Joyce activated, issue 70

First, Happy New Year! And sorry that this is late – personal and professional life went slightly crazy, but I think I’m over the hump now, and posting will return to normal.

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I said a few weeks ago that I’d return to the biggest blowup over anything I’ve ever said, and what I learned from it. That was my interview on Helen Staniland’s live YouTube show, Wine With Women, in May 2022.

We covered a fair few things, but the bit that has followed me around ever since was where I talked about how important it is to limit as much as possible the number of people who adopt wholesale the notion that sex isn’t real, or that gender identity must and should replace it in all situations, or who transition because of this social contagion. I said that these people are a big problem for everyone else, and for running society in general, and that the fewer of them there are the better. And, in a phrase that will probably provide my epitaph, that they are “a huge problem in a sane world”.

Well, that provided the “evidence” that I’m genocidal and want all trans people dead. So in this issue I’ll try – again – to explain what precisely I meant, and what I learned from the experience.

I’m sure that I could have phrased myself more clearly. Sometimes I wish I’d put the care into expressing myself on this that I put into the section in my book that draws an analogy between the paedophile infiltration of left-wing groups a half-century ago, and the safeguarding failures inspired by gender-identity ideology now. In that passage I bent over backwards to try to avoid having people misattribute to me opinions like “all trans-identified men are paedophiles”, and I actually seem to have succeeded. 

But I think I’m a pretty clear speaker, and considering the number of unscripted interviews I do, I produce rather few flubs. And part of the purpose of conversations – one of the big benefits of free speech, actually – is to help you to think your way through tricky issues. Good-faith conversations don’t end up with people picking up slight infelicities and turning them into gigantic claims that you’re a homicidal maniac! 

I’m not up against people who employ good faith, though. They know perfectly well I don’t mean “put everyone who identifies as trans up against a wall and shoot them”, but they are still willing to claim that’s what I believe. No amount of being really clear will stop them from finding something to misrepresent or lie about outright. 

I’ve also thought, rather darkly, that at least it mostly displaced the previous worst thing that was said about me, which is that I’m antisemitic. And since it’s much more common to be antisemitic than to be genocidal, antisemitism is actually a more damaging allegation, even though I have literally never said anything that could at a wild stretch be taken to be antisemitic: there isn’t even something to misinterpret.

So what was I trying to say in that “huge problem in a sane world” passage? 

As surely anyone reading this agrees, the idea that “gender identity” is not just real but more important than sex is a new meme that has spread incredibly fast across the Anglosphere, especially among young women and the college-educated. At the same time there’s been a huge increase in the number of people, especially teenage girls, asserting some sort of gender identity. These are obviously related phenomena. And in both cases, every extra person who succumbs is a large net negative for the world.

Every person who believes ardently that gender identity overrides sex is a person who will argue against sex-based rules concerning single-sex spaces and sports, and therefore in favour of forced breaches of women’s boundaries. If they’re men who insist they are women, they’re highly likely to use spaces that some women – significant majorities, judging from opinion polls – are very unhappy about sharing with them. If they are erotic cross-dressers who would previously have kept their kink to the bedroom or club, they will be emboldened to bring it out into the world. If the women forced to act play bit parts in their fantasy have experienced male violence in the past they may be retraumatised. Even if they haven’t, they may well self-exclude. 

If an ardent believer in gender identity works in education, they will agitate to teach children lies about their bodies and identities. If they work in an operational role they will try to destroy the day-to-day accommodations that women need, for example by making workplace toilets gender-neutral. If they have a policy role they will try to drive through policies that erase all mention of sex – even in the most shocking situations, such as intimate searching by police or forensic examinations of rape victims. They will insist that women should be unable to say no to searches or examinations by men who identify as women, unless they accept being turned away entirely; indeed that such women will be forbidden even to say that the person touching their body is a man, not a woman. If they work in HR they will instigate or facilitate witch-hunts against women who try to talk about any of this. 

A striking example of the impact even one such person can have on others has just come to light in the employment-tribunal judgment of Rachel Meade, a social worker who was severely sanctioned at work for a few gender-critical posts on Facebook (full disclosure, Meade’s barrister, Naomi Cunningham, is chair of Sex Matters, where I work). There’s a good short analysis of the judgment by Michael Foran in the Critic.

But the aspect I want to draw attention to here is who first complained about Meade: Aedon Wolton, a trans-identified woman who used to work with Meade and now works – get this – as “strategic lead for equality” for Sport England, an arms-length government-funded body with a budget of more than £250m a year. Wolton is responsible for Sport England’s “LGBTQ action plan” – here’s an article by her, in which she claims that “discrimination, often in the form of homophobia, biphobia or transphobia, is a common barrier to participation for LGBTQ+ people across a range of sports and sporting environments”. This is the usual conflation of same-sex orientation with gender identity – as if saying “no males in female sports” is the same thing as, say, the nasty mockery of female athletes as “butch lezzers” and suchlike.

This one woman, who seeks to be classified as a man by other people, almost managed to destroy Rachel Meade’s career. If Meade had lost, or not taken a legal case and just slunk off, that would have rippled out across the UK, destroying safeguarding in social work, a profession where it couldn’t be more important, and contributing to an unknowable but large number of children being irreparably damaged. And now Wolton is playing a lead role in policies that are harming women’s sports countrywide.

And then there’s the kids getting caught up in the social contagion. Obviously – obviously! – I want as few children as possible to undergo irreversible medical procedures as a result of the gender-identity meme, just as anyone reasonable would want as few children as possible to pick up contagious ideas about self-harm, self-starvation or any other malignant idea. 

More than that, though: I want as few people as possible to have their teenage years blighted. By now I’ve heard so many stories from parents, and also some young people, about the awful impact becoming seized of gender-identity ideology can have on individuals and all around them. This is true even when they go nowhere near a doctor’s office. Families get thrown into turmoil and conflict; parents have sleepless nights worrying that the situation will escalate; kids who may have real problems don’t do anything that might help them feel better and instead place their hope in snake oil and end up feeling worse. 

I recently met a young woman who had identified as a boy for several years from her mid-teens. She had taken testosterone and had her breasts removed, and was now flip-flopping over whether to detransition, and what that meant. She didn’t seem particularly unhappy about her body, or her personal or family situation – but I was struck by how immature and self-absorbed she was for her age. At a very important developmental stage, when she should have been finishing school, going to university, travelling, doing her first crappy jobs and falling in love for the first time, she had instead wasted her days navel-gazing on the tedious subject of her gender identity. That’s an early adulthood she’ll never get back.

Even in the best-case scenario, the fallout should not be minimised. I’m thinking of a couple of families I know where girls in their early teens have temporarily identified as non-binary/ transmasc for a year or two and then abandoned the whole thing without ever taking any physically harmful steps. It’s striking how the experience has scarred their entire families.

Their parents were shocked to discover that not only was no support available, but that they were immediately framed as risks to their children. They lost sleep worrying that things would escalate – that the next thing would be breast-binders and then hormones. They felt angry and helpless at being told to refer to their daughters as they/them and then he/him, at being subjected to idiotic lectures about how they are sexist and homophobic when they are nothing of the sort – and terrified that if they put a foot wrong something worse would happen. They’ve come out of the whole experience much more suspicious of institutions and with the constant feeling that they only just dodged a bullet.

So, I think I’ve stood up the idea that it’s reasonable to want as few people as possible to fall for gender-identity ideas. But I’d actually go further. What I was feeling my way towards in the interview with Helen Staniland was this: that at least in their extreme version, these ideas are “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

This expression comes from the test in UK equalities law for deciding whether a belief satisfies the “Grainger criteria” – the five tests established in Grainger PLC v. Nicholson, a precedent-setting judgment for deciding whether a person’s “religion or belief” is one that can’t lawfully be the basis for discrimination. Those five criteria are:

1. The belief must be genuinely held.
2. It must be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available. 
3. It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour. 
4. It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance. 
5. It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

The defendant in the Grainger case claimed successfully that he had been selected first for redundancy because he believed in climate change. Other beliefs that have met the criteria are belief that Scotland should be independent, being an ethical vegan and, of course, the “gender-critical belief” that sex is binary and immutable, and that recognising this is important. 

Famously, Maya Forstater’s first-instance ruling concluded that her belief failed the fifth Grainger criterion. Her successful appeal overturned that decision and set precedent – first-instance employment-tribunal hearings don’t, but the employment appeal tribunal does. So although it was horrible for her to lose in the first instance at the time, it’s a bloody good thing she did.

The test set in criterion 5 is pretty easy to pass. You can believe bonkers stuff, and talk about it and “manifest” it, including in work, as long as it doesn’t impair your ability to do the job or make it unreasonably difficult for your employer to run the business. (This isn’t an accurate description of the exact legal test; I Am Not A Lawyer. My point is just that you can be for Brexit or against; believe that abortion is murder or alternatively that it should be available with no restrictions as of right; that only the Elect are going to heaven or that there is no God and when we die we rot; that God designed marriage to be for one man and one woman or that it should be possible to marry your sibling or more than one person…. And you can say so at work too, even if your colleagues really don’t like it, as long as it doesn’t stray into harassment, and be protected against being fired for doing so.)

Saying that a belief is “NWORIADS”, in the acronym – that is, fails to meet criterion 5 – means saying that it is in the ballpark of believing that black people are subhuman and should be enslaved; or that Jews are vermin and should be exterminated; or that men are entitled to force themselves on women regardless of consent. These beliefs are not merely ugly, indeed despicable; they are inherently incompatible with other people’s fundamental rights – enslaving, exterminating or raping cannot be reconciled with other people’s “human dignity”.

So James Tayler, the judge in Maya’s first hearing, was literally saying that to believe that sex is binary and immutable, and that there are times that we must recognise that to protect women’s rights, is to be unworthy of the protections of equality law. That’s quite extraordinary. If you hold a belief that fails Grainger criterion 5 you can, perfectly lawfully, be discriminated against without sanction in work and in the provision of goods and services. You can be fired, turned away from business premises, refused service in shops, pubs and restaurants. Landlords can refuse to rent to you; banks can refuse to open an account for you. And they can do all of this while stating openly that your belief is the reason. 

So why do I think that believing the opposite might be that bad? Well, if you look back up at the reasons I said I wanted as few people as possible to believe that gender identity should overwrite sex, you’ll see why. The consequences of that belief, if you’re sincere in it and manifest the logical consequences, are that you are ideologically committed to acting in ways that destroy other people’s rights. Rights to privacy and freedom of belief and speech. The accommodations necessary to give women genuine equality in public life and to reduce the risk that they are subjected to male violence and to contact and non-contact sex crimes. Children’s rights to be protected by the adults around them, taught the truth and safeguarded against dangerous ideas and predators. 

Whether a specific person’s belief is that bad will always be a fine judgment. Take someone who says “trans women are women” and that people should use “preferred pronouns”, but doesn’t force their way into spaces for the opposite sex or try to get people sacked for misgendering, and who accepts that in certain situations you do need to distinguish between “biological women” and “trans women”.

People like this make me shrug – I don’t think they really believe what they say they believe. But that’s fine. People say they believe all sorts of mad things, and often they demonstrably don’t really, because if they did they would prove it by doing awful things. It’s like someone who claims to believe in homeopathy or crystal healing but still goes to the doctor when they have something actually wrong with them, or who claims to believe in astrology but limits that to unfalsifiable claims about people’s personalities. If they don’t try to end mainstream health care or require all businesses to hire according to what is written in the stars, their belief is kind of fake, but also not really a problem.

Across the West, over the past several hundred years, there has been a moderation of religions from intolerant, proselytising and violent forms to private, personal beliefs that can be accommodated alongside other beliefs, and lack of belief, within a secular framework. The idea that everyone should be free to hold their own beliefs would have been given short shrift by the Crusaders or Inquisition or the British government that imposed anti-Catholic laws on Ireland in the 17th century. Citing freedom of belief is still not going to get you very far in, say, Saudi Arabia.

Whether a person’s beliefs pass the Grainger tests depends very much on what precisely they believe. Christianity, generally, is protected – but someone whose Christianity encompasses the passages in the Bible endorsing slavery and exhorting people to burn witches isn’t going to be covered. Similarly, there are probably plenty of people who say “trans women are women” and “everyone can self-identify as whatever gender they please” but don’t actually believe that rapists should be put in women’s jails or that women should be forced to accept men as women in sensitive situations. I’m not sure how they can square what they say with not endorsing the consequences! But there we are.

So when I say a believer in gender identity might have a belief that is NWORIADS, I’m talking about someone who says gender identity is the one true test of whether someone is a man or a woman, and really means it. Someone who doesn’t just say “woman” means “people who say they’re women”, but who acts and advocates for the logical consequences. Who, if they were “assigned male at birth” but identify as a woman, would barge into women’s spaces and play in women’s sports, and who would, whether trans-identified or not, seek to get anyone who objected fired, blacklisted by the media and so on. Who thinks that children should be treated as the sex they say they are, and seeks to bring down the might of the law on any parent or teacher who won’t go along with that. Such people hold a belief that’s inherently rights-destroying, and incompatible with the dignity of others.

As I started to write this on Wednesday 10th January, a select committee in Westminster was taking evidence from the minister for crime, policing and fire, Chris Philp MP. He was asked about a report just published by the grassroots Women’s Rights Network. Using freedom-of-information requests, it found that 35 of 47 police forces in England and Wales had either already decided or were in the process of deciding that, as a matter of policy, men who identify as women count as women for the purpose of stripping and searching. This means both that a woman who is arrested may be searched by a male police officer, provided he claims to be a woman, and that a female police officer may be told that she must search a male suspect who says he’s a woman.

Pleasingly, Philp was having none of it, and said quite clearly that he would be following up and ensuring that such unlawful policies were changed. More worryingly, he also said that if a man had gone through the process of getting a gender-recognition certificate – which simply means changing your name on a few bills, persuading a doctor that your sex makes you feel miserable, waiting two years and sending off a form with £5 – then the man would indeed count as a woman for the purposes of searching. This is where the whole thing has led: men being given pieces of paper by the government that license them to violate women’s human rights.

And so here’s what I learned from the whole kerfuffle about the “huge problem in a sane world”: if you really, truly believe this whole gender thing you will naturally want things like this to happen. Your belief is so harmful that it cannot be accommodated within a democratic, rights-respecting society. I don’t think I’d have got there so fast without the fuss.

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