About me
I’m a journalist. I write a monthly column for the Critic, and between 2005 and 2022 I was a staff writer for The Economist, where I held a variety of jobs including education editor, Brazil correspondent (based in São Paulo), International editor, Finance editor and Britain editor.
I provide media training with a special focus on hostile and difficult interviews, working with everyone from first-time interviewees to C-suite executives. I also offer coaching in business and professional writing, working with journalists, analysts, civil servants and senior staff in businesses and non-profits.
Together with my professional partner, Rabbi Harvey Belovski, I offer an executive-coaching package focused on navigating career and life transitions: visit H2Org to find out more about our work together.
I’m best known as an author: my first book, “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”, was published by OneWorld. It was an immediate bestseller and named by the Times, Spectator and Observer as one of their books of 2021. The paperback came out in 2022 and includes an entirely new foreword and afterword. It was reissued in 2023 under a new title: “Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights”. An audiobook edition is also available, read by me.
As well as my freelance work in journalism and consultancy, I work part-time with human-rights charity Sex Matters, which campaigns for clarity about the two sexes, male and female, in law and in life.
If you’d like to find out more about my training work in media and interview skills of writing, or to commission me to write or to speak, drop me a line on hjoycegender [at] gmail.com. For queries about my book, including to do with translation or syndication, please contact my agent, Caroline Hardman of Hardman and Swainson. For anything to do with Sex Matters, use this form.
If you value what I’ve written to date and would like to see more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter, Joyce Activated — slightly counterculturally, I’m running it myself from this website, rather than joining Substack.
For high-resolution photos of me, scroll down this page.
In the run-up to writing “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”, I wrote several articles for Quillette, including:
- In November 2019: the veteran gay campaigners who’ve had enough of Britain’s ultra-woke homophobes.
- In October 2019: the propaganda campaign against “TERFs”.
- In July 2019: Jessica Yaniv’s claims against Canadian beauticians who refused to wax male genitalia.
- And my first article for Quillette, published in December 2018: an overview of gender identity and trans ideology.
Before 2017 I was blissfully unaware of the fact that some people thought the words “man” and “woman” weren’t simple descriptors of biological sex in our mammalian species. Most of my journalism up to that point was for The Economist, a publication that almost entirely lacks bylines. Among the exceptions are longer, multi-part “special reports”, of which I have written two: one on Brazil in 2013 (£), when I was the paper’s correspondent in São Paulo, and one in 2019 on banking (£), when I was Finance editor.
And finally, a sample of pieces I have written on topics other than trans issues, in a variety of outlets:
- When the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, decided in August 2024 to abruptly ditch the Higher Education (Free Speech) Act, I wrote about that act of authoritarian vandalism in the Times Saturday essay, August 10th.
- In 2023 I was shortlisted for the Maddox Prize for advancing public discourse with sound science in the face of challenges or hostility. I wrote about the winners, and my and other nominees’ experiences of being harassment and hounding, for the Times Saturday essay, October 28th.
- In early 2019 I visited Amsterdam for a retreat with the British Psychedelic Society. I wrote about my trip for the New York Review of Books Daily.
- In 2016 I wrote a long read on slash fiction for The Economist’s lifestyle magazine, 1843. And no, I’m not a fan of the genre – I stumbled across it while researching something else. I was so astonished that I had to find out more – and for me, the best way to do that is to write about it.
High-resolution images
The photos below are freely available to use, with credit where mentioned.
