Helen Joyce

[darada]

I just wanted to say how much I love Helen Joyce. For me she's the best thing about this whole sordid trans business.

I'd recommend you watch a few of her podcasts on YouTube. The clarity of her thinking and expression, her rationality and her non-tribalism are so refreshing. I also love the fact that with time she's run out of fucks to give and just calls out BS much more directly than her earlier comments.

Helen if you lurk here keep up the good work, I have learned a lot from you and we're all lucky to have you on our side in this increasingly important and urgent fight for sanity and our kids' future.

Fewer abused children. Sorry. Can't keep my inner Stannis Baratheon quiet sometimes (and Stannis is the ultimate Dadjoke....).

My Shero ❤️

There's a very strange ignorance or denial of the stable history of trans experience over time and culture going on in this thread (and in FWR in general)

There's a presentation as if it is a recent Western fad, rather than an enduring human experience with rich history throughout multiple cultures.

There's an estimation of 10 million + hijra living today in the Indian subcontinent today for example, and reference to these experiences in ancient texts, eg kama sutra dated approx 300AD.

How do the 10 million hijra figure in Helen Joyce's rhetoric on trans people out of interest ? (When she is not busy reading child pornography in full view of others in public places)

What an irritating misinterpretation we have here.

Let's use an analogy, referring to my own personal life. I had a close female relative who developed her first eating disorder (bulimia) aged 14. She 'recovered' from bulimia, in that she managed to stop her binge-purge cycles, but she did that by switching to pure calorie-restriction, i.e. she developed anorexia, with a surface layer of orthorexia.

The late teens are a pivotal time for bone development in female adolescents, which is inextricably linked to the menstrual cycle. Her malnutrition led to menstrual disruptions, which led to osteoporosis. Within approximately 30 years of first developing bulimia, she was diagnosed with advanced osteoporosis. She only lived another decade, and that decade was filled with suffering, because the repeated fractures could not heal fully. Each time, she lost mobility in the affected limb, and this led to other complications. The over-stretched NHS could not meet her needs.

My ringside seat as an unwilling witness to the lifelong ramifications of eating disorders has shown me exactly how awful they are. I want less people in the world to develop eating disorders. This does not mean that I am glad my loved one is dead. It certainly does not mean I wish death upon young women like her today.

It means that I want those young women to lead lives that are not devastated by the physical effects of one of the most dangerous mental illnesses we have, as would anyone capable of empathy with an emotional IQ above 51. Happily, most people on this thread meet that criterion.

Seriously, shouldn't a sane world have a huge problem with it when teenagers starve themselves into disability and death? Are we supposed to say "her body, her choice" about it, in case someone assumes our only problem with teenagers with anorexia is that they're not dead yet?

The idea of a trans identity is a claim to consider oneself a sex one is not, on some basis that is not biology. The idea that being a woman/girl or a man/boy is based on something other than biology is sexist. We should want there to be no sexism. As identifying as transgender is based on sexism, it follows that we shouldn't want anyone to identify as transgender, because in this way they are declaring their support for a sexist ideology.

I am shamed. Shamed I tell you 😆

This sounds as if you are completely disinterested or unaware of the sudden explosion of teenage girls with no history of gender dysphoria who are deciding their healthy growing bodies are flawed and believe that drugs and surgery will "fix" them? It's called social contagion & is a recent phenomenon.
Fortunately there's a legion of women and men concerned about what's being visited on children world wide who now refuse to be silenced about this international scandal. Helen is an articulate and informed advocate, recognised for her insight, wisdom and passion that children should be protected from these dangerous beliefs. Women, mothers and responsible adults are glad that she speaks out.

How glad are they that she reads Harry Potter child pornography in full view of others in public places?

I mean, she seems pretty familiar with such texts as she has referred to reading these before for her research on trans children.

You'd think her familiarity with source material and academic skills would mean that she would quickly be able to research, find and read texts pertinent to this area of focus, rather than reading Harry Potter fanfic on Malfoy/Hermione 'haterape', that has no reference to any trans identities, slowly enough for random passengers to read from their seats opposite and take photos of.

(As you will be aware, this is evidenced, and the subject matters has been acknowledged by HJ).

Can someone please explain to me why all our regular trans activist posters use incredibly outdated terminology, while also pretending they've always cared about child abuse? As well as today's "child pornography", we had "kiddy porn" the other week. Nauseating.

Kindly delete these phrases from your vocabulary, or get thyselves back to 1995.

I absolutely love Helen Joyce and I've really enjoyed reading the posts and replies from those considerably more patient than me. Brava one and all. You'll not get an honest or enlightened response to your incisive questions, of course.

I really can't stand people who twist others words to suit their (presumably personally invested) narrative. It's just such a toxic and unhealthy way to be. Drowning in a sea of their own warped logic. They have my pity. From a distance, mind, because life is too short to be pulled under the surface by another's delusions and misery.

Hey ho.

Back to Helen. She is my podcast go-to when I want someone to understand what is going on. You can't always get people to read a book but 30mins of Helen being utterly concise and reasonable usually does the trick.

How do the 10 million hijra figure in Helen Joyce's rhetoric on trans people out of interest ?

All male. Not a teenage girl amongst them.

(When she is not busy reading child pornography in full view of others in public places)

There is no such thing as ‘child pornography’

HTH.

Are you attempting to leverage other cultures and the opression some groups faced in their cultures to convince others to allow male people to access female single sex spaces in the UK?

Since you have done this, could you please explain the origins of the Hijra so that we are all clear what this group of male people entails? In my recollection they were, historically, eunuchs, males with Differences of Sex Development and potentially homosexual men. Is this correct? Do you think eunuchs in Moghul times were given an option to be eunuchs?

Were those male people considered female at all or only ever a third gender? Or were they treated differently from female people and differently from male people? Did they have ritual and cultural differences?

I don’t believe that historically they were considered female, so please tell me what I missed and why they are relevant to women’s rights.

Would you also like to explain the history of the Hijra that you have casually used for your own political purposes? Particularly how those male people, before the era of British government, are relevant to the modern era people with that label since you have introduced it to the thread.

I am all ears. And please don’t tell us to google. You introduced this topic as a way to vilify Helen Joyce. The onus is therefore on you to explain why you did this and how it is relevant.

I join the others to be horrified in the labelling of child sexual abuse material as ‘child pornography’. It is not a person who is kind who does that.

Hard to take any moral high ground while using that term while leveraging in other oppressed culture groups. I don’t think that post does what the poster thinks it does. It says more about them than the people that they are attempting to shame.

Well of course there are transmen in India subcontinent, a very quick search will reveal information here.

But yes, there is not the extensive subculture and information because of the very patriarchal society that has existed in the region for a very long time. Many signs of progress now in some areas which is good news and so things look like they are shifting now in this respect.

This history has meant that female born children's sexualities have been regulated and constricted within society. Married off and with no means of independence of their own there has little scope for such identities to exist freely or be acknowledged, let alone recorded. In much the same way that lesbian identities have been repressed. That does not mean they have not existed.

Hijra are referred to as the 'third sex'. Nobody claims that they are women. Hijra was/is a way for a community to absorb and find a place for homosexual men in a society in which gender non conformity is taboo. Though, to an extent, Hijra are still outcasts and rely on begging or prostitution to survive.

Yes, people have always felt things; had ideas about themselves which run counter to social expectation - but what is new about gender ideology in its current form is that it seeks to impose a version of reality upon the rest of society; forcing them into compliance. It stems from a radical post modernistic theory which denies material reality or the existence of measurable truth.

Well of course there are transmen in India subcontinent, a very quick search will reveal information here.

Transmen are not part of the Hijra.

HTH.

There's a reason that cultures with "third genders" are patriarchal - the patriarchy bit is why they have third genders. Where societies could not accept gay men, lesbians, or indeed anyone who didn't rigidly follow sex stereotypes, the solution was often to assign these people to an extra category. And they were, in most cases, assigned to it, by others. Jesse Singal goes through various instances in various cultures here: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/what-is-the-goal-of-our-great-big-e2a

It will come as no surprise that some young women in India are lesbians, and others rail against gendered expectations, in a society in which gender roles are strictly demarcated.

Why are you using the oppression of other cultural groups to vilify women for discussing the rights and needs of women and girls in the UK.

Do you think this political leveraging can be considered racist?

To be clear, I am referring to your motivation for introducing this topic.

There is some most excellent logic going on here 👏

There's a very strange ignorance or denial of the stable history of trans experience over time and culture going on in this thread (and in FWR in general
There's a presentation as if it is a recent Western fad, rather than an enduring human experience with rich history throughout multiple cultures.

I wonder about how this assertion sits with the other assertion often made that trans identifying youth will self harm if not immediately affirmed and medicalised.

Obviously both these things cannot both be true, as there isn't a long history of teenage self harm going back centuries, which only began to abate in the 2010s when trans identification and affirmation exploded exponentially.

Edit for clarity: clearly self harm and suicide has always taken place. But not in the numbers these suggestions ^^would we should have seen.

Human beings are always searching for the best way to interpret themselves and their problems and some interpretations are harmful while some are beneficial. The idea that a feminine boy is "really a girl" is not beneficial, but yes, some cultures have held that view. Our culture once held the view that some women were hysterical, and that autism was caused by a child's mother being insufficient loving. These were bad ideas, they didn't help the people they were meant to help.

Ethan Watters has written about how these interpretations come in and out of fashion in his book Crazy Like Us. Anorexia made an appearance in the late 1800s (IIRC) and then disappeared for decades, to become more widespread again following Karen Carpenter's death. Diagnoses become ways for suffering people to understand themselves and end up shaping their experiences. The prevalence of transgender ideology is causing troubled young people to believe their discomfort to be caused by their being trans. The Cass Report found this diagnostic overshadowing to be a problem at the Tavistock.

So when trying to answer the question "is it good to affirm trans identities?" it's not enough to say "these cultures think some people shouldn't be treated as the sex they are". You still have to ask did it help those people, and how were their rights balanced with those around them, and will similar practices work in this society.

Maybe having to submit to castration ( many Hijra were subject to castration) could be seen as a form of culturally sanctioned/enforced self harm?

Bit of a tangent but (I’m sure Helen Joyce won’t mind!) if anyone reading this is interesting in the women who identify as men in India I recommend listening to Indian film maker Vaishnavi Sundar (and watching her excellent 4 part film, ‘Dysphoric’ links in the next post):