When Does Sex Matter?

The Law & Liberty Podcast

Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater join host Helen Dale to discuss transgender activism, civil rights law, and Forstater’s recent discrimination lawsuit.

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.

Helen Dale:

Hello, my name is Helen Dale, and I’m Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. With me today are Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce. Maya is the Executive Director and co-founder of the UK lobby group Sex Matters. Helen Joyce, formerly of The Economist, is the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. She also works at Sex Matters, where she’s Director of Advocacy. It’s fair to say both Helen and Maya have quite extraordinary stories, which are best told in their own words rather than in summary form by a radio broadcaster. So, to that end, let’s get started.

Thank you for joining me, Maya and Helen.

Helen Joyce:

Oh, you’re welcome.

Maya Forstater:

Hello.

Helen Dale:

Hello, hello. The common theme here is Sex Matters. Helen, what does Sex Matters do both in the UK and elsewhere? Remembering we’ve got a significant American audience.

Helen Joyce:

Well, it’s a lobby group, as you say–but we would say advocacy group–and it presents the importance of the fact that sex is a meaningful biological category that is binary and immutable for law, for policy, and for everyday life. In lots of things nowadays, sex doesn’t matter the way that it used to as, for example, when women weren’t allowed to vote, or only a man could get a university degree—but now, sex still matters in the places where it basically comes up against reality, where law and practice come up against reality. So in things like sports, in single-sex facilities, in medicine, in education, when we’re telling children what the truth is about how they’re going to grow up, and yet that’s been very much blurred by trans activism over the past decade or maybe a bit longer to the extent that it’s actually seriously impinging upon our ability to protect everybody’s human rights by recognizing when sex matters.

Now, we’re very focused on the law, and we’re very focused on the UK because, of course, laws differ from place to place, but sex doesn’t. So anyone elsewhere who wants to look at what we’ve produced or what we do and think about how to apply it in their own legal framework is more than welcome to do so. And we think that the underlying arguments are really applicable across the world.

Helen Dale:

Yes, your website’s available to everyone, and there’s a huge amount of resources there. It really is quite extraordinary. While I was preparing for this, I spent quite a bit of time on it, and I thought, “there is a lot here.” There really is. How did you personally become involved in Sex Matters? What made you choose it rather than continuing with The Economist?

Helen Joyce:

Well, I stumbled upon this extraordinary story about five years ago. Up until then, I had seen trans issues just out of the corner of my eye, and I thought that this was just a legal fiction and accommodation for a very tiny number of people who were very psychologically unusual, who needed to be allowed to move around the world as if they were members of the opposite sex. And I think that’s what most people think it is. And then, just because I was asked by a commissioning editor to look at it, I realized that much more than that was happening. In fact, we were looking at the destruction of the categories of sex in law and that this had really dire effects in all sorts of ways.

So I wrote about it. I received the backlash that anyone who talks about this publicly does. That only made me more determined. And I ended up writing a book, which came out about two years ago now, and I thought the book was going to get it out of my system and that I could just go back to… I was Finance Editor at the time.

Helen Dale:

Yes, I remember.

Helen Joyce:

I was writing a book at The Economist, that I could just go back to ordinary life having, to my own satisfaction, established that sex is indeed binary and immutable, and that does indeed matter. But it turned out that this is a real, actually civilization-threatening movement, and I didn’t feel I could go back to editing six pages of The Economist every week, even though it was a wonderful publication. So I took a year’s leave of absence, and that turned into a permanent stepping back, even though The Economist had been very welcoming and very supportive of me and really did try quite hard to get me to come back. I would say the other reason that I decided to do it was Maya. I think she’s setting up an extraordinary organization, and I think she’s an excellent leader. So, I felt like I had found the right place to do what I thought I could do to help.

Helen Dale:

If there’s one thing I just want to draw out of that, you talked about a civilization-ending movement. What makes you say that?

Helen Joyce:

Well, we are animals, specifically mammals, and we are constrained in our existence. We’re born, we live, we die. We think of ourselves as being ghosts in machines because we have these big brains that don’t fit very well with our rather weak bodies as bodies for mammals go. But the fact is that we are constrained by the fact that we are living beings. And like all mammals, we do come in two sexes. And so something that tries to deny something as basic as that is nearly as fundamental as denying that we breathe air or that we need to sleep or we need to eat. Not quite, but pretty close to it. And you can expect dire consequences if you lie in your law and your policymaking and your education of all sorts at every level in school and universities about something absolutely fundamental to the nature of humanity.

At first, I thought it might be minor and side issues. People do tend to think that. They say, “Oh well, just close the door in the toilet. What’s the problem? There’s only one person in 10,000 or something.” They don’t register the fact that we’re embedding a really fundamental law at the center of every one of our institutions, every one of our laws, and the result is that we break them.

When you have a lie at the heart of an institution, it flips the purpose of that institution on its head. I’ll just take one example out of many. If you have a safeguarding institution, like a school or the regulator for social work, and you put a lie at its heart, which is that sex is a self-defined category, when it is not, then that institution can no longer safeguard because safeguarding essentially requires you to say what sex everybody is, that men and women are rather different in terms of their risks and the risks they pose to others and the risks they pose to children.

And so when you have a lie at the heart of an institution, the next thing that happens is everybody has to be silenced about it. And before you know it, that institution turns on its head and seeks to do the exact opposite of what it was set up to do. So now you have, for example, right now, Social Work England is defending a case taken by a social worker who lost her job for saying that she didn’t think that there are more than two sexes. I forget the exact details of what she said. But basically, she was defending the fact that we need to be able to say what sex everybody is in order to safeguard vulnerable people and children. And she was fired. And now, Social Work England is actively attempting to destroy safeguarding across all of Social Work because it allowed a lie into its heart.

Helen Dale:

And this leads me to my next question, which is why we’ve got both of you together. And this was done very deliberately because Liberty Law Talk is a podcast of a legally focused magazine. In UK employment and civil rights law, Maya Forstater is what lawyers often call a living precedent.

Maya, how did you become one and what does it feel like?

Maya Forstater:

Really, one step at a time. I was working for a think-tank, actually, a Washington D.C. headquartered international economic development think-tank. I was working in London, but the bulk of the organization is in Washington D.C., and the UK government was consulting at the time–this was in 2018–about a proposal to reform the law that allows people to change their legally recorded sex, which is used for some purposes such as marriage and the basis on which they could do that.

So the UK government was asking for people to input into this. It was a topic of democratic, legitimate debate. I don’t work on sex and gender. I was working on international tax policy, but I was in an organization full of economists, sensible, pragmatic, empirical, quite hard-nosed people. And it never occurred to me that they would get offended when I said on Twitter, “Men are not women,” basically. And in fact, they didn’t.

What happened was a couple of people, or three people, I think, in Washington D.C., young female fundraisers for the organization, recent graduates–they complained. And I hadn’t seen that coming. I didn’t know them. I had no idea, really, at that time about the kind of culture that they were coming from. They complained to HR in Washington, and then it escalated from there. Obviously, I didn’t see all of that at the time, but when you go to court, it all comes out.

Helen Dale:

Comes out in discovery, yes.

Maya Forstater:

Yes. So initially, my colleagues–the senior colleagues of the think tank–said, “Well, what she’s saying seems to be a bit controversial. It’s an issue where there are heated feelings on both sides, but we don’t really see a problem in what she’s saying. Let’s ask her to put a disclaimer on her tweets—‘all views my own.’” I did that and thought that was it—but then it escalated over six months, and I ended up being investigated and then losing my job. At that point, I didn’t know I had any employment rights because I wasn’t employed in a straightforward way. I was a visiting fellow with a contract, but I tweeted about it. And there were feminist lawyers who had been thinking about a case like mine before it happened. They dreamt me into existence, I think, which was a belief discrimination case.

So in UK law, we have the Equality Act, which brought together… It’s the Equality Act 2010, and it brought together 40 years of discrimination protection, race discrimination, age, disability, and sex into one law. It includes nine protected characteristics, things that you shouldn’t be discriminated against for. One of those is religion or belief, and it includes obviously religions, but also what they call philosophical beliefs, any serious secular belief that has as much importance to you as a religion. String theory doesn’t count, but any belief that shapes your life. Somebody’s won a case on ethical veganism.

And so the big question of my case was: Is the belief that sex is real, immutable, and important a protected belief? My employer fought that. And so they argued the other side. They said that it’s not a protected belief. That it is on par with Nazism or fascism. Those are the kinds of beliefs that don’t fall under this protection. And they won in the first instance. And that was what really brought my case into the public domain because the day after, they won that bit, and I lost it. J.K. Rowling tweeted about it, and suddenly, it became a much bigger story. And I appealed, and they fought that, and I won. And four years later, I’ve won compensation for losing my job, and I’ve created this precedent. So I’m glad it’s over.

Helen Dale:

Yes, I’ve been on the… When I say the other side, I don’t mean the other side as in the other party in litigation–but the other side as in the job of both the solicitor and the barrister–because I’ve practiced it in both arms of the divided profession that exists in commonwealth countries, unlike the US system, which is a bit different. And I have seen what is described among lawyers… I have seen clients develop litigation neurosis, because they’re placed under so much pressure, particularly when there are multiple appeals and you have to keep climbing up the courts.

And I think, based on my understanding of employment law, although it’s not my area of experience, is that the next step–had you lost again–would’ve been the High Court. Is that correct, or the Court of Appeal? It would’ve been the Court of Appeal?

Maya Forstater:

Court of Appeal, I think.

Helen Dale:

Okay. For our American listeners, that’s like one of your circuit courts for the fifth circuit or the seventh circuit. And for an American, the next step after that is SCOTUS. So you’re getting very, very serious there. So, what does it feel like to be a living precedent?

Maya Forstater:

Well, I’m glad I didn’t change my name when I got married because it’s my name, and there aren’t many Forstaters in the world.

Helen Dale:

Generations of law students who have to write it out, remember how to spell it, and underline it. Well, they’ll thank you.

Maya Forstater:

Yes, exactly.

Helen Dale:

Yes, you are.

Maya Forstater:

I’m the snail in the bottle. Yes, I surprise people when I turn up to lawyers’ parties. It’s definitely the most important thing that I’ve done so far, and it has an amazing catalytic effect. People say my name at work, and it stops a grievance or an investigation, or it makes their employer think twice about what would otherwise be a process that I went through–this escalation of the idea that if you say that sex is not real, it’s open season and you should lose your job. So my name has become very powerful, and that’s quite strange, but I’m hoping it’s not the most important thing that I’ve ever done because I then went on to co-found Sex Matters.

Helen Dale:

If there’s anything that can be said as a follow-up to the idea of being a living precedent, it’s creating an organization that then puts that precedent to work. It’s really quite extraordinary. It’s like Mrs. Carlill of Carlill and Carbolic Smoke Ball, which is another classic contract case. And, of course, the snail in the bottle is the classic tort or delict case. It’s like one of those individuals setting up an organization for tort law reform or for reforms to the law of contract. It really is quite striking. And this is employment law and civil rights law, the way this is working.

A common theme here is working through the courts, engaging in multiple rounds of litigation, which you have–not only on your own account but also in concert with other organizations like the Free Speech Union. How is that proceeding, and do you have any idea how many Forstater cases there are currently on foot?

Maya Forstater:

I haven’t got an exact number, but I think it’s definitely in the dozens at the moment. And then there are other cases that have settled, and there are situations where, as I said, people have just said my name or cited the case and managed to get an employer to back down and to stop the witch hunt. And those ones, ultimately, I think we need more of those. We need to reduce the cost of challenging this and just make it more normal so that people don’t get discriminated against for saying something which is completely normal. It is what everyone thought about sex until five minutes ago. And as Helen said, it’s something that people need to be able to understand to do their job. So I don’t want hundreds and thousands of Forstater cases because that only makes work for lawyers, but certainly, we need more to bash the case home so that employers really take notice.

And also to, there’s the first case in a university, the first case in the civil service, the first case against a regulator, which was this Social Work England one that Helen talked about. There needs to be a case where somebody sues their trade union who are also covered by the same regulation, the same law.

The way that this ideology has gone about protecting itself and protecting the lie has been to go after people at work and to shut down debate and capture institutions. So this thing of protecting people at work and protecting their freedom of belief and speech is such an important way to recapture these institutions. I mean, off the top of my head, I think there are three cases against the Open University, one of our big universities, three against the Green Party. There’s been one against the Arts Council, which is the big government funder of arts.

Helen Dale:

For American listeners, that’s something like the UK’s equivalent of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sorry, Maya, I just thought I needed to—.

Maya Forstater:

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, I think there are several writers suing their publisher, or their organization employs them as a writer. There’s one against the Scottish government, and then there was Allison Bailey, the barrister who sued her chambers and Stonewall. So Stonewall is something like GLAAD. It’s the national organization that started off fighting for gay and lesbian rights. And then, over recent years, has become a trans rights organization. Allison is a lesbian, and she argued that Stonewall is destroying gay and lesbian rights, the very thing that it was set up to protect. She sued her chambers and won, but she also sued Stonewall, who was an advisor. Her chambers were part of this scheme where you sign up to Stonewall and they tell you what to do, and you get a badge. And she sued Stonewall as being the organization that incited her employer to discriminate against her. She lost on that in the first instance, but she’s appealing.

Helen Dale:

Yes, it is.

Maya Forstater:

So that’s quite important in terms of somebody who’s bringing a case against an institution that has a relatively small financial footprint but a huge influence footprint in the UK.

Helen Dale:

And I’m sure Americans would confirm that GLAAD has done something similar in the United States– because one of the things I did do before writing up the script for this podcast and going about recording it was I put out a call for questions from Liberty Law Talk’s American listeners, because so many Americans listen to this podcast, and many of them express concerns at institutional capture and at the state of the US legal and judicial system. And one American commented, and this is a quotation that I thought was a very good question, “Gender identity ideology has crept into all our institutions and sometimes absurd judgments are made. Indoctrination in schools is taking place. Police, healthcare, sport and banking, as well as the third sector are all corrupted.” And he wanted to know your views, Helen, on the extent to which the judiciary has been captured perhaps in both the UK and the US.

Helen Joyce:

I think quite a lot, I would say. If I start in the UK, the fact is our law is in a much better state than it is in the US. We still have the concept in common law of sex being binary and immutable, and the Gender Recognition Act, because it was actually a forerunner of other legislation about gender doesn’t do a wholesale change in somebody’s legal status as regards to their sex and has also got quite a lot of medical gatekeeping in it. So the facts of the law are pretty good. And it was extraordinary, really, that the judge in the first instance, tribunal in Maya’s case, could seriously think that to say what is basically the situation in British law is so wicked and bigoted that it’s akin to Nazism. The exact phrase that’s used in the legal test is “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Helen Dale:

Yes, I remember the Adam Smith Institute–or one of the think-tanks–said that you were basically being compared with people who promoted Hitler or people who promoted Stalin.

Helen Joyce:

Well, that’s exactly right, because you can’t defend all beliefs. You can’t defend the belief that you know there should be a genocide of Jews or that-

Helen Dale:

Genocide of Ukrainians.

Helen Joyce:

Yes. So the test, there’s a set of five tests called the Grainger tests, some of which are more technical, but the one that really bites is the last one. The fifth Grainger test “is this belief worthy of respect in a democratic society,” and beliefs aren’t worthy of respect in a democratic society if they’re rights-destroying. So what Judge Taylor in the first instance tribunal was saying was literally saying that to acknowledge the fact that there are two sexes, just two and that it’s immutable, and to think that acknowledging that matter is in law and everyday life” is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” And as the judge said in the second case–in the employment appeal tribunal–it’s actually the situation in British law pretty much.

I mean, that’s not actually the test in the Grainger test. Is this the law? But basically, the judge in the first instance had been so trained and had been so misguided by lobby groups that have influenced the guidance that judges use in managing court cases that he’d gotten himself turned upside down and thought that saying that there were two sexes and they can’t change and that you need to be able to talk about that was literally akin to Nazism. So there’s a very ongoing process of capturing the judiciary, and a lot of it is done just via general “you’re not allowed to talk about this” intimidation of people who try to talk about it, and so on. But a significant amount of it happens via this thing called the Equal Treatment Bench Book, which is by judges for judges.

Helen Dale:

Yes. I heard about this on the lawyers’ bush telegraph. I have to say, if you could go on and describe that to my American listeners, that would be great.

Helen Joyce:

It started as a way for judges to help other judges to basically run their courtrooms in a way that wasn’t going to lead to unfairness or, indeed, mistrials. So things like “what do you do if you’ve got a blind person giving evidence?” or a deaf person or somebody who doesn’t speak the native language, how not to spread rape myths, how not to spread racial stereotypes. And, of course, with all these things that start with good intentions, they become a target for lobbyists. And it has by now come to significantly embed the assumptions of what we would call gender identity ideology–that it’s bigotry to use someone’s sex pronouns if they don’t want you to, that non-binary identities are real, that some people are gender-fluid, that there can be a woman’s penis and that a woman might rape somebody with her penis–and so on and so forth. So, Judge Taylor–I’m speculating, but I think it’s informed speculation–had been through training of this sort and had come out of it totally misunderstanding both the law and reality.

Now, in the US, you get very much the same sorts of things. GLAAD has a media guide, they have legal guides, they have a lot of money. They’re not the only ones who are doing this work. The ACLU is also–and I think the Human Rights Campaign will be the other one of the three big organizations I point at–and they are putting judges in a position where judges have totally lost sight of reality. And then the law in many American states is worse. So many American states have gender self-ID, meaning that you can just change–you can just write off and get a new birth search that changes your sex. And now your sex really is for the purposes of the law, what the piece of paper says. And lawyers and judges do tend to have this fondness for believing the piece of paper over reality.

And it’s funny, really, because there’s a famous quotation, Maya may be able to tell me who it was who said it, a famous British jurist who was saying that… He was basically arguing mostly for the primacy of parliament over the sovereign, but he was also saying what the limits of parliamentary or legislative power were. And the example he turned to for a thing that no legislature could do is make a man a woman. There is a bedrock reality there, but I think after years and years and years of legal education and working as a lawyer and then a judge, you tend to believe the pieces of paper and not the reality. So I actually think that lawyers and judges are particularly prone to this magical thinking.

I’ll say one more example of that, and that was a case in Scotland just before Christmas. The Scottish government is attempting to introduce gender self-ID. The UK government is saying that that’s not compatible with Devolution because certain powers are reserved to the UK government in Westminster and only some are devolved to the government in Holyrood and Edinburgh. The argument that the government’s lawyer made for why a piece of paper can change somebody’s sex is that there is no distinction between legal sex and actual sex. And the example he gave was the speed limit. He said, “The speed limit is whatever the government says it is. There isn’t a real speed limit and a legal speed limit. There is only the legal speed limit.” And the idea that sex is like a speed limit when sex has been a fact of life on earth for more than two billion years, and there have been mammals for more than 200 million years, and no mammal has ever changed sex in 200 million years, and we are mammals, and he’s talking about speed limits–only a lawyer can come up with nonsense like this.

Helen Dale:

I think I can probably give you an idea as to why lawyers do this when they should know better, particularly, as of all professions, lawyers are the ones who are trained to argue and to have recourse to the facts. There are only two great legal systems in the world. One was invented by the English, and that’s the one that Americans and English people will be most familiar with. The other was invented by the Romans, which is the one that you see on the Continent, but also in Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere in the world. And all the other legal systems that exist are derived from something that either the Romans or the English developed. And if you go back to their very early law in both civilizations–one Pagan and one Christian–what you find is a form of word magic.

You’ll get, for example, in the common law, dueling oaths, where the person who can do the biggest and scariest oath in God’s name–because they’re Christian–is the one who tends to win initially. With the Romans, you also get the oath-taking and you get, for example, a soldier will swear by Mars and say, “May Mars break my head off my shoulders the way I break the head off this arrow,” and he’ll hold it up in front of him and then snap the head off. So there’s this tradition of word magic, magical words, words that really can have an enormous effect on reality.

Words that really can have an enormous effect on reality are embedded deep in both these great legal systems. And I actually think–based on what you’re saying here–is that in some respects it’s broken through. It’s come to the surface.

Helen Joyce:

That’s very interesting.

Maya Forstater:

I think that’s true. And when you look at how the Gender Recognition Act in the UK was developed, they thought about parallels with marriage, where marriage is partly a real thing, but it’s partly a form of word magic. And they thought about parallels with adoption. And again, neither of them are exactly the same as somebody wanting to say that they’re the opposite sex, but that’s what they drew on.

Helen Dale:

I actually think that one of the reasons why these various, and I’m going to use the word woke, even though people hate it, these various woke things have got their tentacles into so many institutions–and it’s not just the issue with the trans debate that we’re talking about here, but in certain other areas–is because they’ve been very good at finding a weakness that already existed within an institution. The law’s case is the tendency to rely on legal fictions. Both Romans and English do this. Going right back to classical antiquity, lots of legal fictions existed. The legal fiction of the corporation that has given rights to sue and be sued and perpetual succession and so on and so forth. In the Roman world, you would get things like non-citizens being treated as citizens in commercial litigation because the only commercial law that was available was Roman law.

And because the business of the Roman Empire tended to be business, they wanted business–the wheels of commerce–to be well-oiled. And so it was just a legal fiction that treated everybody in the empire with capacity–everyone except slaves–as Roman citizens for the purposes of commercial law. That’s an enormous legal fiction, because there were huge rights differences between what a Roman citizen could do and what a non-citizen could do. But it’s a classic thing that the law does. And so we finished up with that weakness being attacked. Other areas where there’s a weakness within an institution, various aspects of wokery have been able to attack it. In the race debate, it’s been able to attack the Christian churches because of the doctrine of original sin. And it’s very easy to weaponize that against Christians because that weakness was already there. “You are responsible for the terrible behavior of your ancestors, whether it’s slavery or colonization or whatever.” And this is repeated over and over and over again. Really quite striking.

Helen Joyce:

I think there’s a very good analogy there with some strands of feminism. A lot of women have somehow got it in their head that if you say there are differences between men and women, you are automatically saying that there’s a hierarchy and that men are at the top of it. And that’s actually a very sexist idea that just because men do something and women do something else, that the man version is automatically the good one. But not ever having faced up to that internalized feeling that men are actually the pattern and women the other means that some feminists reflexively refuse to accept that there are any differences between men and women. And they may believe, for example, that in a just world, men would do just as much of the childcare, women would be just as likely to be chess champions, whatever. They may think that 50/50 is what you’re aiming for in absolutely all spheres of life.

And then those women have very great difficulty, (a) in explaining why men do nearly all the violent stuff, and (b) when it comes to something like sport where you finally do see in front of you the physical differences, they have to try and say, “Well, our minds are the same, our brains are the same, but our bodies are different.” And I know, Helen, because we’ve had this conversation before. I’ve quoted you many times since when you said to me that “the rad-fems think that evolution didn’t work from the neck up and the trans rights activists think it didn’t work from the neck down.” Well, you and I both believe it worked on both bits.

Helen Dale:

Yes.

Helen Joyce:

That weakness in feminism of never facing up to the fact that women and men are actually different in many respects, not massively different, mostly just statistically different—exceptions obviously comes to the carrying and making of babies–but different. And because feminism never faced up to that and then made the argument that that did not mean women were inferior–now it’s come back to bite feminists in the ass.

Helen Dale:

It’s good that you’ve turned to this now, actually, because when I put out my call for questions and issues that people were interested in, my Liberty Law Talk listeners and also on my Substack, a lot of people had something to say on the situation in which feminism finds itself. A lot of people are very angry. They think that they’ve been taught nonsense at university. In my case, it was obvious that it was nonsense. I was a farmer’s daughter, and so I knew what was true, and then what various lecturers were telling me was not true. But if you grew up in the city–if you were a “townie” is the Australian expression–then you often went in completely blind. And Louise Perry has written very eloquently about going into university and being told things that weren’t true and having to find them out when she worked at a rape crisis center.

Helen Joyce:

Ask Maya what she studied at university. You’ll like it.

Helen Dale:

Oh, what did you study at university, Maya? I would be very curious to know in light of this.

Maya Forstater:

Agriculture.

Helen Dale:

Of course. But one thing that came under sustained attack from a lot of really quite cranky American women, and I don’t mean cranky in a bad sense, I think legitimately cranky–what they’d been taught at university was the concept of patriarchy. And a few gay men as well actually joined in on this one. And it had lots of critics on both sides of the pond. And there were so many questions, I’ve had to be quite selective. I’m just going to bring some of these up now. How can or should feminism evolve in light of exactly what you were just saying, Helen? And in light of reality–the reality of agriculture that Maya and I know about very intimately–do either of you think feminism or any strand of it can accept that men and women are mentally and emotionally different from each other?

Helen Joyce:

Absolutely. And that strand is much stronger in the UK anyway than in the US. I’ve always called myself a feminist without supporting movement feminism of any kind. But I just want to start by saying if you think of feminism–as the broadest idea–that is “trying to build a world fit for women,” then you’ll obviously understand that there’ll be very different strands within feminism, just as there are within men’s thought. Because until relatively recently, all political economy and all political philosophy was really about men, like women and children were adjuncts to them. And so men’s version of how we should organize the world varies so wildly that it goes from libertarianism to communism to fascism to socialism to being a foreign policy hawk to being a pacifist. So we should be surprised that when women sit down and say, “How do you make a world fit for women?” they come up with enormously different answers, some of them about as reality-denying as communism is. Famously, EO Wilson said of communism, “Nice idea. Wrong species.” And I think that the-

Helen Dale:

One of my favorite quotations.

Helen Joyce:

Yeah. He studied ants. I think that the idea that you can treat mammals as if the two sexes are going to be identical in pretty much every respect–except that one sex has a sort of an internal grow bag and pops a baby out every now and then–is about as stupid as thinking that you can impose an ant-based system of organizing your society on a mammal. I would say that feminism, to me, means creating a world that’s fit for women to flourish in. And I want men to flourish too, and I want children to flourish, too. But feminism specifically focuses on women and thinks, “What do women need to flourish?” And most women are going to be mothers, but not all. Even women who are mothers, as both Maya and I are, are other things as well, so women are much more complex to fit into a world that’s fit for them.

But we’re not even starting to think about that because we’re denying what it is to be a woman. We’re thinking that a woman is a man who can pop out a baby every now and then. And that’s convenient if you’re trying to run a business because it’s hard to fit people who are mothers and the very needy nature of human babies into the modern corporation. But as long as we do that, we’re not creating a world that’s fit for women, but we’re not even talking about it properly. We’re talking about a sort of a choice feminism that sees women as being men in pretty much every respect, except that every now and then, they choose to drop out for a bit and pop out a baby whom they’re going to give to somebody else to mind.

I think that we need to … Actually, and I think Louise Perry thinks the same, that this movement may actually help us to recenter on reality when we think about what it is to create a world that women can flourish in. And that’s what I hope will come out of all of this when we get through all the crying after hopefully abolishing the idiotic idea that sex is a spectrum or mutable or doesn’t exist–or whatever the hell it is this scavenger ideology of massive internal inconsistencies claims–that we can come back out the other side and say, “Well, right now, look, we do have two sexes. What does that mean for how we should organize society?”

Helen Dale:

As it is, it seems impossible for feminism to reckon with motherhood and fatherhood, not just motherhood, but fatherhood as well. And so you get this problem with reckoning with family life more generally.

Helen Joyce:

Yes.

Helen Dale:

Do you have any sense of how that changes?

Helen Joyce:

Well, it’s because of the long-run, over several centuries, marketization of things that weren’t marketized. The market stopped at the door. And inside that, we understood that things were non-fungible. Because I worked at The Economist for a long time–although I don’t have a degree in economics myself–I’m used to the way economists talk about things. And I’ve often said to my children that they’re the ultimate non-fungible goods. You can’t replace a child with a better child or an equal child. And if my sons died, I couldn’t take other ones that were in some way better, like taller or stronger or more handsome or something like that. My children are non-replaceable. And it’s the same once you’ve settled on a spouse, that’s the only person that you are with, and that’s the person you make memories with and that you face the challenges of life with, and so on.

We understood that. But markets are like a universal solvent. Everything that they enter, they dissolve, and they break down into their constituent parts. And so many things have become marketized now that it’s hard to fit people who are close to irreducibly non-marketized transactions or activities. And that’s women much more than men because we make babies. Getting someone else to carry your baby for you or to breastfeed your baby or to look after your baby when the baby is small, it’s not substitutable. The baby loves the mother best. It can be the father. I know fathers can look after babies. But anyway, their primary caregiver, which is usually their mother, is the person they love most. And other people cannot substitute for them. So unless we accept that markets have limits … But setting limits in markets is incredibly difficult, so I think it’s going to be very hard.

Helen Dale:

It’s so very tempting to let them run wild.

Helen Joyce:

It’s hard not to. They are extraordinary things.

Helen Dale:

And the reason why—and this is something that was actually noticed by the Roman jurists and Adam Smith, of course, made a big deal of it in Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. But it’s originally a Roman insight: that if you set up a market in something, it becomes less violent. So rather than stealing from each other and killing people and taking what’s theirs, you trade instead.

Helen Joyce:

Yes.

Helen Dale:

And-

Helen Joyce:

And it’s not just that it’s less violent—it’s that it creates value.

Helen Dale:

It does. It does create value, yes.

Helen Joyce:

Markets provide the thing you want the most. So, the reason we’re so wealthy now, it is The Wealth of Nations. It’s because of markets. I have great respect for the power of markets to drag humanity out of nasty [inaudible 00:39:13], both the violence point and the wealth point. But we can’t even start talking about this when we aren’t talking about the things that are non-marketable—like care, love, motherhood, and childhood. And we aren’t willing to do that.

Helen Dale:

Or if you do make them marketable, it becomes one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments. You finish up with all the conflicts, the complexities that people are now encountering around surrogacy, for example.

Helen Joyce:

Exactly.

Helen Dale:

They suddenly discovered it’s a lot harder than they thought. But it is so very tempting to do, because the market reduces the kidnapping of babies and the obvious violence. So you think, “oh, we’ve solved the problem because there’s less violence,” not realizing you’ve created a whole heap of others.

Helen Joyce:

It’s also just that you don’t have to create markets. One of the extraordinary things about markets is that they create themselves. Nobody’s set out to create a market in dating. Somebody just created a dating app, and everybody came there. And now it’s actually rather difficult to get together with another young person if you’re not both on the app. And the thing is that they ratchet. Once you have a market, this is one of the magic things about markets—and also one of the terrifying things about them—is that it compounds. Whatever it is it does, it just keeps compounding and changing. And so you get to the point where you have 90% of the people—I saw in an article yesterday—on dating apps are men and 10% are women. Men and women have very different ways of making decisions on dating apps. They’re much more similar in real life than they are on dating apps. And this just evolves.

Helen Dale:

Yes. And you finish up with a situation where nobody gets what they want.

Helen Joyce:

Exactly.

Helen Dale:

Everybody’s unhappy.

Helen Joyce:

And very hard to reverse. I don’t know how you could reverse that one. Nobody regulated dating apps. Nobody set out to create a world in which that’s how young people overwhelmingly meet each other with the purpose of having intimate relations.

Helen Dale:

Just going back to Maya’s qualification in agriculture, I think this is quite a good point and it’s worth working on it a little bit more. You’ve commented publicly—I’ve seen you say this, I think whether it was on Twitter or in an interview, I’m not sure—that hostility to evolution is feminism’s Achilles’ Heel. And I actually think this is a wider question than just feminism, which we’ve been talking about because this has become pervasive in a lot of areas now. How do we get pseudoscience not only out of feminism but also debate? The organized skeptical movements and rationalist movements—you could see from Richard Dawkins’ travails—have just blown themselves up.

Maya Forstater:

I think as Helen said, when you put a lie into the heart of an organization or an institution, it corrupts that institution around it. And the lie that men can be women is such an obvious lie, and we’re seeing the fallout from that. But the lie or the misapprehension that men and women are the same from the neck up is only a hair’s breadth removed away from that. And it’s interesting, often when we have conflict, debate, and fights between the radical feminists on one side and the trans rights activists on the other side—for some people, their view of the world is not that far removed.

And certainly, we’ve seen how gender ideology came up through the universities when women’s studies became gender studies became gender queer studies. And those institutions became corrupted, I think, around trying to protect the lie that men and women are not that different because people had fallen for the naturalistic fallacy that if it’s going to be fair, it needs to be equal, that men and women are ultimately Lego people that are sort of similar, apart from the hairstyles. I don’t know how we fix this other than that freedom of speech is the most …

It’s the only way that we come to the truth, that we come to weigh different ideas against each other. And protecting that protects the institutions that create wealth and that create stability and all of the stuff that we’ve come to value in society. So, I just come back to freedom of speech, not to any one person having the answer, but to enable our institutions to think about what is true, what delivers value, what works—and to kind of fight those battles out in words and language—rather than trying to cancel people.

Helen Joyce:

And if I could butt in there and say, it shouldn’t surprise us that pseudoscience wins because we’re evolved beings, and that includes our mental capacity. And there’s a host of evidence now that our brain power is largely used to rationalize decisions that we have already made for reasons other than logical ones. And in particular, we’re tribal. When your tribe has decided to adopt an idea, it is deeply unwise not to go along with it. And the sorts of people who, back in the rainforest, said, “Hang on a sec, I don’t think that’s the right God. Or why do you say we can’t eat that particular thing? Or what if I go down this way that you say there’s a monster?” didn’t tend to survive. And even if they were right in their skepticism, they might be cast out. And being cast out in a tribal society means death.

So we evolved to be very good at coming up with ideas why what we already think for emotional reasons and for tribal reasons is right. And the scientific method and the sorts of debates, the Socratic method, and so on, are hard-won brilliant adaptations that we use in order to try to fix those problems with our evolved capacity to think. And it’s very easy for us to forget them or to lose them or to drop them in one domain. That’s what happened with the skeptics. There are plenty of people who still call themselves skeptics, but who are willing to believe that men can be women, which is about as dumb as any other belief that skeptics–

Helen Dale:

To be fair, I’ve always analogized it with creationism or geocentrism.

Helen Joyce:

Well, exactly.

Helen Dale:

And, of course, Simon Edge’s first-most, no, second-most recent novel, which I think is out—The End of the World is Flat—the whole conceit of that depends on analogizing it with geocentrism. And I thought, “How are you going to keep this up for 400 pages?” And then I had to review it for The Spectator, I think. And he has absolutely no trouble keeping it up for 400 pages because that’s exactly what it’s like.

Helen Joyce:

Yeah. It’s a great book. I really enjoyed it. And he’s also written a more recent one, which is about Maya, basically. It’s another-

Helen Dale:

In the Beginning.

Helen Joyce:

… comedy analogy. Yeah. You can actually look at skeptics and you can see people who are saying … They’re blasting aromatherapy and homeopathy and all the things that they can blast within their tribe without getting cast out. But they know very well that if they say, “Oh, yeah, the trans rights stuff is even more stupid,” that they will get cast out. And so their brain power manages to work without them consciously noticing it to come up with what are obviously laughably stupid and superficial reasons for why they believe what they believe because it’s backfilling, it’s desperate backfilling. And they then have to conceal the fact that that’s what it is from themselves, which is why they get so angry when you attack them about it, because it’s fragile. It’s a sensitive place in the worldview that they have created and in their social acceptance in their tribe, so they go on the attack to try to get you to move away from the sensitive place.

Maya Forstater:

And I think also it explains why people like my colleagues, people who are not … Weren’t bought into the ideology at all and whose professional instinct is to think clearly from evidence and first principles. But I think as soon as you step into a space where you instinctively recognize that there’s a danger that you will be canceled by your tribe, it feels awful even before you understand what the risk is or anything about the content of the thing. There’s a just … it’s like a bad smell, and you back off because rationally … And you’re evolved not to fall out with your tribe. And I think that happens a lot. So, people don’t even get to the point of defending the belief or considering the belief or the inconsistencies. They just go, “Here be dragons.” And they go back to … Also, they go back to their day job, which is important in its own right. And they don’t want to harm or destroy that or harm their family or … There are all sorts of rational, understandable, and very hardwired reasons why good smart people don’t want to go here.

Helen Joyce:

Lots of people in the women’s sector, for example, people who run rape crisis centers or domestic violence shelters or so on, know very well that these places have to be for females only. And that if you want to serve a trans woman, meaning a man who identifies as a woman, maybe that’s fine. These people also suffer rape and domestic violence, but you’re going to have to do it in some separate way. You can’t have them in the group setting because so many of these women are traumatized. But funders have gone trans-inclusive. And that puts a woman who’s running a rape crisis center in an incredibly difficult position because she knows the work she does is literally lifesaving, and she doesn’t want to lose funding. She knows that there are women in grave need.

And so she crosses her fingers behind her back and says, “Okay, trans women are women,” I call these hostage statements and hope that it won’t come to anything, but then that’s the fact. That’s what they’ve said. People who can’t cope with that leave. People who think have been indoctrinated, young women come in, and they work for it. And now, suddenly, this organization has become … Genuinely believes that men can become women. And it must tell the women who come into the center if they ever say anything like, “I’m sure she’s a lovely woman, but I actually find her traumatizing because I find male voices traumatizing,” they have to silence that woman and call her a bigot and kick her out. And before you know it, that’s an organization that is actively working against women. It’s like a men’s rights activism movement. It’s an incel movement. There’s a Brighton Rape Crisis Center.

Helen Dale:

It’s the same as the safeguarding principle. The principles of which-

Helen Joyce:

Exactly. So it turns you on your head, actually upside down. It doesn’t just take you off course, it turns you through 180 degrees. Brighton Rape Crisis Center—I have a friend who credits it with saving her when she ran away from home as a teenager, and she had experienced very serious sexual abuse in the family. And she says it was a lifesaver for her. That organization now refuses to offer any groups or any support that isn’t trans-inclusive, not even one group. It could say that all the groups are trans-inclusive except one. And a woman is taking it to court saying that that’s indirect discrimination against her on grounds of sex because women really do need single-sex support.

Helen Dale:

And belief.

Helen Joyce:

And belief also, yes.

Helen Dale:

So it’s another Forstater case.

Maya Forstater:

Yes, there are Forstater cases outside of employment, and that’s one of the most important ones, I think.

Helen Joyce:

But the amazing thing is that this Brighton Rape Crisis Center—which was such a good organization—if you talk to people in the sector, they’ll say it was a leading light and it was very early and very good. It’s now an incel organization that seeks to make it impossible for women who need single sex spaces for recovery to have them. It’s saying that asking for what trauma-informed care requires is bigotry. It’s extraordinary. Andrew Tate couldn’t make this argument, and they’re making it.

Helen Dale:

No. And I don’t think he would, to be honest. I’m not defending Andrew Tate here. I’m not holding out any brief for him or anything. But I’ll be quite frank: I watched his long interview that he did with Zuby, because I watched Zuby’s podcast, and I couldn’t even imagine him making such a bonkers argument. He wouldn’t go there.

Helen Joyce:

No, it’s worse than bonkers. It’s evil. They are more evil than anything that somebody like Andrew Tate could say. As evil as it gets to say that a traumatized woman is simply forbidden from either saying that she needs female-only space or even mentioning that the person who has just come in is male. It is actually evil.

Helen Dale:

Both of you have been talking about the evolutionary point and how people who asked difficult questions about why we couldn’t eat that plant or go down that path or whatnot in the past tended not to survive. But it became clear to me, as both of you were talking, that one of the reasons why they tended not to survive was because this has produced conformity. It has produced an evolutionary tendency towards conformity. It’s not just not wanting to be cast out—it’s also going along to get along before the questions even come up—so we’ve got an evolved tendency to be conformist. And it strongly suggests that somewhere along in my family tree, I must have had a Captain Grumpy survive because I’m notoriously Captain Grumpy and don’t go along with anybody. Although, I do wonder how much of that is just caused by the fact that I’m posh and quite well off. Would I be this Captain Grumpy otherwise? I suppose I was when I was younger. When I wasn’t—I was posh, but I certainly wasn’t well off. But anyway.

Helen Joyce:

This is a movement of disagreeable women in the psychological sense. I don’t mean that we’re horrible. I mean that we are unusually willing to accept people not liking us and not going along with us for women.

Helen Dale:

Jordan Peterson’s description of disagreeableness. Yes. The proper one, not the one that says, “Oh, you’re-”

Helen Joyce:

Not the casual one.

Helen Dale:

Not the casual one that says that you’re bad company at parties. But in light of all of this conformity and how this whole movement is built on conformity, quite a lot of questions came in from both North American and British listeners about the intellectual origins of trans lunacy. Because I can remember how in days gone by—and this is going back to when I first started my undergraduate degree, which was in 1990, which immediately dates me—it only turned up in fringe humanities or social science courses. It really was on the fringe. And people would laugh at it and say it was bonkers. Now, it’s everywhere. But it’s also clear that it came from the tertiary sector. What, then, do we do about the universities?

Maya Forstater:

Yeah. I mean, I think I remember reading Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate whenever it came out. I think that was in the nineties or 2000s. And being horrified but thinking, “I’m sure he seems to be exaggerating. It can’t be that bad.” I have a degree in agriculture. I didn’t know anything about what it’s like in the humanities of universities. Clearly, it was that bad, and then it escaped the lab and took over the world. And I think part of why it takes over institutions, not just universities but all sorts of established institutions, is because their business model is being disintermediated, and their sources of value and the way that their career structures work and the assets that they have are all being turned over for reasons of technology and climate change and energy. You know, the universities may go the way of the typewriter anyway.

And I think that it’s when organizations are in that state that they then become vulnerable to this kind of mind virus that doesn’t create value, that destroys it—but that is able to see where there is a resource to be had—and it helps people to get rid of their boss and take over to gain a position. So it turns over all these organizations that were supposed to be meritocratic and that were supposed to be running scientific method, that were supposed to be based on evidence. So maybe it’s hastening their decline. There will be organizations that we have to save, and there will be organizations that will evolve into something else, and there will be organizations that are surpassed.

Helen Joyce:

I’d like to point out that one of the major things that’s happened in American universities—which is where this is all incubated mainly, like they are the Patient Zero—is the unbelievable, incredible expansion in the number of adjunct staff, like “academic related” we’d call them here in the U.K., administrators in other words. And there’s a remarkably good writer, an academic called Lyle Asher—I cannot recommend his work enough. And he has looked at how ed schools have basically ruined first pre-university education in America and now university education in America too.

So, just for your American listeners, the way that we train teachers in the U.K. is very different from the way that they’re trained in the U.S. You do an ordinary degree the same as anyone else first in whatever you like: history, mathematics, whatever. And then you do a one-year course called a postgraduate certificate in education. And that’s largely done in school now. It used to be done more in the classroom, and they were taught nonsense theories. But now you mostly spend all but the first six weeks in classrooms learning how to manage kids, learning how to get your message across, so you’re an expert in your own area is the idea. And you know how to teach, and you’re taught very and prescriptively how to teach children to read using phonics and so on. In America, you do a degree in education is the main route, and they teach you nonsense by Paulo Freire and the like, all about the co-production of knowledge and the rest. And so America is still teaching children to read by methods that are well known and have been known for decades to fail because they’re taught in ed schools.

Then the ed schools found a new market, which was the university administrator—when universities created enormously large numbers of new roles in monitoring diversity and inclusion, in doing witch hunts on people who might have done something that could count as sexual assault and suchlike. And the ed schools started offering courses in university administration, and now that’s like a parallel syllabus that’s run with no oversight at all, no academic rigor. It’s often compulsory, because in the dorm you have to do the course on consent, and that’s where you’re taught that transwomen are women and just every sort of nonsense, and you’re taught that whiteness is cancer and everything else like that. And nobody’s watching that. Nobody’s checking it. It’s compulsory. If you don’t go along with it, you’ll be kicked out. And so I really think that’s been an under-acknowledged reason why American universities have gone so rotten.

Helen Dale:

It’s interesting that you mentioned Paulo Freire and the role of education schools because I’ve got a colleague, one of the writers on my substack is a chap called Lorenzo Warby, and he’s a medievalist by training. That’s his… ancient, medieval, church history, languages history, so on and so forth, that particular area. And he had to do the one-year education course. Australia has the same rules about you have to do a proper degree; you can’t do an education degree. You only do this one-year education course, and one of the set books for it was Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. So I borrowed it off him. I’m a lawyer, so I just… Because he just said it was nonsense. He said, “This is absolute cobblers, and it would not help you in the classroom at all.” Just a sort of two-sentence dismissal. And I read it, and he’s right. It is absolute cobblers.

And then sometime later, after we… It’s only a little book. It’ll take you a couple of hours to read. And there’s no insight. It’s just someone having a moan about the way his society is organized. And maybe his society was organized unfairly, but that doesn’t give him the right to pronounce on education. And anyway, Lorenzo, being the kind of person who’s interested in this period and in the Early Modern period, he said the situation with the universities, because of the way education—particularly in the United States, the education schools have destroyed them—he says it’s getting close to the dissolution of the monasteries territory. That was the analogy he drew.

Helen Joyce:

So I lived in Brazil for several years, and I was the foreign correspondent based in Sao Paulo for The Economist between 2010 and 2013. The job I had done before that for The Economist was education correspondent. Paulo Freire was the great Brazilian educationalist who completely destroyed any chance his own country had of setting up decent schools, and then got exported around the world. And actually, the woman who was my office assistant out there was a trained teacher, and she was fascinated by watching my two boys who went to the English school and how they were taught to read using the standard, tried and tested phonics method. And she said, “I’ve never seen anything like this. They still use the whole word method. They still say that street children in Brazil have other ways of knowing mathematics,” and all this absolute bollocks. And this is part—a big part of the reason why Brazil comes out so incredibly badly on international comparisons of education is because of Paulo Freire. And he’s been exported, and he’s still being taught to people in American ed schools and destroying American education, too.

Helen Dale:

Just extraordinary. Yes, that was a little diversion. Sorry about that, everybody. A non-law diversion, but I think a genuinely interesting one.

To get back onto the legal aspects of it, and this is a question from another North American listener and heading back more towards the legal arguments that we’ve been discussing; and she wants to know, “What do you think will turn the trans juggernaut around in the U.S. and Canada? And how best should gender-critical efforts be focused in those two countries?” Question for you both.

Helen Joyce:

Maya, maybe you should try that one.

Maya Forstater:

I mean, the sort of joke of the tourists saying in Ireland, “How do you get to Dublin?” And the answer is, “I wouldn’t start from here.” You know, I’m glad I’m not in the U.S. or Canada. The U.S. was Patient Zero, and Canada caught it worse. But the two things that I think are sort of bright sparks in the U.S. are the attention now being paid to sport and obviously how… I mean, sport is important to lots of people, but it seems to be particularly important in the U.S. And the whole thing about academic scholarships and sport in school is much more culturally important, I think, in the U.S. than it certainly is in the U.K.. And people can see that sport is just so viscerally unfair if males are allowed to compete in female sport, and that seems to be a bright spot in the U.S.

And then children, I mean, I think we’re seeing almost across most of Europe now, medical establishments that had gone along with transitioning children, giving them puberty blockers—the whole idea that children can be born in the wrong body is turning around. And I think more slowly in the U.S., that is having a ripple effect. And then obviously the question of liability for… I mean, ultimately, I think this is a human rights abuse on the people that it’s done to. The doctors are making a promise to often vulnerable young people that they can do something to their body that will make them acceptable as the opposite sex to everyone else. And if everyone else doesn’t accept that, then they’re bigots and they should be canceled. And obviously, we are pushing back on that. And if the answer is that the rest of the population won’t make good on the promise that the doctors are making, then it becomes very much more clear that what they’re doing in sterilizing people, in cutting off healthy parts of their body, in order to try and affirm the idea that they can be the opposite sex is a human rights abuse against those people. And I think that will probably play out differently in Europe than it will in the U.S. because we have different medical systems and different institutions that are liable for them.

But those seem to be the kind of two areas that are really making some progress.

Helen Dale:

How transferable is the U.K.’s campaign to the U.S.? I think it’s fair to say that the campaign in the U.K. has been much more successful, and some of that success is now spreading to the rest of the Commonwealth but not Canada. It’s spreading to Australia, for example, which is starting to pick up the U.K. approach to fighting this.

Helen Joyce:

I mean, we do very, very legal analysis at sex matters all the time that really looks at regulations that govern schools and the procedures for dealing with children who have special needs and the details of how the Equality Act works and so on. And obviously, that level of granular detail is not transferable. In fact, some of the international law stuff isn’t transferable to the U.S. either because the U.S. isn’t a signatory toward the international conventions. But it should be transferable across Europe, quite a lot of it. I mean, Maya’s case does go back to freedom of belief in the rights that were written into U.K. law in the Human Rights Act, but they come from the European Convention on Human Rights. So she is citable as persuasive across Europe.

In the U.S., I think it’s much harder to make these arguments like freedom of belief and freedom of expression, but you can look at your Constitution in the U.S. and say, “Well, what’s there?” And I mean, you’ve got better freedom of speech rights in America. So I would say that people can look at the materials that we’ve produced and the stuff that’s about bodies and sport and not indoctrinating children and so on. That should be very transferable. But you may need to think smart about how to convert an argument that’s about freedom of expression in the European Court of Human Rights into freedom of speech in the U.S. Constitution.

Maya Forstater:

Yeah. I mean, the other difference between the U.S. and the U.K. is there are just much lower employment protections altogether. Part of the reason why I think my case happened was because the HR decisions were being made in the U.S. by people whose experiences are that you can tell anyone to clear their desk.

Helen Dale:

Contract-at-will it’s called. I’ve had to explain this to Americans—that Australia and Britain don’t have that, and that if you have freedom of speech or freedom of expression, then you have it in both the public and the private sector. It doesn’t matter. There might be less of it, but what you have is held equally, regardless of whether you are a state employee or a private sector employee. Whereas in the U.S., this whole culture of contract-at-will in the private sector just means—as you were saying—people can just be told to clear their desk and walk.

Helen Joyce:

I think another difference that’s very important is that America is so politically polarized that it’s very hard to do things through the legislative route, at least at the federal level. We’ve seen a significant amount of engagement from politicians here, either the government in power, which is the Conservative-led government realizing very belatedly that it was asleep at the wheel while all this nonsense came in since 2010—which is how long it’s been in power—but also on the Labour side realizing that even if this doesn’t turn into an electoral issue—which I don’t think it will when there’s a cost of living crisis and so on—there’s a very serious risk that it turns into a real albatross while Labour are in power, which is what they’re expected to be from the end of next year. You know, nobody wants to have press conferences in which every single one—no matter what it’s about, somebody says—“Prime Minister, can I ask you, what’s a woman? Prime Minister, what share of women have penises? Prime Minister, is this rapist a woman? He says he is, but is he?” That sort of thing. You want that done and dusted.

But in America, the political system is more captured. So Democrats are willing to say these unbelievably ridiculous things more willingly than any party is here—except possibly the LibDems, who are nuts. But also it’s very hard to engage with legislators in a constructive way that might allow you to do a proper process of fixing broken laws. And that’s a big part of why so much gets resolved in the courts in America rather than in the legislature. You end up with abortion rights being a Supreme Court matter and then being overturned. Whereas here we just passed a law. The argument was between the legislators, and then there was a free vote, and then the law passed. And it’s been amended since to bring down the age at which abortion is generally available.

So I think maybe that work will have to be done at the state level in America where you engage—do the hard democratic work of engaging with lawmakers and explaining to them that more than one person has rights here. There’s been a general pattern globally of seeing only the trans-identified person and thinking that what you do for them affects nobody else, and forgetting that when you allow a man into what’s meant to be a female-only space, you destroy the female-only space for all females. And when you tell children that one child in the class is a special type of child, “Yes, he looks like a boy, but actually he’s really a girl,” you are lying to and indoctrinating all children. And there are rights on the other side, in other words—the right of somebody to say who they are, like this right that we absolutely have invented out of nowhere and centered in modern discourse—you know, “My identity is mine to define who I am. Nobody else can tell me.” That is being allowed to overrule everybody else’s rights.

Different countries have different systems for balancing rights and different lists of what the rights are, but the advice I would generally give to people is to look at the rights on the other side. When you allow a man to lie and say he’s a woman legally, what rights does that destroy, and where are those rights in your law? Because they’ll probably be there somewhere. Like, even in Canada, sex is there in the Charter.

Helen Dale:

Much of British public dialogue, too, is also quite secular. This is another thing that occurred to me when I was putting this together. How do you think Americans should attempt to deal with this issue in a society that has much more religious public discourse? It’s very clear that a lot of the most effective opposition to gender ideology, as you would call it, in the United States is coming from people who are varying degrees of religious.

Maya Forstater:

Yeah. I mean, yeah, so the U.S. has separation of Church and State in a way that we don’t have, and yet they have a much more religious society. I do think that often it is people with a religious conviction who are willing to stand up against this because of that whole calculation, or maybe it’s not a calculation, but that whole feeling of 1) who your tribe is and 2) what it is you’ve got on the line? Is it just your current good life or is it your future soul? Those things make people act in very different ways. So I think certainly from a legal point of view, when we are looking at these cases about belief discrimination or about freedom of speech, the freedom of speech of people who are religious helps to protect the freedom of speech of people who are not and vice versa. And so we do end up with kind of strange bedfellows.

And I think, I mean, in the U.K. we get this accusation thrown at us all the time. Sex Matters is a non-partisan organization, religious people, non-religious people, right and left. But both Helen and I are atheists, and we are told, “You are in bed with the religious right,” but it’s not a very hard accusation in the U.K. because there isn’t really a religious right.

Helen Dale:

You don’t have one, no.

Maya Forstater:

There’s the Church of England, which is the sort of religious establishment, but that’s something quite different. Whereas in the U.S., the political partisanship, the split between the right and the left, and the split between the religious and the secular, it’s much more divided. And so I don’t have an answer, but I do think that religious people’s rights and non-religious people’s rights are the same rights. The right that protected me at work was religion and belief. It protects people who believe and who don’t believe. I think that is ultimately very important.

Helen Joyce:

I’ve received emails from people in the U.S. telling me both that I should stop talking about religion at all and think about how I come across to… In the particular email I’m thinking of, I mean, she’s a lesbian woman who went to Berkeley and is absolutely secular and a lifelong Democrat who’s absolutely distraught at what’s happened to her party on this issue. And she said, like, “Think what it sounds like to somebody like me that you’re willing to talk about Evangelical Christians’ rights so that you are willing to talk to and quote the ADF in your book.” But then I also get people saying to me that I should be working better with people like Matt Walsh or something like that. And I think in the end, all I can do is say what I see as being the way forward—as somebody who is an atheist who thinks that there is probably a biological basis not only for sex differences, but definitely a biological difference for sex differences, but probably also for sexual orientation—and who recognizes that this ideology is sterilizing gay kids disproportionately.

And I just have to say how it looks to me and be completely transparent about my worldview and my intellectual convictions, which center around the primacy of evolution, and let those words fall where they may. And because Maya and I are, as these things go, pretty much free-speech absolutists. We stop at the, “don’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater; don’t put copyrighted material online; don’t actually libel people”—but short of that, we want all voices to speak. And so I can’t pretend to be who I’m not, and I’m not willing to put other people outside what I think is a very broad tent. So I’m willing to talk to all sorts of people, and I’m willing to be platformed with all sorts of people, short of actual Nazis. And the accusation of who’s a Nazi I have become very skeptical about because I’m routinely called a Nazi, which is a very strange experience.

Maya Forstater:

Oh, so am I. Welcome to the club.

Helen Joyce:

All the good people are now, and some bad people.

Maya Forstater:

Yes.

Helen Joyce:

But all the good people are called Nazis now. That’s a very dangerous route to go down. What does somebody like me—”an antisemite, a Nazi, a homophobe, a transphobe, a shill for far-right American money”—there are people who are all of those things and I’m not a single one of them, and it dilutes the force of them to call somebody like me those things.

Helen Dale:

Well, what it does is when you get a real one, it becomes an instance of the very, very famous folk story. And the reason fairy stories exist is to tell us fundamental truths about the way the world works. And the fairy story I’m thinking of, of course, is the little boy who cried wolf. If you cry wolf too often, eventually the real wolf will come. The real wolf comes, no one believes you, and someone in the village is eaten or worse.

Helen Joyce:

I do think that people are going to start laughing more at the idiocy of this. Any time I ever show somebody a picture of one of these trans athletes on the podium, like some enormous, middle-aged, rather chubby bloke who’s just beaten some incredibly athletic women simply because he’s male, people do laugh. It’s the first thing they do. They are then absolutely destroyed about it, but they think it’s funny. And it is funny. And so…

Helen Dale:

There’s a podcaster who’s American, actually, and he got in lots of trouble because it went up on YouTube, but his name is Josh Slocum. And he did one of his videos, and it was over the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, was it?

Helen Joyce:

That’s right.

Helen Dale:

And anyway, Josh is gay, very flamboyantly gay, so you need to sort of imagine that. And he put pictures of Laurel Hubbard up behind his head in his little chat show that he does and just went, “I’m sorry, you can see his meat and vegetables.” And the way it was presented, it was impossible not to fall about the place laughing. And I just thought, that’s an icebreaker because it’s absolutely true.

Helen Joyce:

Yes, but it’s more than an icebreaker. Once you start to laugh at the wizard behind the curtain, all bets are off about what happens next. The thing that worries me most, and it worries me more in America than anywhere else, is that the longer this goes on, the worse the backlash. And the backlash is going to sweep up not just perfectly ordinary trans-identified people who just want to be left alone and who don’t intrude on other people’s rights, but it’ll also sweep up all feminists, whatever they believe, whether they’re sex realist or not, and all gay people too, because the LGBT lobby and the forced teaming of that. So yeah, I mean, this backlash is going to be horrific, and I regard myself as somebody who is attempting to limit the damage by stopping the ideology from going to the far reaches of complete absurdity, of enormous numbers of children sterilized and so on, in order to limit the backlash.

Helen Dale:

This leads me to my next question, which came in also from an American listener. And she speaks… I’m going to quote her, but she probably speaks for about 30 people who asked a version of this question, and I’ll quote her. She said that she feels “politically homeless,” and she said, “I’m a longstanding left-winger, but wokeism drives me nuts. How do you both think debates like these will shape politics and the future direction of conservatives and progressives?”

Helen Joyce:

I think we’re all politically homeless, everybody who has any sense now. I mean, where are you meant to… Which package are you meant to pick up? I mean, I really, really dislike the Republicans. I dislike them for having come up with a candidate like Trump. I dislike their lack of acceptance of women’s rights of various sorts. I dislike lots of things about them. I dislike their acceptance of the way that money acts in politics and big business acts in politics. But I mean, how can I support the Democrats if I were an American? They’re literally the party that is forcing a child sterilization agenda into schools. So, hopefully, we break a lot of things, and something better comes out. I try not to grieve too much about the amount of destruction in this creative destruction process, but it is actually horrifying. Like all these institutions that so much blood and toil and sweat and tears were put into making and that have been hollowed out and destroyed from the inside, and I don’t see any way to prop them up. I just tried to look forward and not back because, honestly, I’d sit down by the side of the road and cry for the rest of my life if I thought about what we have lost.

Helen Dale:

One of the questions I was asked—and this was on my substack actually, rather than through Liberty Fund—from an American was: “My God, what happened to the American Civil Liberties Union?” And that is that question that just came to me when you were saying that.

Maya Forstater:

All of these organizations—it’s heartbreaking. And as Helen said, they turn around to be exactly the opposite of what they set out to be. You know, and the ACLU defended the freedom of speech of Nazis. They went that far in order to defend the freedom of speech of everyone else, and now they’re telling us we can’t misgender. The feminist organizations are fighting against women’s rights. The Greens have forgotten what nature is and biology. And I think the organization that you love the most is the one that breaks your heart, but it’s everywhere.

Helen Joyce:

I mean, I’d add to that, Stonewall, which is our gay rights—was meant to be our gay rights organization here. And yes, it’s the equivalent of GLAAD and similar organizations elsewhere, but it was very specifically set up to counter a particularly homophobic piece of law known as Section 28, which made it impossible for schools to present gay relationships in anything, except to say they’re fake, they’re pretend. They’re not real relationships. And therefore made it impossible to tackle any sort of homophobic bullying in schools. Because a teacher who simply said, “Look, what’s wrong with being gay? Or, yes, okay. They’re two gay people. They love each other the same way that a man and a woman might love each other,” is promoting an ideology that was… and they were specifically banned from doing so. So Stonewall was set up to counter a law that permitted homophobic bullying and made—in particular teenagers—gay teenagers’ lives miserable. And now Stonewall is the biggest voice campaigning for an approach in gender clinics for children that sterilizes gay kids. So it is now the biggest voice in the UK that’s pushing for gay kids’ health to be ruined, their sexuality to be destroyed, for them to be turned into a simulacrum of the opposite sex and slotted back into society as fake straight people. And it is the most incredible reversal of all of them. Now, as somebody who has two sons, one of whom’s straight and one of whom’s gay, I feel absolutely sick that this organization. And I know some of the founders who are equally sick about it, it’s the worst and most heartbreaking of all the betrayals for me personally.

Helen Dale:

I got the impression from a lot of Americans, maybe it might reflect the fact that many of our listeners on Liberty Law Talk are in fact legal practitioners. The one that breaks their heart is the American Civil Liberties Union. So that might just reflect a lot of lawyers listening to this podcast and reading Law & Liberty. But a lot of them are very, very upset about the ACLU, and they haven’t got used to the idea of having to transfer their loyalties to FIRE, which is the new organization—it isn’t new, but it used to only do free speech issues on university campuses—Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It used to be the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It had to change its name. And a lot of Americans have not got used to the fact that it’s not the ACLU anymore. They have to go to FIRE to do that job.

Helen Joyce:

It’s very, very hard to give up on something that you really loved. And that was a lodestar for me for a long time.

Helen Dale:

Oh, people who donated lots of money to it over many years. Without naming this individual, I had someone message me in advance of this podcast who said that over the course of a career as a successful legal practitioner—lawyers, as a general rule, are not poor, particularly commercial lawyers— and this gentleman told me that he probably donated $100,000 over the years to the ACLU.

Helen Joyce:

Yeah, Amnesty really breaks my heart as well. An organization that was set up to stand up for some of the world’s most silenced people, namely political prisoners who often can’t even get a letter out. And now Amnesty Ireland is run by a really committed trans rights activist. And he says that women who believe the sorts of things that I believe—which is mostly not a belief, it’s mostly just fact, but then, on top of it, accepting that those facts matter—we should be denied political representation. We should be hounded out of public life. We should not be listened to. And I used to go and knock on doors for Amnesty.

Helen Dale:

We all want operations and surgery on children to stop, as you’ve alluded to, as well as the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors. And it does seem, based on what you’ve been saying, on what I’ve been told, that these are common and ongoing in the United States. However, how common are they in the UK now? How common is treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in the UK? What is available on the NHS? What is available in the private sector? How does provision differ between the USA and the UK?

Helen Joyce:

I think you probably know more about that than I do, Maya.

Maya Forstater:

We’re not a medical organization, and so we are sort of following what’s happening in the UK, which is that the Tavistock clinic—so the Tavistock clinic was the National Center for Child Assessment and Counseling. So they don’t do operations, they don’t do a prescription, but what they were was the national gateway so that any child who in England and Wales, I think who presented their GP with gender issues was referred to the Tavistock clinic. And then they were assessed. And if the Tavistock clinic assessed them as having gender dysphoria, then they would be referred on for hormones and surgery. And the big thing that has happened in the UK is that that center is being closed down or that contract is being taken away from, it’s a larger hospital.

Because of the spotlight that’s been shone on the impact of puberty blockers, hormones, and this pathway to surgery, the UK government commissioned a eminent pediatrician called Dr. Hilary Cass to look at the evidence base for how you treat or how we are treating unhappy children who place the source of their unhappiness in their sex, in their gender identity. And she came back with, there is very little evidence that any of this helps. And the evidence-base, the arguments for it have shifted over time. The arguments for giving children puberty blockers were initially that they would improve their mental health, mitigate the feelings and the depression and risk of suicide and so on. But actually, the reason for taking puberty blockers is to stop the physical appearance of being the sex that you are in order to more successfully appear to be the opposite sex. And there are terrible things that go along with that. So all of that has kind of come to the fore and the clinic is being closed down.

But what is going to replace it is going to be a set of regional clinics around the country, which are supposed to be more evidence-based, but are going to be harder to have any oversight. And I think one reason why things have happened in the UK and the way that they haven’t in the US is that we have the NHS, we have a single commissioning organization and we had a single assessment clinic. And so there was a lot of attention and scrutiny eventually placed onto that organization. And now that’s being dispersed around the country. There’s a danger that it may get worse.

Helen Dale:

There’s a danger it may start to look like federalism. Because one of the reasons why—and I know this from having lots of Australian friends and having grown up there—one of the reasons why even though the debate in Australia looked quite similar to the debate happening in the UK, one of the reasons why Australia is so far behind the UK in terms of fighting off the trans lunacy basically is because it’s a federal system. And as soon as you have a federal system, as soon as you have dispersion of authority—which of course is what federalism is meant to produce, that’s why people came up with federal systems, to break up authority so you don’t finish up with this centralizing, unitary power that crushes everything in its path—but one of the reasons why there’s difficulties in Australia has precisely been because of its federalism. You finish up with a multi-headed monster and you have to individually go around and behead each one.

Maya Forstater:

I think that’s true of this whole thing. I mean, I think the thing about sex is it’s older than human beings. It’s older than mammals. It’s the most fundamental thing. And so it is relevant for every area of law and policy and power and resource allocation and all of these things that are broken up into different levels and layers of government and different sites of decision-making. And the way that the gender ideology has captured institutions has been both through federalism, geographic federalism, but also through the vertical dispersion of powers and decision-making in all kinds of large organizations because that’s what you do in large organizations so that no one is ever responsible for the decision. And so in the case of medicalizing children, no one is responsible for deciding that a child should have surgery.

The Tavistock clinic assessed the child and decided they have gender dysphoria. They can be referred to an endocrinologist. And then the endocrinologist, their job is to check the child’s bloods and to make sure that they’re giving them the right amount of the hormones in terms of bringing them up to a certain level. But they don’t know anything about the child’s background, their psychological state, why they’re there. And then by this time they get to the surgeon, all of those decisions have already been made. The child is on this pathway, the child has this expectation, and the surgeon’s job is purely technical. Can they turn this piece of flesh into a piece of flesh that looks something different? And that decision pathway starts well before they’re anywhere near a clinic, which is in a school where the school is saying, “Well, maybe we should just allow this child to change their pronouns and we are not thinking about surgery,” but that’s what they’re putting the child on the pathway to.

Helen Joyce:

And this is what’s happened the whole way along with this field if you go back a century to the first doctors who did anything like this, which was around 1930 in Germany. And what they did was they created anomalous human beings who were really very hard to fit into a very much more gendered society. This is back at a time that women had less voting rights, less property rights, that sort of thing. And then law had to in some way respond. It didn’t actually in Germany—because something else happened in Germany about several years later and distracted everyone—but it popped up again in the US. And because the US is a more distributed system, in the 1960s and ’70s, the individuals who ran registers of births and deaths and also registers of marriage in town halls around the US—because the US didn’t have a national organized system for recording these things—individuals had to make decisions.

When I was doing the research from my book, I found a particular registrar who said that of a particular man who had had genital surgery and came in wearing a wedding dress with a man he wanted to marry, said, “Well, if they come in here wearing a dress, I count them as a woman,” but another registrar wouldn’t do that. And then in the UK, what happened is there was a very precedent-setting legal case, which said that no, a man can’t count as a woman even post-surgery for the purposes of marriage.

But there were these anomalous human beings who were being made in a clinic already on the NHS and also abroad, mostly in Casablanca, and then coming back having had surgery—and very, very hard to know what to do with them in a system where your pension rights, who you could marry, your ability to travel, what it said on your driver’s license, all these things, they marked your sex. And so bureaucrats made decisions on an ad hoc basis in order to allow people basically to work and to travel. And that’s how we got sex change markers or sex markers changed on passports and driver’s licenses.

Helen Dale:

I’m actually aware of a couple of people in that circumstance, both socially and a couple of others through legal practice.

Helen Joyce:

Yeah. And so those people then created a legal accommodation for people that doctors had jumped the gun with. Not only did any one doctor not really make the decision to chop this person up and to put them out into the world and tell them that they would be accepted by everybody else’s members of the opposite sex, but they didn’t check whether other people would accept them as members of the opposite sex. And they’re still not checking, but the law had to respond to these facts on the ground in ways to accommodate them. And so over many decades, there was this movement that ended up in some American states and at some national level governments as well, where you can change your birth cert because it’s deemed that not to allow people to do that would be very, very hard for somebody who’s gone through all of this surgery.

And then the last bit of that chain is people bringing human rights cases. They’ve done this in the European Court of Human Rights and in some other international and national courts where they say that making anything dependent on being sterilized is a human rights abuse, which I agree with, by the way.

Helen Dale:

Yes, I have to say I don’t actually agree with that, but then I don’t agree with a lot of human rights.

Helen Joyce:

I’d argue from the other end. I’d say, don’t go chopping people’s genitals off because it is in itself a human rights abuse and we don’t have to call it a human rights abuse. You can just call it an atrocity if you like. But anyway, so the argument went, you are willing to give this man a piece of paper that he very badly wants and which brings some rights with it. For example, to have a heterosexual marriage with another man, and you will only do that if he chops his penis off and makes himself sterile. So you must do it without him having to chop his penis off. And so that’s why gender recognition laws around the world in most countries now don’t require any surgery. It was meant originally to be a compassionate concession to this tiny number of people. And now it’s just a right in many countries.

Helen Dale:

I have to say, when reading Trans, Helen, I found your account of the emergence of hormonal and gender surgery during the Weimar Republic extraordinary. And for listeners who haven’t read Trans, which I recommend you do, you can get it from bookshops even in the United States, it’s not been banned yet. Here’s a potted summary with a little bit of extra detail that I’ve added because I’ve done some research in this area as well.

The Institute of Sexual Science was founded in Berlin in 1930, and among its sex toys for kinksters and treatments for venereal disease or infertility were hormones and genital surgery for people who wanted to change sex. Although clearly strange and run by people who were even stranger, it appears to have been internally unpolitical. Founder Magnus Hirschfeld was a gay Jew and a drag queen, for example.

Meanwhile, its in-house surgeon and inventor of the vaginoplasty, Erwin Gohrbandt, not only joined the Nazi party, but went on to conduct lethal medical experiments on inmates at Dachau. Crucially, the institute’s beliefs about human sexuality rejected Darwin’s entire theory of evolution, both natural and sexual selection. Its staff behaved as if Darwin had never existed. And that’s a quote from Helen’s book. Hirschfeld thought all human beings were bisexual, meaning not the sexual orientation, but that they were both sexes and thus indistinct, on a spectrum. Males and females, he wrote were—and this is a direct quotation—abstractions, invented extremes. Because my first novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper had an Eastern Front setting, when I was researching it, I also became aware—and this was in the 1990s—that what is now called autogynephilia has a troubled history, and not just in Weimar.

One of the reasons Field Marshall Zhukov—the greatest of Soviet military commanders in World War II—attacked through the Romanian formations at the Battle of Stalingrad, and I quote from Zhukov here was “because we had captured some of their officers who were wearing women’s makeup.” This was one of those little historical details that finished up on the novelist’s cutting-room floor. But when I read your book, Helen, and as it has become clear how many leaders in the trans rights movement, the wider movement, are autogynephiles, I’m not sure if that’s correctly pronounced, but that’s how I’m going to say it. That little bit of research came back to me. How do we respond to the reality of what is clearly a serious and destructive psychiatric condition and how much more research into it is needed?

Helen Joyce:

Yeah, I mean, for your readers, you are pronouncing it perfectly or for your listeners, autogynephilia means love of oneself as a woman, and it’s a contested diagnosis or category, but it’s obviously correct. If you ever read any sissy porn—as I forced myself to do when I was writing my book—I don’t recommend it, and basically it’s like cross-dressing, erotic cross-dressing on steroids. So rather than a man thinking, he puts on women’s clothes or women’s underwear in order to masturbate, which probably about 3% of men do, he becomes really convinced that there is a woman persona inside him or that he has a woman persona in some sense—and probably some men have felt like that all along—but when being a woman meant you couldn’t vote and you were mocked and you weren’t allowed to go out in women’s clothes or whatever, men didn’t act on this.

Whereas now, if you do it, you’re just stunning and brave and you are the most oppressed, and you are somebody who can do astonishing things like get invited to the White House to celebrate a day of lesbian power. There are two men at the table with President Biden at the most recent example of that. Both of them men who think they’re women and think they’re lesbians. So now it’s really being encouraged. I think if we weren’t encouraging it, it would probably just go back into private bedrooms mostly. And I mean, I’m very sorry for women who marry a man who doesn’t tell them that this is his sexual fetish—and I’m not trying to belittle what they’re doing—but I also don’t think it’s the business of the law to regulate what happens in people’s bedrooms, short of actual murder and such like. So we focus on the law and public policy.

I think the issue is that a man saying he’s a woman is then accepted as his right, his ticket to go into places that these men find sexually arousing. And if we took away the ticket, I wouldn’t care so much if he thought it would be arousing to play in women’s sports or go into women’s changing rooms or whatever it is. Because autogynephiles find it all arousing. They find all taking on the social role of a woman arousing. I mean, they are extraordinary examples. They find pretending to menstruate arousing. They find imagining taking the pill arousing or knitting or pushing a baby carriage or all these sorts of things. It’s absolutely—the fantasy is to inhabit the role of a woman.

And if we can take away the bits of that impinge upon other people outside the home, well then they can do it If they like and I don’t care, and on they go with it, and it can go back to just being an issue that sexologists research because they do research these things and that’s fine. It’s a useful thing to know. And they can counsel these men and they can tell them “You aren’t actually a woman and you can’t pretend and you can’t go into women’s changing rooms because that’s perverted and you’re harming the women. If you want to fantasize about doing that, be my guest.”

Helen Dale:

I asked that previous question—including the long exercise in throat clearing first—because of what has happened to comedian and sitcom writer Graham Linehan. It’s fair to say his situation exploded into a national scandal across the UK last week. And from what I’ve seen, a significant part of the extraordinary venom that is directed at him is because he was one of the people and is one of the people who constantly makes the autogynephile connection. I mean, what do you think?

Helen Joyce:

Yeah, I mean there’s a fantastic expression that the author Alice Dreger came up for it, which is, “it’s the love that would really rather you did not speak its name.” Because the fantasy is to really be a woman, you don’t disrupt other erotic fixations or even sexual orientations by saying to the person, “Oh, that’s what you are.” If you say to a gay man, “You’re a gay man,” you’re not causing him any difficulties here. But if you say to a man whose ardent desire is to really be a woman, not to pretend to be a woman, “Yeah, but you’re just a bloke, aren’t you? You’re just a bloke in a wig.” He will respond with narcissistic rage. And that is what we see. It is absolutely what we see, but it’s very difficult.

Helen Dale:

That is why Linehan has been absolutely-

Helen Joyce:

Hammered.

Helen Dale:

… hammered. I mean, I would say that he has been treated… of anyone involved in this debate. I think he’s up there in the top two or three for the sheer level of venom and nastiness directed at him.

Helen Joyce:

Yeah. And the other thing that happens with poor old Graham is that it’s laughably easy to misrepresent what people are saying. We think about this all the time, that’s one of the reasons I say I’m stepping back and I’m saying what the law should be. And I mean, I don’t think Graham cares what people do in their bedrooms either. But when you talk about that, people say, “Oh, you are saying all trans women are perverts. You are saying that there’s pedophiles in this movement and they’re all pedophiles”. But the thing is, there are pedophiles in this movement because it’s an anti-safeguarding movement—and pedophiles arrive everywhere that you are not careful about safeguarding.

But he’s misrepresented as saying that he thinks they’re all perverts, that he thinks it’s just about perversion, that they’re all pedophiles and all bad people. And then he gets angry, which is very understandable, the way he’s being treated. It’s really hard. You’ve got to be a saint to do this work. You’ve got to be able to have people shout the most horrific misrepresentations at you and somehow keep your temper and keep saying, “I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about the law.”

Helen Dale:

And I mean, he did make the point and he told me personally—but he also made a point in an article for The Daily Telegraph, which is a British center-right newspaper, that the comedy routine that he did up in Edinburgh, when they finally managed to hold the show for the ticket holders and it finished up being held in public at the Edinburgh Fringe, outside the Scottish Parliament—was the first bit of paid comedy he’d done for five years. That’s how thoroughly he’d been canceled over this, before it blew up into a national scandal last week.

Maya Forstater:

I mean, I think the comedians, the things that are funny are the things that we’re not allowed to say. And so you have to cancel the comedians because if you can laugh at things and if you can point at what the reality is, then the emperor has no clothes. And so he has been quite viciously canceled. And one of the things that he’s very angry about, understandably, has been the cowardice of other comedians and other comedians who we know don’t believe in this, who we know were laughing about it 5 or 10 years ago and now are not laughing and not saying anything. And if you can close down the comedians, then that’s freedom of speech gone.

Helen Dale:

My last question is back to the law again. One of the reasons charities like the UK’s Stonewall went so badly off the rails around trans issues is a legal one. And that’s because charitable trusts can exist in perpetuity. They don’t have to vest. It’s a basic principle of trust law that all of us lawyers learn when we’re baby lawyers. And then some of us get to use it as practitioners, as I have. And that creates a problem when the charity’s work is done as Stonewall’s was after the enactment of same-sex marriage into law. And it’s very clear that one of the reasons why they reoriented themselves towards trans was in an attempt to stay relevant and keep the donations flowing. With that in mind, do you think Sex Matters will ever be able to wind itself up? Will you get the opportunity to be the anti-Stonewall?

Maya Forstater:

I really hope we will. I mean, I think the problem that we are trying to solve is huge and demanding on one hand, but is also just very, very stupid because sex is real. Everyone knows sex is real. Everyone has a mother. Everyone will continue to have a mother for the foreseeable. People will continue being male and female. And I think once we break the spell and break it in enough places, then reality will fight back. And so I hope we are not intending to go on for forever. And I’ve certainly looked at Stonewall both in terms of “how did they do that, let’s do what they did,” but also “let’s not make the same mistakes they did.”

Helen Joyce:

I often analogize it with bindweed or Japanese knotweed, depending on which analogy, how pessimistic I’m feeling on that day, because bindweed is hard, but Japanese knotweed is really hard. So this has spread while nobody was doing the weeding, but you could conceivably pull it all back out. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And once we turn the tide and each landmark legal case or each person who’s uncancellable as JK Rowling turned out to be, that’s a good strike in the right direction. But we have to keep pulling out the bindweed. The day that we finish pulling out the bindweed, I hope we pack up and go, I didn’t intend to be doing this work, and I don’t think Maya did either. I know she didn’t in fact.

I thought I was going to write a book to get this out of my system because it was driving me completely bonkers. It was going around my head, all the stupidity, all the idiotic arguments, all the dumbness at the center of it. I wanted to write it down to get it out of my head and then go back to editing six pages of the world’s best news magazine every week. But I mean, it turned out the madness has gone further than I had any idea of. And I will keep pulling it out until it’s gone, and then I’m stopping.

Helen Dale:

And on that note, thank you very much, ladies, for your time. You’ve been listening to Liberty Law Talk, which is owned by the magazine Law & Liberty, a publication of Liberty Fund.

Helen Joyce:

Thank you for having us on, Helen.

Brian Smith:

Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.