A New Year update

For the past few years, whenever I’ve eased off at the day job I find it almost impossible to do anything at all. It’s like I’ve only got two speeds: full tilt ahead and stationary. I had intended to do some writing over the Christmas break, but didn’t succeed. And now that I’m back at work for Sex Matters, counterintuitively, easier to motivate myself to write here as well.

If you are not a subscriber to my newsletter, Joyce Activated, you might like to sign up for free updates. I hope that in the future you might consider subscribing.

My resolution for this website and newsletter for 2025 is to write more frequent, shorter updates. Let’s see if I succeed – I have a bad tendency in interviews to try to say everything possible in response to each topic rather than hit a few points and stop. But with that in mind, this will be a short post, sharing two things – one, that I have brought the list of my interviews on trans issues up to date, and two, that I have an exciting event coming up in April.

The event is Oxford Literary Festival, one of the country’s biggest and most important. I’m being interviewed by journalist and author Julie Bindel on April 2nd in the Sheldonian, the festival’s biggest venue (pictured above) – and tickets sold out within a couple of days of going on sale. That should send a signal to organisers at other live events that audiences are hungry to hear a wider range of non-approved views, and they should grow a backbone.

I love live events, and hope that this is the start of doing more of them. It’s not invitations, as such, that have been in short supply; it’s appearances. What happens frustratingly often is that an event organiser thinks to themselves: what’s topical, controversial and interesting – oh, I know, let’s get someone who agrees with gender self-ID and someone who opposes gender self-ID to come and talk to each other in a moderated conversation. You know, like we might do on pretty much any other topic. And then they learn that the sex realists say Yes and the genderists say No or call the would-be organiser (or me) a Nazi or simply never reply.

I always warn them in advance that this is what will happen, and they don’t believe me until it happens to them. I also tell them that they should consider empty-chairing the “other side” because otherwise they are enabling the heckler’s veto. Most don’t listen to that either. Fortunately, the organisers of OLF have proved an exception. If they had been able to find someone serious who disagrees with me to share the platform, they would have been delighted – believe me, they spent months trying – it seems, however, that pretty much every author, politician, academic or charity bigwig who has advocated for self-ID is either out of the country or washing their hair for the entire eight days of the festival. But they decided to go ahead anyway, and I’m delighted.

The news that I would be speaking at OLF was not greeted with universal joy. Look at the replies here – yes, that’s the Joanne Harris expressing disappointment at me appearing at OLF – the author of blockbuster “Chocolat” and until recently chair of the Society of Authors.

I know I shouldn’t laugh, but I can’t help myself in the case of Sophie Molly, who features in the second post above. He’s a trans-identifying man who was briefly – and almost unbelievably, even given what a bin fire the Green Party is – a candidate for the Greens in Scotland before the last general election. I don’t know whether it was the confusion between literary and literacy, or the misspelling of literacy, or just the sheer idiocy of the entire thing, but he’s now deleted the post; fortunately it was screen-captured for posterity. And “after consideration” he’s withdrawn the threat of legal action against the organisers of OLF and has instead sent a letter of complaint. 

He’s also written an article about how terrible I am on the website of his partner Heather Herbert, another trans-identifying man. It’s just amazing that he thinks I come out of this article looking bad.

More than one person, including a journalist, got in touch with me to ask whether Sophie Molly was a parody account – I can assure you it’s not; some of my friends in Scotland have interacted with him far more than they would like, including in person. One friend even asked after the “litteracy festival” post if Sophie Molly was my alt. I wish I was that funny.

If you are signed up for free updates or were forwarded this, and would like to subscribe to my newsletter, Joyce Activated, click below.