An Irish woman, a Welsh woman and a GENOCIDE! walk into a wine bar…
Nearly two weeks ago, Irish journalist Helen Joyce (she of the bestselling book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality fame) and wonderful Welsh woman Helen Staniland (she of the question that shall not be answered fame) had a live conversation on YouTube as part of Staniland’s Wine with Women series. Over a period of 1 hour and 7 minutes, they spoke about Ricky Gervais, conversion therapy, homophobia, Allison Bailey’s tribunal, and the paperback edition of Helen Joyce’s book.
And with this past weekend came these late reviews…
The Pink News article can be read here. Quoting a barely minute-long section of the conversation and framing it with this title: ‘Gender critical’ author Helen Joyce says she wants to ‘reduce’ number of trans people: ‘Chilling’, they knew exactly what they were doing. As did other prominent figures like Owen Jones, Laurie Penny, and Stonewall’s Nancy Kelley.
The full video and an extended transcript of the section in question will be at the end of this article.
Look at the slideshow below to see the reaction that Pink News et al stirred up – really, scroll through the tweets and take them in. There have been hundreds of comments along the same lines, shared tens of thousands of times. You may recognise a few names as well.
The hyperbole would be comical if it wasn’t so serious
Comparisons with Nazism, genocide, eugenics; references to J.K. Rowling; death threats; sex denialism; and a claim from one person that taking puberty blockers is just like taking paracetamol. This is truly deranged stuff.
But the thing is that many of these people genuinely believe what they are saying. As an aside, legions of anime avatars with lists of pronouns and personality disorders in their Twitter bios making such claims is not really the best way to demonstrate mental and emotional stability when trying to argue that identifying as trans never has anything whatsoever to do with anybody’s mental and emotional stability. Mostly though, it’s concerning that anybody could genuinely believe, based on what was said, that either of the two Helens hate trans people and intend on some sort of genocidal conspiracy to exterminate them.
In the very next part of the video clip circulated [the bit Joss Prior, Owen Jones, and Pink News intentionally chose to omit], Helen Staniland says that there should be compassion for trans people, that nobody hates them, and that the trans movement is perpetuating harm by telling them otherwise. Way to prove the point, Pink News.
It would be comical if it all wasn’t so serious.
I mean genocide, really? As Feminist writer Victoria Smith tweeted, “When feminists talk about wanting there to be fewer people who hate their female bodies, they do not mean ‘let’s kill people who hate their female bodies’.” Wanting to reduce the number of children and young people automatically being affirmed as trans and put on a highly experimental medical pathway for the rest of their lives does not mean genocide, does not mean killing people – just as being concerned about a rapid increase in childhood obesity or anorexia and wanting to address the reasons for that and reduce those numbers would not mean genocide or killing people. I mean for god’s sake.
Eugenics is perhaps even more absurd – wanting people to feel happy in the body that they have and not wanting anybody to be sterilised is the exact opposite of eugenics.
Owen Jones and others suggesting that it is somehow sinister to want to try and influence decision-makers is a more amusing slice of hyperbole, especially when ‘bypassing the public’ is a core tactic in trans activism – it’s literally in the handbook. Such claims are even more disingenuous when, as I’ve written about previously, every single poll shows a lack of public support for self-ID or the medical transition of children, and that a majority of people recognise a distinction between sex and self-declared identity.
The fact is that there IS a disagreement about whether or not an individual gender dysphoric person is better off transitioning or not.
The infographic below is taken from the Cass Review interim report and it shows that there is a multitude of reasons why a young person could present as gender dysphoric and a range of possible outcomes.
We know that there is a lack of a solid evidence base for medical transition (particularly for children and young people), uncertainty about the long-term effects of puberty blockers, and known harmful long-term effects in the use of cross-sex hormones. We know that there has been a sudden and dramatic increase in young people identifying as trans and pursuing transition, one that remains clinically unexplained but would seem to have a strong association with social media and social peer groups. We know that gender dysphoria often co-occurs with other mental health issues, with trauma, and with autism. We know that there are an increasing number of young people later coming to regret their transition. We know that for many detransitioners and desisters, their feelings of gender dysphoria were related to difficulty accepting being LGB. We know that there is a high rate of complications from transition surgery and limited evidence to show that transition improves mental health in the long term for the majority of transitioners.
We know also that nobody can literally change sex.
If you believe that a person can literally change their sex; if you believe that trans is an inherent, immutable state of being as opposed to something a person does to themselves; if you believe, as Owen Jones would tell you, that gender dysphoria is the same as being gay rather than a poorly understood medical term; if you believe that having gender dysphoria isn’t even necessary in order to have a ‘gender identity’ and to pursue legal and medical transition; and if you believe that gender identity is a coherent and tangible thing that should take precedence over the material reality of sex rather than a vaguely defined and entirely subjective concept based on sexist stereotypes and best described as something akin to a soul – if you believe those things, well yes it’s understandable why reality might make you feel uncomfortable.
But this is an ideology that will not allow facts and reason to penetrate it.
Those who transition should be treated with kindness and respect and are deserving of the same human rights as everybody else. Absolutely. But when ‘trans rights’ now seems to consist entirely of demands for special privileges that nobody else has, ones that do impact on the rights of other groups of people, and require everybody else’s participation in the validation of what is essentially a fiction, then of course that poses a ‘difficulty’ in the world of objective material reality that we all actually inhabit.
If trans is now mangled in definition to mean both anything and nothing – and as Helen Joyce wonderfully states in a part of the video, funnily enough, unquoted by Pink News, that being expected to look at a bloke with a beard and a cock and balls and pretend he is a woman is pretty hysterical as far as ideological demands go – then that also poses a ‘difficulty’ in a sane world. And a sane world would of course see that statement as an observation rather than a call to genocidal action.
For a lot of people with feelings of gender dysphoria, transition will not be right for them – many detransitioners have already discovered this. A world where we refuse to explore the motives and pressures that make children and young people want to dissociate from their sex – many with entirely unrealistic expectations of what transition will do for them – and where we refuse to acknowledge the harm caused to those who get it wrong, that is neither a sane world nor a kind one.
So yes, those who wish to live in a sane world do need to get through to the decision-makers, the people responsible for public policy – so that we can all start having sensible conversations instead of allowing discourse to be led by the sort of people who claim to represent the trans community but are happy to whip them up to believe that other people want to literally murder them.
The full video can be watched below. The majority of the video actually covers Allison Bailey’s tribunal. The transcript roughly covers minutes 2-12, the brief section that has caused all the hysteria coming within that time period. It’s a great read, it was certainly enjoyable to type – it should be pretty clear why Pink News et al decided to ignore the majority of it.
HJ: It’s very important to say that neither of them [Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher] were laughing at people, they weren’t punching down, they were talking about an ideology. Debbie Hayton has a piece that’s just come out in The Spectator which I think Debbie got to talk to Ricky for, I’m very jealous of that. Ricky says that it’s not punching down and what he’s talking about is the ideology and not the people. And the thing is the ideology is absolutely hysterical. Like the effects aren’t funny, people getting sterilised and women losing their medals, that’s not funny. This bit that we all have to pretend that we can look at somebody with a beard and a cock and balls and say that this is a woman; that’s hysterical, I’ve been dying for people to puncture it.
HS: Absolutely right, in fact, I thought what was really quite telling about the whole piece – and I know we’ve all said this because we all saw it immediately, which is he’s almost quoted verbatim from a Twitter thread. He’s not made his own jokes up there about trans people themselves. He has literally just parroted what is happening to women and girls every single day.
HJ: I thought – you said the word dinosaurs. That was very telling. That just showed me he’s been listening quietly for a while, he’s been paying attention.
HS: He has. You say you were jealous of Hayden, well not jealous… Some of us were jealous that Ricky Gervais had liked their tweets, you got a reply.
HJ: I know, I was like oh god, does he follow me… and he does. How long has he been following me? Oh God, we’re so sad Helen.
HS: So sad, we can be sad here, that’s okay, we’re all sad together. We’re just a little corner of women just having a chat about this.
Back to what you’re saying, I do think that social contagion thing is interesting. But for me, what I saw of it, was just the fact that now he [Ricky Gervais] has got the word TERF out into the mainstream. Presumably, it’s already mainstream, which is why he feels it is the right time for him to be able to say it. So, there’s enough people who understand the word because they were all laughing etc. But there will be now some thinking ‘what is he talking about?’, ‘what is this that’s going on?’, and will hopefully have a look into it and see.
HJ: I do think for quite a while now this has not been about consciousness-raising, that’s been irrelevant. That was important two or three years ago when there weren’t enough people. But there have been enough people to be critical mass, to be funding the crowd funders, to be writing to MPs, all that sort of thing. To have a movement, to have support for women – and men of course, there’s people like Graham [Linehan] of course as well who’ve had their neck stuck out by this.
We can’t win this by saying there’s 60x million people in this country and we’ve got persuade all of them or a great majority of them, we’ve got to get through to the decision-makers – and in the meantime while we’re trying to get through to the decision-makers, we have to try to limit the harm. And that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. And that’s for two reasons. One of them is that every one of those people is a person who has been damaged. But the second one is that every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world.
Like if you’ve got people who’ve transitioned, whether they’re happily transitioned, whether they’re unhappily transitioned, whether they’ve detransitioned, if you’ve got people who have dissociated from their sex in some way, every one of those people is someone who needs special accommodation in a sane world where we reacknowledge the truth of sex. And I mean the people who have been damaged by this, the children who’ve been put through this deserve every accommodation we can possibly make, but every one of them is a difficulty. I know that sounds heartless, I am trying to say exactly the opposite of sounding heartless. I’m saying every one of those people for 50,60,70 years is going to need things that the rest of us just don’t need because the rest of us are just our sex. So, the fewer of those people there are the better in the sane world that I hope we will reach.
HS: Yes, you’re absolutely right. And not just… other things that they’re also going to need is people to tell them that actually nobody really does hate them, no-one hates them, compassion, compassion for them. But the trans movement really has done a terrible job saying that everyone hates you. You see parents online saying, ‘I’m so frightened for my child coming up into a world where everyone hates them’, and I’m like, no one hates your kid mun. No one hates your kid. You’re just doing this, you’re perpetuating the harm by saying this.
Saying that, I thought that article in the BBC, was it Patrick Strudwick… had written was quite frightening because it did show exactly what women had been saying, because it did show that this conversion therapy ban is exactly a talking therapy ban.
HJ: How stupid are these people? How stupid are they? Their best line was ‘we’re not criminalising talking therapy, of course we’re not, of course you can continue to practice the way that you always work’ and then get the ban through and make it impossible to do anything but affirmation. That was the smart move, but they’re so dumb that they have to reveal while the ban is still in question that actually [what they mean is] a 25-minute zoom call with a child in which you check whether the two of you can work together by asking some probing questions and then conclude that no you can’t.
Which is a very understandable thing – it’s very hard actually when you have a child that’s had an appointment that’s been made by their parent. If you do get dragged to therapy it’s kind of pointless as it’s what mum and dad want, it’s not what they want, they’ve got to learn the hard way themselves. So, I’m not even saying that it was a surprising outcome for this child. The appointment was made by the parents, the mother I think. So yes, Az Hakeem tried a few provocative remarks along the lines of ‘has it occurred to you if this is a bit like the way that I was when I was a goth?’ This child says that she was traumatised by it and is still waking up with nightmares several weeks afterwards. I loved the quote “You can’t stop the words from going into your head if you hear them. You don’t give consent for hearing things.”
HS: Yes, it was quite telling wasn’t it? Because it is what the ideology has been trying to do.
HJ: Yes, make very, very fragile deaf people.
So that article is just the perfect thing to bring to politicians and say you know they said that they weren’t going after ordinary exploratory therapy and good practice, you know the things that Hilary Cass said about diagnostic overshadowing and how the memorandum of understanding for psychotherapy was very harmful – here we are. I don’t know if you’re aware of this but Strudwick and other – ‘journalists’ I should say, were trawling online for people to get in touch with them if they had had any of Stella O’Malley, Az Hakeem and others as their therapists. There was a list of people circulating on Twitter saying if any of these had been your therapist, please get in touch. So, they went trawling for that story and that was the worst they could find. Az Hakeem asks some questions.
HS: It doesn’t sound particularly ethical does it?
HJ: No, it isn’t. This girl is now 18 apparently, so she is an adult now. But Strudwick is talking about something that happened when she was 17 – I mean there’s just some ethical considerations there as a journalist. She is 18, let me repeat, she’s got right to tell her own story, she’s an adult, there’s no special consideration there.
HS: Absolutely, but simply trawling online and targeting therapists – it creates the story doesn’t it, by saying these are the therapists you’ve got to watch out for, when they’re already vulnerable.
HJ: And what it shows is that the conversion therapy ban is just the icing on the cake. They’ve got what they want already, which is that nobody ethical is willing to work with these kids. What Hilary Cass said was diagnostic overshadowing, which wasn’t an expression I’d come across before, but what she was saying was that as soon as a child who may be autistic, self-harming, eating disorders, ADHD, obsessive compulsive disorder, all these things that we know co-occur with gender dysphoria – once a child like that says the word gender, other doctors say ‘oh, I don’t do gender, we better refer you’. And they won’t keep working with the child while the child is on the waiting list for the gender clinic, they just leave them. Because they’re afraid to touch a child that says gender. Well, wouldn’t you be afraid to touch a child that says gender if this is what would happen to you?
HS: I’m assuming that’s part of the reason for trawling and writing the story. If they can’t get it through, they would just use the same – I mean honestly, they’ve only got one tactic, haven’t they? Which is to try and silence.
HJ: It’s intimidation, it’s straightforward intimidation of people like Az. I mean, Az now I think only works with adults and with detransitioners.
Democracy Coma 
Leave a comment