Book Review: Shon Faye & Helen Joyce

Ahh 'tone' I'll give them tone. Just fuck off.

Another review of both books in The New Statesman - www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/09/how-to-talk-about-trans-rights

Whilst not a glowing review of SF’s book the reviewer appears to have an issue with HJ’s ‘tone’.

I'm guessing it is rich and insightful if one is reading it from the angle that trans people are desperately abused and harassed in all areas of life, and therefore the whole of society needs to change to accommodate them.

However the prologue doesn't fill me that it will be extensively researched and referenced.

For extract of prologue.

www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/article/shon-faye-book-the-transgender-issue-extract%3famp

I've read Shon Faye's book. It's extensively researched and referenced, rich in cultural history and testimony, and is insightfully educational on LGBTQ+ issues. It's a work of integrity, and I recommend reading it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Ben Goldacre has commented that some nutritionists put literally hundreds of references in their work. When scrutinised, it's apparent that the reference is not relevant, or that it's been misrepresented, or it is literally to a newsletter. E.g.:

And the scholarliness of her work is a thing to behold: she produces lengthy documents that have an air of "referenciness", with nice little superscript numbers, which talk about trials, and studies, and research, and papers ... but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it's shocking how often they aren't what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text. Or they refer to funny little magazines and books, such as Delicious, Creative Living, Healthy Eating, and my favourite, Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet, rather than proper academic journals.

She even does this in the book Miracle Superfood, which, we are told, is the published form of her PhD. "In laboratory experiments with anaemic animals, red-blood cell counts have returned to normal within four or five days when chlorophyll was given," she says. Her reference for this experimental data is a magazine called Health Store News. "In the heart," she explains, "chlorophyll aids in the transmission of nerve impulses that control contraction." A statement that is referenced to the second issue of a magazine called Earthletter.

www.theguardian.com/media/2007/feb/12/advertising.food

So, what sort of references are included and have you validated a random sample of them? (Yes, I do do this for pretty much everything I read if it's meaningful to me.)

"It is unfortunate that Faye chooses not to flag the wide range of sources she uses for her research. The mix of dependable peer-reviewed evidence with much more dubious sources such as online surveys make it difficult to ascertain the reliability of each purported fact. "- extract from the Evening Standard's review of Faye's book.

What is your definition of "extensively referenced", Peachums?

Actually @LadyPeachums, would you mind explaining further about the non-carceral approach that SF advocates.

How did SF explain this would be of benefit to women, please?

Can you explain why women prisoners should be locked up with rapists?

Cos that’s what Shon advocates, directly or indirectly

And Shon's advice to youngsters was 'be sluttier than you are, suck dick and get tits early.'

Unless they have undergone some kind of personality transplant, I'm not sure one would describe those sentiments as the work of someone with 'integrity'.

I've read Shon Faye's book. It's extensively researched and referenced, rich in cultural history and testimony, and is insightfully educational on LGBTQ+ issues. It's a work of integrity, and I recommend reading it.

Re some of the comments so far: I am a lifelong radical feminist, and I do understand the term by its definition; and yes, I do think that Shon Faye understands this too.

Thanks rub, will read later.

For a cracking Joyce interview, this is worth a watch:

So many clear points in this review.

Starting with the assertions about mental health care, to the lack of credible evidence behind many of the ‘facts’ presented (which we see here from time to time and are easily shown to be highly biased and unreliable), and to the minimising and dismissal of detransitioners, child transitioners and ‘the prison debate’.

I haven’t read the book but if Faye indeed states that trans people should not be told and reminded of the consequences of their medication because, bodily autonomy, they must truly believe they are a special class of humans. Of course Doctors should be warning those on medication that they should not smoke or should lose weight as needed.

But it does show that Faye has some extreme concepts to push, that of biased mental health care (ie not allowing therapy for issues that might be causing distress that are not affirming), the non-carceral agenda, and now the push to not have to ever hear doctors warnings about the affects of the medication. And this includes the fertility issue.

Thank you Stella. Another good review.

Thank you Rubidom.

That was a good read.

It's difficult for reviewers to take the space to illustrate how threadbare the evidence base for such books as Faye's are. Very few people ever check the references that do exist to check that they're used appropriately.

However, every time the suicide attempts statistics are brought up and they're not corrected, I wonder about the damage being done to any discussion in the public space.

In conclusion, although the statistics for suicide attempts have been exaggerated, this is a psychologically highly vulnerable population. A young person with mental health problems needs psychotherapeutic support and a young person who is feeling suicidal needs urgent psychiatric care. Much more research is needed into different care pathways for young people with gender dysphoria.

In this clinical area it is especially important to understand the possible underlying causative factors in suicidal ideation and provide appropriate therapeutic treatment, as the alternative (puberty blockers) carries a risk of exacerbating depressive symptoms. Depression is listed as a common or very common adverse effect for the drug Triptorelin (the form of blocker used by the Tavistock).30

Every suicide is a terrible tragedy and we must be extremely careful in any message we send to young people on this subject. The Samaritans guidance 31 states that we should avoid speculation about any one ‘trigger’ for suicide and that we need to exercise caution in repeating suicide statistics. Transgender Trend would like to see this advice followed more carefully in the case of young people struggling with gender identity issues.

www.transgendertrend.com/the-suicide-myth/

Lol @rubidium 😆 Shon faye: could do better

Much like the Times asked the same reviewer, Christina Patterson, to review both ‘Trans’ by Helen Joyce and ‘The Transgender Issue’ by Shon Faye, the Evening Standard have asked Stella O’Malley to review Faye’s book following her earlier reviews of 'Trans' and also Kathleen Stock's 'Material Girls'.

I love how politely Stella O’Malley is highlighting the paucity of supporting evidence and general batshittery contained within Faye’s book. Very much an air of ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed.’

Compare and contrast:
Review of ‘The Transgender Issue’
www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/the-transgender-issue-by-shon-faye-review-b954336.html
Review of ‘Trans’:
www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/trans-when-ideology-meets-reality-helen-joyce-review-b944183.html
Review of ‘Material Girls’
www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/material-girls-why-reality-matters-for-feminism-kathleen-stock-trans-gender-activism-b931417.html

So much good stuff in there. The concluding line - "Lies are a strange foundation on which to build a movement for freedom" - is perfect.

I also loved:

"What strikes Faye and other woke types as normal, even positive expressions of a experimentative gender ideology look to the rest of us like top-down forms of newspeak designed to police our understanding of sex and to erase the foundational biological and social truths of sexual experience."

That was an excellent read. I wonder if it’s worth its own thread Rubidium?

Trans activists like Faye present themselves as warriors for liberation – they genuinely think of themselves as such – but the consequences of their agitation are almost entirely authoritarian. The Transgender Issue captures this well. To use contemporary parlance, it identifies as a treatise for liberation; it bristles against the goals of ‘trans rights’ and ‘trans equality’ and calls instead for ‘trans liberation’. Such liberation would ‘improve the lives of everyone in our society’, Faye says. And yet Faye’s book feels more disciplinarian than libertine, more chastising than free-wheeling, and more concerned with correcting wrongthink than improving everyone’s lives through the expansion of autonomy.

That's a good article.

Review of Shon Faye's book by Brendan O'Neill in Spiked:
www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/03/the-transgender-delusion/

Quite the skewering. I disagree with Brendan O'Neill more than I agree with him, but he's absolutely hit the nail on the head here.

The standard gender-neutral pronoun in Finnish is "hän" = "he/she", plural "he" = "they".

This really doesn't have that much effect, as far as I can tell. A language with non-sexed pronouns doesn't seem to change culture much. There are still lots of male/female words, including the female suffix "-tar", roughly English "-ess", and compound words like "palomies" (fireman), with the same debates about changing to gender-neutral forms. The rest of the language apart from the pronouns is as sexed as any other. Finns do know what a woman is!

The Finnish word for sex is "sukupuoli" - literally "family half", which I like. They don't have a word for gender exactly - a translation would be "sosiaalinen sukupuoli" - "social sex".

What I find amusing though is that Finns can't actually be bothered with the person/object distinction and actually use "se/ne", which are formally "it/they" for objects, instead of "hän/he" in most spoken dialects. So people are usually called "it".

(You can observe Finns speaking English fairly often will stumble over getting he/she right, but usually spot the error and correct themselves).

I've not actually heard about the neopronouns - sounds hilarious.

I had heard trans people complaining about "misgendering". If people don't hear other people calling you "she", how are they supposed to know you're a woman? Lack of sexed pronouns makes it harder to tell someone is supposed to be trans.