So disgusted tonight

And I had a voice echoing through my head for weeks after, where it's just saying, "they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids."

And I don't know how many kids that is, but it's thousands for sure. And it might be tens of thousands. I don't know how many kids this is going to happen to. And I decided that the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing is I can't stop this, but I can hopefully play a part in shortening it.

So there will be some number fewer of gay kids who are sterilised because of what I'm doing and writing. And that gives me a moral clarity and purpose in what I'm doing, and if I ever think, "could I have done something else? Could I have just dropped this?"

I wonder why (not really) all those who are keen to say Helen Joyce is transphobic haven't been so keen to discuss the next part of the video where she talks about homophobia at the Tavistock. This applies both to their treatment of gay employees and their attitude to children who they think might grow up to be gay (better to trans them).

I think this part of the discussion has been highlighted to deflect attention from the rest of the discussion where it becomes clear that the people who are pushing the idea of gender identity on to children are driven by homophobia.

Yes it has to stop. That's the long and the short of it.

While there remains a danger, as there definitely is at present, that a grandson of mine will be persuaded to have his dick cut off because he likes dolls and dressing up, or a granddaughter have a mastectomy and sterilisation because she likes meccano and dislikes periods, I will fight the crazy ideology that leads to such danger to those I love.

If, in this fight, other victims of this nonsensical shite of 'gender identity' and soi-disant 'trans', such as sad individuals with varied dysmorphias, get upset or come to harm, well, sorry and all, but put the blame where it belongs for that: on the nonsense of the ideology such people have been sold by unscrupulous halfwit shits like Owen Jones and other Stonewallers. Not me. Not my fault.

Helen Joyce is right. And she is right to be blunt. It is past time for being nice. It has to stop.

I don't disagree with most of what you say there. I want everyone to live their best lives free from harrassment and prejudice. If someone, for whatever underlying reason say they feel like a woman and want to dress like one and be referred to as one, crack on.

Where my resistance kicks in is in two areas.

Thinking you are a woman does not make you one. My lived experience, so dominated by my biology in a way that is just not true for men, coupled with how society has shaped me cannot be replicated even with all the hormones and surgery in the world. The issue here isn't that trans people exist and have a right to exist, the issue here is the notion that thoughts and feelings over-ride reality. Predicating the acceptance of trans people on my ability to over ride biological reality is just not going to work and inevitably creates tension.

My second point of objection brings us back to the Helens. I cannot see how the removal of healthy body parts and sterilisation of young women could ever be seen as a good outcome. Surely we need to prioritise helping our young people to live as happily as they can in the bodies they have. The upsurge in young transitioners and the hideous medics who are driving it and profiting off it (see yeet the teets woman and the Webberleys) are horrendous. Transitioning of young people needs the strongest of gate keeping.

Greer used to say she made her students angry because then they would think.

And I think that's worked here. I've seen some deeper more meaningful philosophical discussion on this thread than I've seen for a while.

I think Joyce has been doing the same thing. She's always been blunt about this, and she's trying to shake people out of a sort of stupor where they use phrases like "trans kids" to avoid looking at the material reality of what's happening.

In her first interview with Benjamin Boyce she spelled out her motivation in similar terms.

I like doing transcripts, so:

I went to the Detransition Network launch in Manchester in I think it was late October. I just wrote about it for Standpoint magazine, and it had a big impact on me.

You know, you're sitting there in a room, there's eight young women, all of them lesbians, you know, some of them are sterile, had their uteruses removed when they were 20, 21, and now they're sitting there, 23, and their broken voices, and they were lied to, lied to, lied to. Huge medical scandal.

And I had a voice echoing through my head for weeks after, where it's just saying, "they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids, they're sterilising gay kids."

And I don't know how many kids that is, but it's thousands for sure. And it might be tens of thousands. I don't know how many kids this is going to happen to. And I decided that the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing is I can't stop this, but I can hopefully play a part in shortening it.

So there will be some number fewer of gay kids who are sterilised because of what I'm doing and writing. And that gives me a moral clarity and purpose in what I'm doing, and if I ever think, "could I have done something else? Could I have just dropped this?"

Because people have said "would you not just drop this? I mean why..." Somebody said to me, "do you want this to be the issue that defines you?" Like, well, fine, yeah! They're sterilising gay kids. Why would I not?

I would love this to go to court, and see someone argue that we should not be sterilising fewer children.

Shit like this from Jones, Pink News et al are fuck all use to the real trans people being shafted by their fuckwitted politicking.

Joyce and Staniland speak out of compassion for the individuals. Jones, Pink News, Stonewall speak out of self interested political egotism.

100%. Samphire puts it in a nutshell perfectly.

to you both. Gender as a social construct and framework of oppression isn't a walk in the park for women and girls, it's tiresome for people to assume that everyone is happy being female all the time unless they say they are "trans".

I am so sorry that happened to you. It really resonates. My first memory of being sexually harrassed was at the hands of a british soldier. I was 11, an early developer. He leaned down from his jeep and said "nice tits, shame about the face". That left its mark.

Offending people can be useful. Greer used to say she made her students angry because then they would think.

As for converts; I'm not interested in proseltysing. People are free to think or believe what they want - what we need is evidence, data, clarity and information. Discussion. Then everyone can make up their own minds.

We need to find workable solutions to protect women's rights and children and young people.

Children are currently being harmed. We can tread gently around 17 yo girls having mastectomies of healthy breasts, and perhaps if there was robust and solid evidence of benefit one could argue that point.

But there isn't.

It has to stop - this is pretty much the NHS position and the Cass Report so far. We have to stop and look more closely at what's going on before creating more patients with lifelong medical conditions on the basis of some vague socio political theories.

As well as sex, we have gender. A woman may have a gender identity that is congruent with her sex - i.e. she "feels" she is a woman. Or, she may have the opposite gender identity, i.e. she "feels" like a man. In this second case she is a trans man.

See my trouble with this is, like many posters on here, so many women don't feel like they conform to their 'gender', which of course can only mean stereotypes or means they don't fit in, what else does it mean?

I memorably said to my husband years ago that I was a gay man trapped in a woman's body. But feeling that way doesn't 'make' me trans, or even NB, this is something self declared which as we've seen is tricky to 'prove', unlike being same-sex attracted.

Like everyone else, I don't actually know what it feels like to be the opposite sex, I only know what it feels like to be me.

Painting trans people as difficult to accommodate and that being the reason we need less of them, it’s a bad take and an own goal.

So why are you doing it?

Nowhere in the clip does Joyce say anything about "trans people", because she's too precise in her language, and knows that wouldn't mean anything. The word "trans" does not appear at all. She is very strictly talking about transition - surgical or hormonal.

You're trying to take offence by saying she said something she didn't and claiming that if she had said it she would have meant something different to what she actually did say.

It would be productive if no further use of the word "trans" occurred on this thread, as it's only purpose can be to misrepresent.

It's a form of the "motte and bailey" (which I think is a bad name for it, because no-one understands the analogy).

Normally it relies on fuzzy definitions - say X, which is not clear whether it means A or B. You can support X (meaning controversial meaning A) and when challenged you retreat to "oh, I just mean less-controversial B", until attention goes away looking, then advance back to A.

This is a kind of reverse. Someone is arguing clearly against controversial A - you then rephrase that as them arguing against X (assuming no-one notices the rephrasing), and then accuse them of arguing against uncontroversial B. But they never mentioned X or B.

In this case, "A" is "transition" - specifically hormonal or surgical procedures on children in this context, "B" is something like "transgender identity/social transition", and "X" is the incredibly fuzzy "trans" or "trans people.

We live here, now, and no one can say definitively there is no such thing as trans.

Like no one can definitively say there is no pink teapot in orbit around the moon. Or god, or alien landings etc etc.

That doesn't mean that there can't be a psychological dysmorphia where a person rejects their body. There are such dysmorphias.

Do we need that first? Or do you need to prove there’s actually no such thing as gender dysphoria?

Who has said there's no such thing as gender dysphoria, as a serious psychological issue for a tiny minority of people? Why does it have to mean some innate, sacred "transness"? That's where the ideology comes in.

No one says you are alone in your interpretation. It's ok to disagree, though.

If you're offending people who already agree with you, you're not making any new converts. I'm clearly not alone in my interpretation.

@Nellodee "It doesn’t matter what being trans is. The clip was offensive. It’s long enough that there should have been more clarification given around it. Painting trans people as difficult to accommodate and that being the reason we need less of them, it’s a bad take and an own goal."

Taking offence at something is entirely a matter of personal choice. Perhaps it is more honest to say "I have chosen to interpret that edited portion as offensive".

Further, it certainly matters what being "trans" is. Perhaps use of the word "trans" is misleading. Perhaps we should substitute that word with "people who are dissociated from the natural sex of their bodies". That is what the word "trans" means, as far as I can work it out, anyway.

People who are dissociated from the natural sex of their bodies are difficult to accommodate because society has not yet adjusted to fund and provide the separate spaces and services needed for them in prisons, hospitals, sports and everywhere else where natural sex matters to most other people.

The “gotcha” posts about there being so objectively definable thing as trans or gender identity spectacularly miss the point. It’s not about that. Of course we can’t define it objectively - it’s hardly a new or radical statement, it’s what GC feminists have been responding to TRAs who say TWAW for years.

But we do know that there is a group of people who identify as trans, whether we think that’s possible or not. Helen’s words were very unfortunate in that regard. She clearly means something by “transition”, whether medical or social and she’s saying these people are a problem, not because of their internal trauma (which I think is a valid point) but because of long term accommodations that need to be made by a “sane” society. You might personally think that’s fine and doesn’t matter but it’s generated total outrage and turns people off the women’s movement. And yeah, if you actually want to bring about meaningful change (which Helen clearly does because she says we need to tackle legislators rather than raising awareness with the general public), then you do have to be “nice” and you do have to play the game. A lot of people miss this point and think it’s just about making their friends or colleagues aware of the issue and getting angry (ie the comments that KJK “gets stuff done” whereas others try to be too nice). That’s wrong because politicians (other than maybe on the v far right) won’t touch KJK with a barge pole and it won’t lead to any legal changes (even if lots of people get pissed off). More moderate voices do have a chance though, which is why this is a shame.

It doesn’t matter what being trans is. The clip was offensive. It’s long enough that there should have been more clarification given around it. Painting trans people as difficult to accommodate and that being the reason we need less of them, it’s a bad take and an own goal.
I only arrived on this board around the time Karen White hit the news, so about four years ago, so I guess I can’t really be gender critical. No true Scotsman, eh?

I mean they firmly absolutely believe they should be the other gender and maybe there’s a reason for that, not just their imagination. I’m not an expert and neither are many of the others on this board. I’ve read and been on this board for a long time, and you can have a go at me all you want, but it won’t change that I’m a reasonable person who would be torn apart as transphobic by many people if I said to them what i think on these topics and I also think Helen Joyce just committed an own goal with that video.

Do we need that first?

I don't know how we can have a discussion about something if we're not all clear about what we're discussing. What do you mean when you say someone is 'genuinely trans'?

Do we need that first? Or do you need to prove there’s actually no such thing as gender dysphoria? It’s easy to have glib answers but it’s not that black and white and in the meantime people get hurt (on both sides as it’s a vicious world).
I don’t think Helen Joyce should have said that even with the context added, it doesn’t make it all ok the way many people have said it does.

If we're going to discuss whether or not "there is no such thing as trans" we first need to have a definition of exactly what you mean by 'trans'. What is it?

@nepeta for each of these examples you can debate the individual points and they are all fair points, but any basic logical approach shows that none of that is clear proof that there is no such thing as trans. Besides, it is also unclear that we can unlink sex from gender completely, which is the only world where the argument that you remove gender and trans doesn’t exist holds. We live here, now, and no one can say definitively there is no such thing as trans. I’m not going to repeat all my caveats from above about various drivers for being trans.

The case of the Albanian sworn virgins in the northern, and extremely patriarchal part of that country is quite different.

The rights of women there have been almost nonexistent, and any woman who wished for more rights would have to become a sworn virgin. That was the only way she could inherit the family property, for instance, when the family was left without a male heir.

So the reasons for this phenomenon can be in something quite different than gender identity, perhaps a feminist desire to have a less limited life and more rights when the whole society was structured as a rigid patriarchy where women were pretty much property.

It’s happened the other way around in Albania @Datun . I’m not saying there is anything conclusive about that evidence, and agree gender roles are relevant, but I am saying we do not know enough to know it’s not real, and I would not be prepared to say that and risk that being a harmful statement. There are sufficient differences between male and female and not all is understood (by a long shot) so I think we should recognise adults transitioning. I think we should do this while acknowledging the reality of their biological sex and that some services and capacities are defined by sex. (That’s awkward phrasing for womens sports but that’s what I meant by capacity)