Joyce activated, issue 96

I’m in Berlin today, at the protest outside the Bundestag against the new gender self-ID law that has just come into force. Around the world women are protesting outside German embassies; I accepted an invitation from the organisers in Germany to come and show solidarity with them. They kindly translated my speech to German and distributed it so people could follow along.

Here’s the text (approximately) as I delivered it.

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George Orwell is supposed to have said: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

We live in a time of deceit. The deceit we’re talking about here today is the deceit of gender self-ID. It’s the lie that what makes people men or women, boys or girls, males or females, is what they claim about themselves based on their ideas and feelings, not the reality of their immutable sexed bodies. 

Think about what it would mean for that to be true. It would mean that humans are somehow fundamentally different not just from other primates, not just from other mammals, but from all other living things. This is a new, secular version of creationism. It’s a claim that our species is not part of Nature but is set above it, able to rewrite biological reality and the rules of life by sheer force of will, rather than subject to them like every other evolved species.

But being this specific type of animal isn’t something meaningless! We are human beings: with everything good and bad, every strength and limitation, that implies – everything that is specific to our species and everything that is shared with other forms of life. Like other animals, we are conceived, we are born and we grow up. We conceive and nourish new lives, in a process that is fundamentally and irreducibly different for males and females. And then we grow old and we die. 

But we are different from every other animal too – not set apart from them, just different. We are physically weak and we live complex imaginary lives. We are often confused by the feeling that we are “ghosts in a machine”, the striking phrase that the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle used to describe René Descartes’ mind–body dualism – or, in the words of one the most famous poems by Irish poet W.B. Yeats, we are souls “fastened to a dying animal”. 

In the disembodied modern world, with machines to do our work and to allow us to communicate as two-dimensional faces on a screen and voices coming out of our computer speakers, which allow us to represent ourselves as CGI and computer game avatars and social media profiles – we are leaning into the already dangerously attractive notion that our true selves are something separate from our bodies, rather than our bodies being indivisibly us.

This is causing all sorts of harm. To our physical health, as we move too little and disengage from the material world. To our mental health, as we retreat into virtual spaces, focus inwards rather than outwards, ruminate about our identities rather than seek connections with others, and imagine that a good life is to be found in self-definition rather than in doing good work and helping others. 

We see these harms most acutely in our children, in the mental-health crisis that is sweeping through schools as they are encouraged to see themselves as fragile and to reframe every challenge as a trauma. To think of the project of growing up as one of making specific and often idiosyncratic identity claims – not just about gender but about physical and mental health conditions, often self-diagnosed – and treating other people’s lack of interest in our special selves as “hate”. To regard puberty as avoidable, rather than one of life’s two great developmental sprints, second only behind babyhood. 

This self-ID law is motivated by all these toxic, pernicious ideas. And like all ideas that run counter to material reality, it hurts the least privileged most. 

It hurts women. If men can declare themselves to be women, then women cannot draw boundaries that exclude men. 

When women cannot say No to men, we do not have rights. A woman who has been raped cannot insist that only another woman can carry out a forensic examination on the body that has been violated by a man. She cannot turn to the support of women-only spaces to recover and heal. She cannot form women-only organisations where she can talk about experiences that only women go through. She cannot tell men who intrude on everyday spaces reserved for women to get out. 

Of course it’s “not all men” who commit violence and sexual crimes towards women – but it’s mostly men. We can’t tell which ones are safe – but we can be pretty sure that the boundary violators; the men who insist that their special identities give them the right to overstep our boundaries and ignore our No – are more likely than the average man to cause us harm, not less. 

Good men stay out so that bad men stand out. If the men who claim to be women really understood what it was to be a woman, they would not impose themselves on us like this.

The destructive idea of gender self-ID hurts children. They believe what adults tell them: ideas have consequences. If we tell them that their bodies are unimportant, that they are disembodied creatures transported like automata around the material world in bodies they are encouraged to regard as customisable meat-suits; that they can opt out of growing up; that other people must pretend to see them as the sex they are not; that if other people refuse to engage in that pretence then they must be hateful and want children dead – well, then we are teaching our children to be seriously mentally unwell. 

We are creating bodily distress and discomfort in children who would otherwise have navigated the choppy waters of adolescence and emerged as adults who are happy, healthy and whole. We are putting untold numbers on the path to gender distress, some of whom will go on to make irreversible decisions that harm their health for their whole lives. 

Some will take puberty blockers, which we’re increasingly sure damage brain development and bone strength, and stunt a child’s genitals. We know that these powerful, untested medications block the process whereby children come to understand their emerging adult sexuality. We know that they lock in gender distress, rather than allowing time and maturity to resolve it. They make it almost certain that the child will progress to cross-sex hormones, which cause permanent physical changes to secondary sex characteristics – beards and deep voices for girls; breasts for boys. And finally, these drugs put children on the path to cross-sex surgeries in adulthood.

Some of these children are boys who have retreated from real life into online spaces, identifying with avatars that can change sexed characteristics with the click of a button. Some are in flight from masculinity, which they have been told is irremediably toxic. Some fear becoming men, which looks so difficult when the housing market and jobs market are broken. Some have been lured into a perverted fantasy world by the addictive and violent porn that is so readily accessible on their mobile phones.

Some are girls who know what their male classmates are looking at, and who reject the portrayal of female sexuality as objectification and degradation. The porn aesthetic – false eyelashes, fake tan, plumped-up lips, acrylic nails – is now mainstream and even young teenage girls feel that they have to be Instagram-ready at all times. If this seems unachievable or unbearable, they may think that they cannot be “real girls” and opt out by identifying as boys or non-binary.

This is the most depressing development of my lifetime. I’m old enough to remember when girls were told they were fully human, that within the constraints of physical strength and the facts of reproduction, we could do anything. Now girls are told instead – on social media and in classrooms – that what makes a girl is feeling like a girl. And what does a girl “feel like”? Every sexist, outdated stereotype you can think of. Now, accepting that you are a girl is accepting that you are not a fully rounded human, just as much the author of your fate as boys are. 

And to add the final, outrageous twist to this story, we know that among the children demanding gender change, those destined to be gay adults are hugely overrepresented. Instead of growing up happy, healthy and same-sex oriented, they are being turned into permanent medical patients – and sterile, anorgasmic facsimiles of the opposite sex.

It doesn’t escape my notice that this makes them “straight” (and, for those who have gender surgeries, desexed via castration, a punishment beyond the wildest dreams of the most vicious homophobes of past times). 

We should be telling these precious non-conforming children that they are beautiful just the way they are. That boys can wear skirts and makeup and grow their hair. That they can play with dolls and do ballet. That girls can climb trees, play in the mud, crop their hair and become lorry drivers. That both boys and girls can love whomever they want. That it doesn’t matter if a boy is “effeminate” or a girl is “butch” – the boy is still a boy and the girl is still a girl. 

Instead we are telling children that if they don’t conform, there is something profoundly wrong with them. That if a girl isn’t girly, she’s probably a boy, and vice versa. That these children don’t just need time, space and understanding – they need their bodies fixed with drugs and surgeries. Of all the lies of gender identity, this is the most cruel.

This isn’t just any old medical scandal, it’s gay “conversion therapy” in the truest, most catastrophic sense. And it isn’t even the only way this toxic idea hurts gay people. 

When there is no stable meaning of sex, there can be no stable meaning of sexual orientation. A straight man who identifies as a woman becomes a lesbian – and too bad for the actual lesbians who don’t see him that way. Telling lesbians that they should “get over” their aversion to male bodies is conversion therapy too. It’s the postmodern version of what lesbians used to hear – that what they need to set them straight is a good fuck.

Rules and laws are written in words. And if words lose their meaning, so do the rules and laws. That’s what the queer theorists want – they think boundaries and categories are destructive, and abolishing them is liberating. 

The destruction of meaning won’t stop at sex. Already we are seeing scientific research corrupted by the destruction of sexed categories. If you erase the difference between male and female, how long can you hold onto distinctions between health and sickness, and between organs functioning properly or failing? How long can you hold onto the idea that some things are objectively better than others?

This has gone too far. We cannot and must not allow ourselves to be co-opted into lies, especially when those lies are about a fundamental aspect of the human condition. If we don’t stand up now, where will this end?

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Well, telling the truth in a time of deceit also has a price. We have not – yet – reached the point where the truth about the two sexes is impossible to state. But that is the direction of travel.

I know there will be penalties in this country for so-called “misgendering” – but Germans, like all other Europeans, do still have the human rights listed in the European Convention on Human Rights. These include freedom of belief and expression, and there is a great deal of case law that recognises free speech as foundational among human rights because without it, it is impossible to advocate for any others.

The state may say that a man can be a woman, but we individuals who know this to be false need to refuse to say this lie, and fight every step of the way if they try to force us. 

They will claim we are prejudiced or unkind – far from it. The true unkindness is pressing forward with this lie that causes so much harm. 

No matter what the law, this is what I will continue to say:

No man can be a woman, and no woman can be a man. No one is non-binary. 

I will say these things, because I don’t believe the lies.

And there’s a reason I don’t believe them: it’s because they are false. Pieces of paper or self-declaration can’t change people’s sex, any more than they can make a dead person alive or an alive person dead, or than a law could make the Earth flat instead of round. 

If someone else wants to believe that a man is a woman, or that a dead person is alive, or the Earth is flat, they have freedom of belief and speech too – but in none of these cases are the opposing positions equal. One is right and one is wrong

And saying the one that is right matters, because the truth matters. For good health care and scientific research. For sound governance and public policy-making. For child safeguarding. For protecting everyone’s human rights, but most especially the rights of women, children and gay people.

I understand that for some people the cost of speaking the truth will be too high. Not everyone can be a revolutionary. But those of us who can speak up must – or else, soon enough, none of us will be able to. 

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