What Will It Take to Return to Reality?

Helen Joyce's Speech at the Bigger Picture Lisbon Conference

I’m now back in the UK after attending the third Genspect conference, in Lisbon, and staying on for a few days’ holiday. I thought the conference was a triumph. I’ll share some further reflections on it in the next issue, but first, here are my tidied-up speaking notes for my session.

It’s almost a year and a half since the first Genspect conference, in Killarney, and what I spoke about there was how what’s being done in gender clinics is not medicine, although it looks like it. It’s a post-truth charade that relies on the signs and symbols of evidence-based medicine – consultations, diagnoses, drugs and surgeries – while ignoring its spirit. Judith Butler famously said gender was an “imitation without an original” – a set of ritualised practices that gain meaning only because they are performed over and over again. Well, gender medicine has an original – real medicine – but it consists of ritualised practices that are all form and no substance.

And I set this in a larger picture of an emerging political and ideological framework that I called hyper-liberalism, or hyper-individualism. What I’m going to do today is revisit that framework and show how it upends not just law and medicine, which is what I talked about last time, but science, art, education, safeguarding and policymaking of all kinds. And then I’ll give some hope because the same thing that makes this idea so universally destructive – namely that it’s totalising because everything is connected – is a good thing when you’re on the front foot. I’ll also give some practical advice about how to fight back gleaned from having heard people’s stories for years now, and from seeing the result of polling and focus groups.

Okay, so first the hyper-liberalism, or hyper-individualism. To recap, you can think about what it means to be a person in either a communal or an individual way. From a communal point of view, we’re people because we’re humans. We have a lot in common with each other, and those shared feelings, understandings, interests, desires and so on are why we are even able to have a concept of the common good, and why we could even think of writing a “universal declaration of human rights”.

If you think about it, without such a thing as a shared human nature there could be no such thing as human rights. You couldn’t say “rape and murder are bad” because why? We’re sure that they’re bad, that the victims are indeed victims – that they don’t want to be raped or murdered – because there is a human nature. It’s not that culture has no influence on what we think is good or bad, and it’s not that we are all the same or all want precisely the same things. It’s that we do have fundamental things in common. That’s why we can say that it’s good not to be tortured – that’s Article 3, freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment – and why America’s founding fathers took it as self-evident that people desire life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

But we’re also individuals, and that too is meaningful for what it is to be human, to be good, to be happy and to flourish. A lot of what we think it is to be happy is to be self-actualised, to be free to make decisions and to choose what for ourselves what it means to live the “good life”. 

One way of understanding the difference between people with conservative and liberal leanings is which of these two good things, which are in tension, they see as more important. Do people need to be constrained by society, to seek to live up to an external idea of what is good? Or do people need to be as free as possible to pursue their own idea of happiness, and to be as aware as possible of what they personally find appealing, of their own particularities and inner self?

What we’ve seen not just in the last few years, but the last few centuries, is the progress of the liberal side of this balance, and now it’s been pushed to an extreme. There’s an emerging mindset that all of us naturally have a right understanding of our true selves unless society has twisted and deformed us. That it can’t be bad to “be yourself”, or to “bring your whole self to work” because you’re the only authority on yourself, and you can’t be wrong. That any time a person says they are something, and “the authorities” don’t agree, it’s the authorities that are not only wrong but evil, in that they are forcing individuals to live inauthentically. “Gender self-ID” is then a no-brainer. If you think another person’s self-declaration harms you, you must be mistaken, because by definition people understanding themselves are doing a virtuous and praiseworthy thing.

Logically this is ridiculous. We can’t all live in solitary splendour putting on our own one-man or one-woman plays. We share the stage. Metaphorically speaking, the human-rights framework and other laws are what tell us when we get to be the lead actor, when we have to accept a supporting role and when we have to be the audience. 

More than that, this mindset is hopelessly naive. Obviously, people are on occasion bad actors who seek to hurt each other, including by lying, including by telling lies about themselves. And the more incentives there are to lie, and the fewer bad consequences, the more people will do it.

The upshot is that we continue to have a legal framework that is supposed to be based on a shared understanding of what it is to be human, and to flourish. Many of these rights are to make our own choices and express ourselves as we wish, and each person’s human rights are constrained not just by other people’s rights but by things like “sound administration”, “public health” and so on.

And yet, unacknowledged, a new belief system has arisen within the liberal human-rights framework and co-opted its language. This framework relies on objective tests for what sorts of beliefs are covered, how you balance rights when they collide and when other considerations take precedence. But hyper-individualism makes those tests, with their need for balancing and objective yardsticks, impossible. 

Take privacy and free speech: if one person’s supposed “privacy right” is to conceal their sex, but I can easily see that sex and wish to state it, now I can’t. Because what to me functions as the other person demanding that they can conceal their sex is to them an expression of their true self – the gendered one, not the sexed one.

It’s worth pausing for a second to register how this shift doesn’t merely destroy human rights, it harnesses the machinery of human-rights law to work against human rights. Silencing other people about a perfectly obvious fact that everyone can see – that someone is a man or a woman – now has the force of a human right behind it, namely privacy, when in fact it’s a rights violation – a serious infringement of other people’s freedom of speech. 

Similarly, self-ID means that a man who strips off in front of naked women in a supposedly women-only space is doing something right and proper if he identifies as a woman. Again, this is not just a destruction of human rights, it’s a full reversal. And it’s not just any old human-rights violation, it’s state-sanctioned sex crime – voyeurism and indecent exposure – and an Article 3 violation. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that being forced to undress in front of someone of the opposite sex violates Article 3 – the right not to suffer torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. And note that Article 3 is an absolute, not qualified, right. 

Hyper-individualism is also hyper-subjectivity. If you can never take the measure of a man, you can’t set objective standards or criteria, and you can’t categorise. If you want to make generalisations, those generalisations can only be under headings like: “people who think of themselves as belonging to a certain category, for which I can give no objective definition, say they experienced things they understood as instances of a certain sort of experience, for which I can also give no objective definition.”

You can’t say: male people commit most violent crimes, or most rape victims are female, or that nearly everyone who works as a firefighter is male, or that every human being who has ever become pregnant is female. You can have no test of the “reasonable person”. 

All boundaries dissolve. That’s what queer theory is about: making it impossible to say that anything is different or separate from anything else. You can’t say things are objectively good or bad – except that it’s definitely bad to disagree with someone’s self-categorisation. This breaks institutions, and specifically, it breaks them at their point of purpose. If an organisation was set up to educate, it starts to indoctrinate – to teach lies, and punish anyone who points out that they are lies. If it was set up to do safeguarding, it starts to work to increase the risks of harm and abuse for vulnerable people. If it was set up to promote free speech, it becomes a censor. If it was set up to support and strengthen women, it instead starts to sideline and put down women and promote men in their place.

It also destroys entire fields of human endeavour. Take scientific research. I’ll give an example I recently heard about from a reviewer for a research funder. They were sent a proposal to research a specific harmful outcome from pregnancy. The researcher was clearly knowledgeable and passionate about it, and the proposal was excellent – except among the criteria for inclusion was “recently gave birth, identifying as female”, and among those for exclusion was “not a trans woman”. But what about mothers who don’t identify as female? And do we really want our science to be done by people who have managed to get confused about whether a trans woman can possibly give birth? When the reviewer followed up it became clear that the researcher did indeed know this, but hadn’t known how to frame the criteria without being criticised for being “transphobic”.

That researcher took it for granted that people want good health. That we know what it looks like for wounds to heal well and badly, and that it’s better for them to heal well. That a woman who has given birth has certain vulnerabilities and risks, and that we might want to do research on how to – just off the top of my head – make it less likely that she wets herself when she sneezes, or suffers back pain because her core muscles never recover, or stops having pleasurable sex because her episiotomy left a painful scar. 

The researcher didn’t say: what is pain but a socially constructed category? Or: isn’t it stigmatising to incontinent persons to suggest that it would be better not to have stress incontinence as a result of giving birth? Or: isn’t the expectation that a woman would want to continue to have penis-in-vagina sex after giving birth heterosexist? That research was based on ideas of common humanity, of what it means for organs to function healthily, that pain is worse than lack of pain, that it’s good to be able to continue to have sex when you want and to protect people’s fertility so they can choose whether or not to have a baby rather than having the choice taken from them.

To do good research, in other words, you have to regard some outcomes as better than others, and to judge outcomes by objective criteria. 

What happens when objectivity and the concepts of “better” and “worse” outcomes are abandoned? What you get is papers like this: Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the “normal”: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender pregnancy. It talks about how uncertainty regarding the use of testosterone in pregnancy feeds into “gendered precautionary practices that work toward avoiding potential risk through protecting embryos, fetuses, children, and families above all else… driven… by a focus on attempting to (re)produce normative bodies and people… involve potentially troubling assessments of the sorts of risks testosterone exposure in the prenatal and postpartum environments may pose for later child and adult development: namely, potentially heightened likelihoods of autism, obesity, intersex conditions, being lesbian and/or trans.”

It’s no better for your baby to be born “normal” and “healthy” than disabled or unhealthy, and if you think it is you’re a bigot. (And note throwing “lesbian” in with serious health conditions.) I call this the “have a disabled baby to stick it to the cisheteropatriarchy” paper.

(That paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, by the way – that is, by taxpayers.)

Not just medical research but healthcare are upended within this new framework. At least until the last few years, healthcare professionals were trained within the objective scientific tradition. That meant differential diagnosis, validated self-report, objective symptoms, and understanding healthy functioning, and what causes conditions and how they progress. Gender clinics are working within this system – holding consultations, taking blood tests, offering diagnoses, writing prescriptions, referring to other specialists, making claims about outcomes and efficacy – but none of what they do is really medicine. The gender clinic is a scenario, a backdrop, against which people can perform their identities. Note it’s not just “not medicine”, it’s anti-medicine. It produces ill-health and harm.

I read a great expression recently: Tooth Fairy Science. It was coined by Harriet Hall, a doctor who died last year who was a proponent of rationalist medicine and opponent of quackery. She wrote:

“If you don’t consider prior probability, you can end up doing what I call Tooth Fairy Science. You can study whether leaving the tooth in a baggie generates more Tooth Fairy money than leaving it wrapped in Kleenex. You can study the average money left for the first tooth versus the last tooth. You can correlate Tooth Fairy proceeds with parental income. You can get reliable data that are reproducible, consistent, and statistically significant. You think you have learned something about the Tooth Fairy. But you haven’t. Your data has another explanation, parental behavior, that you haven’t even considered. You have deceived yourself by trying to do research on something that doesn’t exist.”

Gender medicine could be called Evil Tooth Fairy Medicine. The idea that using puberty blockers to throw a spanner in the works of a teenager’s developing brain, body, personality and sexuality might be a solution to anything is for the birds. But unfortunately that hypothesis is out there now and we’re doing that research.

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I’m sure you’ve noticed how ugly all the visual depictions produced by trans lobby groups and social-justice types are. They’re generally in the style called Corporate Memphis – blobby people; flat, unrealistic skin colours; no expressions, sometimes no facial features; digitless hands and feet; distorted proportions and shapes. In this style, the only difference between men and women is the hairstyles and clothing.

That’s obviously very useful for a movement that seeks to suggest we are women if we have long hair and breasts, and men if we have short hair and no breasts. But the nastiness of this style goes further. It claims to be motivated by a desire to be diverse and inclusive, but it seeks to achieve that not by portraying individual exemplars of the human condition – pain, imperfection, overcoming, suffering, courage, joy and so on – but by being stereotyped and non-specific. Good art isn’t generalities, it’s keenly observed and expressive. 

This style seems more sinister when you realise how easy it is to use to draw unhealthy or unnatural body types. Enormously obese people, missing limbs, mastectomy scars – everyone looks equally inexpressive and unreal. It’s one thing to try to avoid stigmatising people whose bodies fall short of some Platonic ideal, quite another to paint out all struggle and suffering. This style isn’t merely inhuman, it’s anti-human. 

The same happens with writing. I’m going to take as an example a review by Substacker Holly Math Nerd of a novella called “Their Troublesome Crush” by Xan West (the full review is behind a paywall).

Here’s the blurb for the book: 

In this queer polyamorous m/f romance novella, two metamours [this means people who sleep with the same person] realize they have crushes on each other while planning their shared partner's birthday party together. Ernest, a Jewish autistic demiromantic queer fat trans man submissive, and Nora, a Jewish disabled queer fat femme cis woman switch, have to contend with an age gap, a desire not to mess up their lovely polyamorous dynamic as metamours, the fact that Ernest has never been attracted to a cis person before, and the reality that they are romantically attracted to each other, all while planning their dominant’s birthday party and trying to do a really good job.

I looked up reviews; this one was typical.

“This book was chock-full of representation, and it was honestly such a treat. I’m personally not kinky or polyamorous, so if you are, this book will likely work even better for you than it did for me. But I am queer and autistic, and I specifically really loved the autism rep. It made me feel very safe and very seen. Of course the queer rep was great as well, but I just don’t get to see good autism rep very often, so this means a lot to me.”

As the reviewer Holly – who has several serious medical conditions – says: “When I choose to give a character of my creation part of the complexity I know well from living in my physical body or paying attention to others who deal with their own physical challenges, I am attempting to make the character more fully realized.” “Their Troublesome Crush” isn’t that. It’s the opposite. Its characters are stereotypes, and deeply unpleasant with it.

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I think we’re all aware of what is happening in education because of these ideas. But I’ll just give one example. 

A friend has a four-year-old who has just started school. She’s already had her first RSE (relationships and sex education) lesson. It involved the teacher asking the children to think about which games and toys are for girls, which games and toys are for boys, and which games and toys are for neither. The teachers’ notes have the obvious examples of dolls for girls, trucks for boys – and it says things like board games are for both. When my friend asked the teacher about the lesson, she was told it was about “inclusivity” because the kids were supposed to discover that there are toys everyone is allowed to play with.

The teacher seemed perfectly nice, and not obviously insane, but didn’t understand that this lesson was clearly the start of a scheme of work that is intended to have brought every child, by the end of primary school, to the point where they believe that if you play with dolls you’re a girl and if you play with trucks you’re a boy – and probably that if you like board games you’re non-binary. 

When a lie is embedded in a system, over time it propagates throughout that system, and then everyone working within it has to try to protect the lie by avoiding going anywhere near it. It’s worse than a loophole, which over time tends to get bigger – it’s a loophole you have to avert your eyes from and avoid mentioning.

I want to give a stark example. Many of you here will know that Sonia Appleby was the safeguarding lead at GIDS, she was disciplined for raising safeguarding concerns and she successfully took GIDS to the employment tribunal. Well, what led to the disciplinary action against Sonia was that she mentioned one of Britain’s most notorious and prolific child-abusers, Jimmy Savile. After he died it came out, as so often, that loads of people either had known or should have known that something was up, but didn’t do anything. 

Whenever training colleagues in safeguarding, Sonia routinely referred to Savile, her point being that it’s everyone’s responsibility to be vigilant and to speak up, and that not just people but institutions can be groomed and be complicit. A colleague was deeply offended at the idea that he could be considered as at risk of being complicit in child abuse and made a complaint. A letter was put on Sonia’s file for supposedly unprofessional and improper behaviour.

After Savile died there were official inquiries and public apologies and the usual guff about “lessons must be learned”. Well, it turns out that the lesson of Jimmy Savile is – don’t mention Jimmy Savile. Institutions that have a lie at their heart, as GIDS does, namely the lie of gender identity, end up breaking at their point of purpose.

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I think I’ve stood up the idea that gender-identity ideology is totalising – the same lie breaks very different institutions and fields of endeavour in what look like different ways, but they’re all connected. So now, let’s think about how it can be put into reverse. 

First, where to focus your efforts? People tend to notice one part of the problem first, and to seek to fix it in that place, partly because otherwise it feels too big to set right but also because doing something concrete means having some expertise – knowing the frameworks and the terms of art and professional standards in a field, and whom you might be able to convince. So it makes sense if you’re in a particular field, to work in that field. 

More generally, if there’s a particular problem that drives you particularly mad, that may be where to start. It’s like the thing that personal trainers and physios say – the best sort of exercise is the exercise you do. It’s pointless saying that bootcamp might be better for you than zumba, if you hate bootcamp and like zumba. You’ll do the zumba and you won’t do the bootcamp. So if what drives you insane is the threat to children, or to free speech, or to lesbians, or whatever, focus there.

But I will make three general observations:

1. Don’t wear yourself out or put yourself at undue risk. Don’t lose your job. Try not to lose friends and really try not to lose family.

2. Whenever possible focus on institutions not people, and on rules not individual examples.  Go for local authorities or school chains rather than schools, and schools rather than individual teachers. Best of all is focusing on policymakers. 

3. If you’re traumatised, you will naturally want to focus on the central thing for you, and there are many people in this room who have been traumatised by the impact on their children and who have thrown themselves into this fight. Of course that’s fine. But I also hear from people privately who tell me their own awful family story and then apologise for not doing anything publicly, often because they need to protect what remains of the relationship with their child or because they are afraid they are going to go mad. It’s as if they need absolution for not stepping up, and that’s such an unreasonable pressure to put themselves under. It’s for those of us who see the issue but aren’t personally affected to step up. In particular, child safeguarding isn’t children’s job, it’s adults’. Schoolchildren shouldn’t have to be brave.

But if you are genuinely asking for where activism is likely to bear fruit first – or which arguments are likely to move people in one-to-one conversation – I can tell you the answer because we (Sex Matters) have done focus groups. 

In general, most people are in roughly the right place, but they don’t like the idea of being mean or rude, and they definitely don’t want to be the ones who have to say “no” to anyone. You can see the impact of workplace training – people spontaneously say that “misgendering” is “unprofessional”. They want to “live and let live”, and they really, really haven’t thought their thoughts all the way through to the end on women-only spaces. They mostly know perfectly well that people can’t change sex but they think people who want to are very rare and deeply, deeply suffering. They think doctors are screening out chancers and that “transition” means something – they use expressions like “if they’ve gone through the change” or “if they’ve had the operation” or “if they’ve fully transitioned”. An increasing number know someone trans or someone who has a trans-identifying child, and they clearly don’t want to get in any sort of argument with them. They may feel personal sympathy.

But there are two topics where people are almost automatically where we want them to be, and those are child gender medicine and sports. We think it’s because in both cases there’s an easily accessible moral framework that has nothing to do with identitarianism, and that doesn’t bring to mind the false analogies – with women’s liberation, civil rights or gay marriage – that so bedevil this topic. For children, people simply think “they’re too young” to be the boss of themselves, still less to do anything irreversible. And in women’s sports they keep coming back to “it’s not fair”. 

Well, we certainly want to stop child gender medicine and protect women’s sports. But that’s not enough – and that’s when the thing that has caused us so much trouble as this idea spread, namely that everything is connected, can start to work with us. 

“Sports” means “changing rooms” as well as competitions. It means the development pipeline as well as elite competitions, and that means sport in schools. And if you can’t lie about who’s a boy and who’s a girl when they are playing sport, then how can you lie about them elsewhere in school?

“No child gender medicine” means an end to the idea of the “trans child”. It means no longer teaching children that transitioning is a thing. It means that you can’t pretend that any boys are girls, or any girls are boys. And once you stop that pretence, it’s obvious what the words “boy” and “girl” mean in school rules and safeguarding. 

And if you can’t let boys into girls’ spaces in school without endangering kids, and you can’t keep them out without being clear about who is actually a girl and who is a boy, then you can make the same argument for adults. First in places where there’s someone who knows who everyone is and who has a duty of care – for example, prisons and workplaces. And then in other spaces too, because if men can’t use the women’s toilets at work, then why on earth are we letting them do so in the shopping centre? 

This is the real importance of the UK’s ban on puberty blockers. They’re not really a serious treatment option in the UK – I don’t think more than hundreds of kids have taken them, certainly not more than a few thousand. What they are is a rhetorical and argumentative device.

The mere fact of their existence means that it is in principle possible to start presenting a small child to everyone around them as the wrong sex and to imagine you’ll be able to get away with it permanently. If you know before you start that puberty will come along and reveal the lie, it’s less likely that you’ll ever start. There isn’t a half-way position, of lying to and misleading children temporarily, knowing that down the line you will not be able to arrest their mental, physical and sexual development and ultimately mutilate them so that the lie is never revealed. In order to start with the lies, at least the notional possibility of arresting their development and ultimately mutilating them has to be on the table.

I’m not saying the unravelling will happen automatically – every stage will have to be fought. I’m just saying that I know where we’ll make progress fastest right now, and that once each step is taken the next will be clear, because it’s all connected. We have to keep taking those steps, but we don’t come up to a dead end unless we give up trying. 

I don’t hold out much hope that we are going to all forget about the idiotic idea that people have gendered essences, at least not any time soon. Once an idea is out in the world, it’s pretty much impossible to get it back into the box. But the consequences of holding this particular bizarre and harmful belief, both for the believer and for everyone else, can be constrained. A child can think they are the opposite sex, or no sex, if they want – they can even have parents who think this. But if schools are enforcing sex-based rules when it comes to single-sex spaces and sports, and there are no clinics offering Evil Tooth Fairy Medicine, the harm will be limited. 

The same with sports: if we return to cheek swabs to check that an athlete is female before she can compete in women’s events, it stops mattering whether a male athlete “identifies as female”. He can go identify as female in the male/ open competition to his little heart’s content.

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The third thing I want to say about how to approach activism in this field is this: don’t rush, and be very intentional – in both directions. 

We heard yesterday from several people about deradicalisation and getting people out of cults. And what they said was: take it slow, leave space for the other person to do some thinking themselves, and accept that it takes time.

I know it’s difficult to seem measured and rational once you’ve seen that it’s nonsense all the way down. For example, I don’t want any more enabling of gender medicine. I don’t want a puberty-blocker trial or any more evidence reviews, because this is just Evil Tooth Fairy Medicine. But to someone good and well-meaning working within medicine – someone like, say, an endocrinologist or child psychiatrist who has severe reservations about what’s happening in gender clinics but hasn’t freed their mind from the idea of the “transgender child” or “transition” – that seems like extremism.

So it’s tempting, and probably essential, to work step by step. But the story of safeguarding failures shows that’s a big problem too.

What typically happens when there’s a major safeguarding failure is that lots of people could have spoken up but they don’t because they know there will be consequences. It’s easy to think they are cowards, and maybe sometimes they are, but they’re also right. Typically, they think something like: if I say something I’ll be managed out and I’m the only cautious, careful person here, so it’s better that I stay and work within the system because if I’m pushed out the next person will be worse. So they stay quiet, and they stay, and then two years later they’re that “worse”.

It’s the whistle blower’s dilemma: your job is to speak up, but if you do, you get punished, often kicked out, and the people who replace you are worse. So you stay, and try to limit the harm and keep your job, and then – as Sonia Appleby said – you’re groomed and become complicit.

I don’t think there are many people here who have decided to keep their heads down, but other people may watch the video of this talk later, so I’m going to say something to anyone who knows that they are, in effect, working at a crime scene and aware that if they report the crime there will be professional consequences. It’s this: ask yourself now what the line is that you are unwilling to cross. Write it down, and pin it up somewhere visible – maybe by your hall mirror. And when you get to that line, speak up. Otherwise you will end up complicit to things you would never, ever have believed you will accept.

I want to finish with a final, optimistic point. There is a meta thing all of us can do, and it's not obviously directly related to gender. I said that what we’re up against isn’t just about a lie about the two sexes, it’s a hyper-individualism and hyper-subjectivity that denies all standards, definitions, judgments about what is better and what is worse, what might constitute a good life and what it means that there is a human condition.

And that means that if you uphold those things – in any sphere of activity – then you are fighting back. If you recentre meaning, if you do good scientific research, provide good healthcare or create art that reveals and recreates meaning, if you insist on quality and beauty, then you’re doing something that is inimical to the trans bullshit and the project of hyper-individualism more broadly.

This article was originally published in Joyce Activated, Issue 94 on October 4th 2024

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