Trans Quotes

“One consequence of opening women's spaces to males is to recast two common male sex crimes as rights. Exhibitionism - non-consensually displaying one's genitals - is so common that many women will tell you that the first time they saw a penis was when a stranger flashed them. Voyeurism - non-consensually viewing someone in a state of undress - is known to be a precursor to contact sex crimes. Entering a changing room constitutes consent to see and be seen by the other occupants while undressed. Women grant that consent on the basis that those occupants will be female; gender self-identification removes that basis while denying that it does so. It therefore turns facilities intended for women into places where males can commit exhibitionism and voyeurism with impunity.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“One consequence of opening women's spaces to males is to recast two common male sex crimes as rights. Exhibitionism - non-consensually displaying one's genitals - is so common that many women will tell you that the first time they saw a penis was when a stranger flashed them. Voyeurism - non-consensually viewing someone in a state of undress - is known to be a precursor to contact sex crimes. Entering a changing room constitutes consent to see and be seen by the other occupants while undressed. Women grant that consent on the basis that those occupants will be female; gender self-identification removes that basis while denying that it does so. It therefore turns facilities intended for women into places where males can commit exhibitionism and voyeurism with impunity.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that trans-inclusive language is inclusive in one direction only. It aims at removing all obstacles to using the words 'woman' and 'female' for any male who wants them, without requiring any special accommodation for females who wish to identify into maleness or manhood.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“I am often asked why I took the risk of writing this book, and occasionally why I felt I had the right. The issue does not touch me closely. I’m not trans. I don’t have a trans-identified child. I’m not a detransitioner, or an athlete forced to compete against transwomen, or a lesbian seeking a partner on dating sites that are now filled with males. The answer to both questions is simple: I wrote this book because, unlike many other people, I could. Parents of children caught up in the gender-identity social contagion stay silent to protect their relationships. The detransitioners I know are traumatised. Many critics of this ideology can say nothing without risking their jobs. All these people need someone else to articulate what is happening.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“The two elements of a binary, in other words, can continue to describe the same distinct groups as they always did, while being stripped of the associations and interpretations that situate one group as dominant and the other as subordinate. Such work is essential to imagining a better future, for women and every other group on the wrong side of a binary. But queer theory does none of it. Instead, because of gender-identity ideology, the quest for the liberation of people with female bodies has arrived at an extraordinary position: that they do not even constitute a group that merits a name.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Males are easier to include in a movement centred on personal choice than in a movement centred on an analysis of male oppression and exploitation of females.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“The final indication of a crony belief is that nothing important is allowed to ride on it. To show this is true of gender-identity ideology, I offer the following thought experiment. Picture a person who insists transwomen are women in every circumstance. If transwomen commit crimes, they belong in women's prisons; if they play sports, they belong on women's teams. If they are attracted to women, lesbians must regard them as potential sexual partners. Such a person will accept no distinction between sex and gender. Transwomen differ from 'cis women' only in having been mistakenly 'assigned male at birth'. Now, what will our true believer do if they need a gestational surrogate?”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“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.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Activists who expressed genuine and reasonable concern for the struggles of trans-identified people would simultaneously dismiss women’s desire for safety, privacy, dignity and fair competition. Unlike those activists, I feel compassion both for people who feel at odds with their sexed bodies, and for the people, mainly women and children, who are harmed when sexual dimorphism is denied. At first I was puzzled that well-educated young women were the most ardent supporters of this new policy of gender self-identification, even though it is very much against their interests. A man may be embarrassed if a female person uses a male changing room; a male in a communal female facility can inspire fear. I came to see it as the rising generation’s ‘luxury belief’ – a creed espoused by members of an elite to enhance their status in each other’s eyes, with the harms experienced by the less fortunate. If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes. And some women’s apparent support for self-ID is deceptive, expressed for fear of what open opposition would bring. The few male academics and journalists who write critically on this topic tell me that they get only a fraction of the hate directed at their female peers (and are spared the sexualised insults and rape threats). This dynamic is reinforced by ageism, which is inextricably intertwined with misogyny – including internalised misogyny. I was astonished by the young female reviewer who described my book’s tone as ‘harsh’ and ‘unfortunate’. I wondered if she knew that sexists often say they would have listened to women if only they had stated their demands more nicely and politely, and whether she realised that once she is no longer young and beautiful, the same sorts of things will be said about her, too.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“They define womanhood as stereotypes enacted by people of different body types; rather than a body type that need not in any way limit the behaviour of the people who possess it.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“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.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“In the spread of gender-identity ideology, developments in academia played a crucial role. This is not the place for an extended critique of the thinking that evolved on American campuses out of the 1960s French philosophy and literary criticism into gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory and the like. I will merely focus on what some have dubbed 'applied postmodernism' and the form of activism, known as 'social justice', that seeks to remake humanity along ideological lines. And I will lay out the key elements that have enable transsexuality, once understood as a rare anomaly, to be converted into an all-encompassing theory of sex and gender, and body and mind.

Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and 'troubling' or 'queering' the definitions of oppressed groups.

A dualistic ideology can easily be accommodated within such a framework. Being a man or woman – or indeed non-binary or gender-fluid - becomes a matter of finding your own gender identity and revealing it to the world by the medium of preferred pronouns. It is a feeble form of dualism to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' replaced by 'they/them' on a pronoun badge.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“What same-sex marriage, women's franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase 'trans rights', they assume something similar is being demanded - that trans people be enabled to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish. Such goals are worthy ones, but they are not what mainstream transactivism is about. What campaigners mean by 'trans rights' is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are.

This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans peoples' subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws. All this explains the speed. When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people's rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness - it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“On the Right, the extremists are white ethno-nationalist majoritarians; on the Left, they are identitarians who see progress as a process of bringing one marginalized group after another in from the cold. Spokespeople for each marginalized group are regarded as 'owning' its policies, meaning transactivists get to promote gender self-identification without hard questions about how it impacts on everyone else. And as the Left has adopted their creed, it hs descended to depths of science-denialism formerly associated with climate-change and evolution deniers on the Right. Indeed, denying the materiality and immutability of human sex is not merely akin to denying evolution - it is [italicized] denying evolution, since the two sexes are evolved categories, and immutable in all mammals.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“A novel belief system is upending the legal and societal order, from education and sports to criminal justice and employment law. It has both fed off and worsened political polarisation”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“regarding transwomen’s safety in men’s spaces, they have none for female people who can no longer keep men out of theirs. Such a man is the most profound type of misogynist: the type that, perhaps unconsciously, sees women as supporting actresses in men’s lives.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“The embrace of gender-identity ideology was part of mainstream feminism’s shift away from seeking to improve the lives of ordinary women and towards a self-congratulatory, performative, postmodernist style with its origins on campus.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Rarely acknowledged in discussions about single-sex spaces is that, until recently, most were for men. The best schools and all universities; well-paid jobs; sporting competitions; political institutions: all were male-only. Some of women's anger at the recent pretence that it is impossible to distinguish between males and females stems from knowing that, when it was women who were excluded, there was no uncertainty. When you are of the sex barred from identifying into the other's privileges, you may not feel accommodating when self-identification in the other direction is cast as a human right.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Moreover, autogynephiles often eroticise aspects of womanhood that most women dislike, such as menstruation, undergoing intimate medical examinations, experiencing sexism or wearing uncomfortable clothes. 'Forced feminisation' - someone making a man cross-dress or undergo sex-reassignment surgery - is a staple of transgender erotica. Quite a few of Lawrence's informants say they would find it shameful to be a woman, and that this turns them on.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“According to the ancient 'one-sex model', men and women were essentially similar, except that women's reproductive anatomy was inverted and inferior. Women have 'exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places', wrote Galen, a Greek physician of the second century.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“The importance of gendered performance in fiction about transkids raises a question: if adults stopped fussing about the ‘right’ clothes and activities for boys and girls, then how, in practical terms, could a child express a trans identity? If no behaviours or norms were off-limits to one sex or the other, how could a child feel, or indicate to the world, that they were not actually members of their sex?”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“These books never make the connection between homophobic bullying and identifying out of one’s sex. A generation ago, progressives campaigned for schools to crack down on taunts about gay boys being girls; now, the bullies are presented as right.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Bell now wishes she had come across radical-feminist ideas earlier – ‘that stereotypes don’t mean anything, that it doesn’t matter if you’re masculine, that it’s your biology that makes you a woman, and there are other women like you’. The”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“The magnitude of the male advantage is obvious in sports statistics. The website boysvswomen.com compare the 2016 women's Olympic finalists with the same year's finalists in American boys' high-school competitions. In running, where the male advantage is relatively small, at every distance up to 800 meters the woman who won Olympic gold ran slower than the boys' qualifying time.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“The worry is not, I repeat, that trans people are unusually likely to be child-abusers. Gay people aren’t, either, and yet their movement was infiltrated by those who were – with two baleful consequences. Children were harmed who could have been kept safe and, even today, homophobes conflate homosexuality and paedophilia. Anyone who cares for the welfare of either children or trans people should want to avoid history repeating itself.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“transactivism can be exploited by those who would harm children – not that trans people, or transactivists, want to harm children, or do not care if others do.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“A definition of biological sex as reproductive capacity is, inherently, a communal one. It is about the role the individual plays within its species - whether that role is conceived of as shaped by evolution, ordained by God or something else. John Money's gender roles, too, concerned how individuals fitted into society - which stereotypes their upbringing had fitted them to adhere to. Now the focus had narrowed. What mattered was whether an individual could provide the sexual, not reproductive, services that a man expected of his wife - an individual rather than societal contract - and how she felt about herself. Though it was not yet consistently named, 'gender identity' had arrived.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality