists, or whether everyone else should be compelled to pay it lip service.

This is, rather, a book about transactivism. It is a story of policy and institutional capture; of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change. They have won over big political parties, notably America’s Democrats, and big businesses, including tech giants. They are backed, too, by academics in gender studies, queer theory and allied fields, and by the pharmaceutical and health-care industries, which have woken up to the fortunes to be made from ‘gender-affirmative’ medicine.

This powerful new lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. And it serves their interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification – which includes many post-operative transsexuals, who are under no illusion as to how much bodies matter. It also ignores other possible solutions to problems faced by trans people – research into the causes and treatment of gender dysphoria, for instance, or adding unisex facilities alongside single-sex ones. Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. When the general public finally realises what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the activists, where it belongs.

One place I expect to see a backlash soon is in women’s sports. Their entire purpose is to enable fair competition, since the physical differences between the sexes give males an overwhelming athletic advantage, and competing separately is the only way that exceptional females can get their due. Allowing males to identify as women for the purposes of entry to women’s competitions makes no more sense than allowing heavyweights to box as flyweights, or able-bodied athletes to enter the Paralympics, or adults to compete as under-eighteens. And yet, under pressure from transactivists, almost every sporting authority right up to the International Olympic Committee has moved to gender self-identification.

The sight of stronger, heavier, faster males easily beating the world’s best female athletes is sure to outrage deep-seated intuitions about fair play – once it comes to wider notice. As this book went to press, it was unclear where that would happen first, but clear that it would happen soon.

A handful of males were expected to compete in women’s events at the Tokyo Olympics, postponed in 2020 – and, judging from recent regional competitions, to place far better than they used to when competing as men. Meanwhile, duelling lawsuits are heading towards America’s Supreme Court, seeking on the one hand to block states from allowing male athletes to compete as women, and on the other to force states to do so.

Another backlash is imminent in paediatric gender medicine. Until recently, hardly any children presented at gender clinics, but in the past decade the number has soared. Every one of the dozen or so studies of children with gender dysphoria – discomfort and misery caused by one’s biological sex – has found that most grow out of it, as long as they are supported in their gender non-conformity and not encouraged in a cross-sex identification. Many of these ‘desisters’ are destined to grow up gay: there is copious evidence of a strong link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality.

But as gender clinics have come under activists’ sway, the treatment they offer has taken an ideological turn. Instead of advising parents to watch and wait with sympathy and kindness, they now work on the assumption that childhood gender dysphoria destines someone to trans adulthood. They recommend immediate ‘social transition’ – a change of name, pronouns and presentation – followed successively by drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones and surgery, often while the patient is still in their teens. This treatment pathway is a fast track to sexual dysfunction and sterility in adulthood.

In the past few years a new group of trans-identifying minors has emerged: teenage girls. Until very recently, this demographic was almost never seen at gender clinics: now it predominates worldwide. And again these girls are fast-tracked to hormones and surgery, even though there is no evidence that these will help – and good reason to think they will not. This is the demographic most prone to social contagions, from the outbreaks of hysterical laughter and fainting that have been documented in girls’ schools and convents throughout history, to the eating disorders and self-harm that sometimes sweep through friendship groups in the present day. Now another is under way, this time spread by social-justice warriors on social media alongside the medical profession and schools, which have added gender-identity ideology to the curriculum.

Early signs suggest that the number of children appearing at gender clinics is levelling off in Sweden, where clinicians have started to become concerned about the uncritical promotion of trans identification across society. And in late 2020, an English court ordered the country’s sole paediatric gender clinic to seek judicial approval before offering children puberty-blocking drugs. These, it ruled, were part of a treatment pathway leading to irreversible harms that very few under-sixteens could possibly have the maturity to understand and consent to. But in the United States, where regulation is light and the health-care lobby is powerful, clinicians are abandoning even the last vestiges of caution. This story will end in shattered lives – and lawsuits.

I know that I will be called unkind, and worse, for writing this book. Some of what I say is bound to be perceived as deeply hurtful by some: that it is rare to be able to pass as a member of the opposite sex, especially if you are male; that the feeling of being a member of the opposite sex, no matter how deep and sincere, cannot change other people’s instinctive perceptions; that such a feeling does not constitute licence to use facilities or services intended for the sex that you are not; that children who suffer distress at their sex are ill-served by being told that they can change it.

My intention is not to be unkind to trans people, but to prevent greater unkindness. As gender self-identification is written into laws around the world, the collateral damage is mounting. Males who raped and murdered women are gaining transfers to women’s prisons. Women have lost their jobs for saying that male and female are objective, socially significant categories. I think it is deeply unkind to force female athletes to compete against males, and a scandal to sterilise children. These things are happening partly because of an admirable, but poorly thought-out, sense of compassion for trans people. This compassion is, not coincidentally, mostly demanded of women, who are socialised to put their own needs last and punished more severely than men when they refuse to comply.

What first intrigued me about gender-identity ideology was the circularity of its core mantra, ‘transwomen are women’, which raises and leaves unanswered the question of what, then, the word ‘woman’ means. What led me to think further was the vilification of anyone who questioned it. Philosophers, who freely debate such thorny topics as whether it is moral to kill disabled babies or remove kidneys from unwilling people for donation, have, with few exceptions, been cowed into silence regarding the consequences of redefining ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Journalists, who pride themselves on ferreting out the stories that someone, somewhere doesn’t want them to print, have taken one look at paediatric transitioning, males winning women’s sporting competitions and women being sacked for talking about the reality of biological sex – and, again with just a few exceptions, turned tail.

What finally pushed me to write this book, however, was meeting some of gender-identity ideology’s most poignant victims. They are detransitioners: people who took hormonal and sometimes surgical steps towards transition, only to realise that they had made a catastrophic mistake. At the inaugural meeting of the Detransition Advocacy Network, a British self-help group, in Manchester in late 2019, I met some in person. When I heard their stories, I knew I had to amplify them.

Some of those I have spoken with, at that meeting and since, are young lesbians who had previously decided that their gender non-conformity meant they were really men. Others are young gay men whose parents preferred to see their effeminate small boys as ‘girls trapped in boys’ bodies’, rather than as probable future homosexuals. The share with traits suggestive of an autistic-spectrum disorder is much higher than in the general population. These traits include dissociative feelings, which can be misinterpreted as gender dysphoria, and rigid thinking, which can lead someone to conclude that deviating from sex stereotypes makes a person trans. Young women with eating disorders are over-represented. And not a few were simply miserable teenagers seeking in transition a community and validation.

Detransitioners speak of trauma from experimental drugs and surgeries, of having been manipulated and deceived by adults, and of being abandoned by friends when they detransitioned. I have seen them abused and defamed on social media, accused of being transphobes and liars, and of trying to stop genuine trans people getting the treatments they need. In fact, most are simply urging caution, and have no desire to stop others living as they wish. Their most obvious wounds are physical: mastectomies; castration; bodies shaped by cross-sex hormones. But the mental wounds go deeper. They bought into an ideology that is incoherent and constantly shifting, and where the slightest deviation is ferociously punished. They were led to believe that parents who expressed concern about the impact of powerful drugs on developing minds and bodies were hateful bigots, and that the only conceivable alternative to transition was suicide.

Ideas have consequences, and one of the consequences of the idea of gender self-identification is that children are being manipulated and damaged. Once you have seen that, it is hard to look away. The detransitioners I know have suffered greatly. They and their counterparts around the world seem to have settled on the lizard emoji as an informal mascot online: a talisman of rejuvenation, recovery and renewal. Their motive for speaking out is to save other young people from suffering as they did. That is also my motive for writing this book.

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