#anti helen joyce

[sleeppaw]

Well, that was a plot twist

You know J/K/Rowling's TERF friend Helen/Joyce? Well, she was caught reading a smutty Harry Potter fan fiction on a train involving Draco and Hermione. Yet TERFs and GC scream "TRANSGENDER PEOPLE ARE PERVERTS AND ARE AFTER OUR CHILDREN!". If someone yells about "Protecting kids" it usually means they can't be trusted. Even more hypocritically, the fanfiction in question is called "Mudblood Bitch", with GC and TERFs often complaining about "bitch" being sexist

[our-queer-experience]

helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

Celebrity TERF Helen Joyce has finally said the quiet part out loud and revealed - that as those of us who know our queer history have been warning for years at this point - that the TERF argument that 'we just care about women and we just have concerns about sports and trans children' is absolutely a smokescreen and a wedge issue for their wider goals; to prevent all trans people from having any rights or legal accommodations whatsoever.

I can't believe they are so bold as to be talking about it openly in public now. It's cold comfort to be unmistakeably proved right - plenty well-meaning liberals were so happy to just trust TERFs that they really did only have some small concerns while they painstakingly worked in the background to slowly shift the tide of public opinion on trans people from default low knowledge live and let live positive, to low knowledge threat perception negative.

This is quoted from Joyce's speech at anti-trans conference 'Genspect' (Oct. 2024) (archive link to full piece)

[infinitemonkeytheory]

Helen Joyce, a virulently anti-trans “gender critical” campaigner, was recently shortlisted for the Maddox Prize, which purports to recognize people who “who stand up for science and evidence, advancing public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility,” even though she promotes an agenda that denies science and demonizes trans people. […] Let me put this statement by the board behind the Maddox prize into context:

1. Joyce is a prominent member of the UK “gender critical” movement and author of a “deeply anti-transgender” book. “Courage” is not a word I would ever associate with her. 2. Joyce did not “highlight the need for further research and evidence,” at least not in any sort of productive way. Physicians practicing gender-affirming care and scientists involved in transgender studies generally agree that there is a need for more research. However, we neither need nor want a gender-critical trans-exclusionist to highlight the areas of need and thus continue the pattern of stigma and research about us without us. We’re on it. What we need are resources and funding, regular and consistent data collection on gender identity, notably absent from prior research, and involvement of the trans community, along with overlooked intersectional minorities previously excluded or underrepresented due to issues such as systemic racism, not lectures from people who deny existing science. 3. Trans health and research-all medicine and research-belongs in the realm of science. It is the ignorant meddling of policymakers that harmsour work. Gender-affirming healthcare should be between the health professional and the patient (and the patient’s parents or medical guardians, as applicable). Though politics are inextricably linked to trans healthcare—as is the case for all healthcare, actually—that does not mean that politicians should be able to dictate the standard of care in medicine, any more than politicians should be able to force a woman to carry a nonviable fetus to term when there is no chance of the fetus surviving and continuing the pregnancy risks the mother’s health. 4. Here, we have on display two scientific organizations espousing the “importance of acknowledging biological sex differences,” an essentialist trope that serves to criminalize, dehumanize, and pathologize trans and intersex people. Their reasoning is also scientifically unsound. The science of biological sex does not mesh with Sense About Science’s comments. Trans people are very aware of biology and how our bodies work, sometimes painfully so. This is not about human biology and its supposed denial; it is about advancing a hostile agenda toward trans people and bad science. Updating gender markers to match one’s identity—which, naturally, Joyce is vehemently opposed to—has nothing to do with denying biology and everything to do with personal dignity, respect, equality, autonomy, and safety. Having the wrong marker on documents means being constantly exposed as trans in a cruel and sometimes violent society and being regularly undermined and questioned about gender. Gender is determined by one’s gender identity, which in turn should determine one’s legal sex designation. As for Nature, it has published multiple articles about the spectrum of sex and the fallacy of biological sex differences. So what gives?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Oct 14, 2024

It was hardly a plague of locusts, but it was disruptive nonetheless. During the annual LGB Alliance conference at the Queen Elizabeth II centre in Westminster on Friday afternoon, teenage activists unleashed thousands of crickets into the auditorium. The inconvenience was only temporary. The crowd simply relocated to another room and the event went on as before.

As those responsible were apprehended, many people were struck by just how young and posh they were. By this point, it should surprise precisely no-one that anti-gay activism in its current form is a predominately bourgeois pursuit. The symbolism of the crickets was, of course, deliberate. It was an attempt to dehumanise those in attendance, to suggest that they were akin to parasites, vermin, spreaders of disease, a common trope of those who seek to demonise minorities.

The perpetrators were children, and so it would be unwise to speculate too much on their motives. It is likely they were being manipulated by the group that has claimed responsibility, calling itself “Trans Kids Deserve Better”. As Bev Jackson, co-founder of LGB Alliance said on my show last night:

“Trans kids do deserve better. They deserve better than to be told lies that that they might have been born in the wrong body. They deserve better than to be told that these hormones and surgeries that they are clambering for will somehow solve all their problems. Many are on the autism spectrum. Many are struggling with their sexual orientation. We know that. They deserve better than to be told that we hate them. And they deserve better than to be labelled trans when they’re going through all the turbulence of adolescence, when your feelings about yourself are in constant flux.”

Irrespective of the intentions of the teenagers involved, this was anti-gay activism. To attack a group of lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have assembled to discuss the ongoing threats to their civil rights could hardly be defined in any other way. Likewise, to refer to groups such as LGB Alliance as “anti-trans”, “transphobic” or “hateful” - as activist media outlets such as the Metro and the Guardian have been known to do - is also an anti-gay strategy. In order to address a problem, one needs to label it accurately.

Gender identity ideologues are, by definition, anti-gay. They are campaigning to force their pseudo-religious belief-system onto the rest of society, one that claims that same-sex attraction is a myth, and that a mysterious spiritual sense of “gender” is the defining feature of homosexuality. Even if they have convinced themselves that they are “pro-trans” and “compassionate” and “progressive”, the implementation of their demands would result directly in the demolition of gay rights. And so “anti-gay activism” is not only an accurate description, it also cuts to the heart of what is at stake.

The trans activist movement in its current form is dominated by this belief in a material and stable “gender identity”, what one trans campaigner explained to me as an “essence of male or female”. This is a departure from the theories of Judith Butler, who posits that “gender identity” is an illusion created performatively and repetitively in accordance with societal expectations. For all their deification of Butler, the trans rights movement is insistent that she is wrong on this key point, and that an individual is “born trans” when there is a misalignment of body and “sexed soul” (to borrow Helen Joyce’s phrase).  

This belief is wholly incompatible with the struggle for gay rights, which has always been predicated on the notion that there exist a minority of people who are innately attracted to their own sex. Activist groups such as Stonewall now argue that “homosexuality” is based on gender rather than sex, meaning that it is possible for a man to be a lesbian. He may have been born male (or “assigned male at birth” to borrow the voguish parlance), but his “gender identity” is female and this should be the salient factor when it comes to sexual orientation.

It is no easy feat to explain the contortions of logic on display here. Lesbian dating apps are now replete with men who claim to be women, many fully bearded and bepenised. Likewise, sex clubs for gay men now routinely admit women who have had their breasts removed and believe themselves to be male. The gay male hookup app Grindr even prohibits its users from filtering out women. As the company’s website puts it:

“When designing gender settings on Grindr, it was important to us to not further perpetuate discrimination and harm for the trans and nonbinary community. For this reason, we allow filtering based on gender - you can specify that you want to see men or women - but this will include all men or all women, because trans men are men and trans women are women.”

In other words, a company that has made a fortune from gay men’s sexuality is now shaming its customers for being gay.

The situation is so confusing that we now have mainstream celebrities such as Billy Bragg effectively campaigning against gay rights without realising it. He is not homophobic (as far as I’m aware) and yet he is assiduously promoting a movement whose end goal is the eradication of homosexuality. Bragg’s 1991 song Sexuality included the lyric: “Just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away”. Perhaps a more appropriate version would be: “Just because you’re gay, I’ll have you surgically corrected in order to better conform to heterosexual paradigms”, although it wouldn’t scan or rhyme.

This is why to grow up gay in 2024 is considerably more risky than during the time of Section 28 in the 1980s. We have gay conversion therapy being promoted by the NHS in the form of “gender-affirming care”, and children who are gender non-conforming (and therefore statistically far more likely to be homosexual in later life) are being medicalised and shamed for their orientation. Moreover, the very organisations that were originally established to fight for gay rights are now actively working against the interests of gay people.

To release bags of insects into a gathering of homosexuals is the kind of tactic we might once have seen from neo-Nazis and extreme religious fundamentalists. Just because those responsible now claim to be “on the right side of history” does not justify their behaviour or make them any less regressive. These are the new reactionaries, espousing a particularly toxic form of anti-gay ideology because it has the approval of the corporate, media, political and managerial class. Homophobia never went away, it just took on a fresh disguise.

==

[ Source. ]

Gay men are not allowed to filter out women from their dating pool.

[probablyasocialecologist]

GCs claim to campaign for the “safety” of women and children. I’ve long suspected this was confined to the “right kind” of women and children. Kathleen Stock, a former trustee of the “LGB Alliance” (public statements of which include “adding the + to LGB gives the green light to paraphilias like bestiality…”) appeared (to me) to suggest that it would be “more honest” for high-profile trans allies to publicly “declare” if they have trans children. Her post made no mention of obtaining the children’s consent. It seems reasonable to interpret this as a call for the public outing of certain trans children. Given “out” trans children have been murdered and 64% are subjected to bullying, it strikes me as, at the very least, callous. Joey Barton, one of the movement’s most high profile (and oft platformed) voices, will shortly stand trial accused of assaulting his wife. Donald Trump, who was found by a jury to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, has increasingly made attacks on trans people a campaign talking point. The GC movement has claimed a degree of legitimacy based on previous legal successes, notably the case of Forstater v CGD Europe, in which GC beliefs were declared “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Some seem to have interpreted this as a licence to persecute trans people. This summer three separate courts gave clear statements to the contrary. The Employment Tribunal upheld the sacking of teacher Kevin Lister after he equated being transgender (as one of his students was) with having a mental illness. The High Court upheld an order banning Joshua Sutcliffe from teaching children after he repeatedly misgendered a child in his care. In Australia, the Federal Court prohibited a dating app from discriminating against trans women. The message from the courts is clear: GC beliefs are worthy of respect, but GCs must also respect trans people. The summer of court losses also undermines the movement’s claims to expertise. High profile GC activists often hold themselves out as experts. The courts made clear that many are no such thing. Maya Forstater gave “expert” evidence in the Sutcliffe case. The judge was “not persuaded that she is properly described as an expert”, noting: “Ms Forstater explained that the use of non-preferred pronouns in this case might be due to cognitive dissonance. Mr Phillips was not, however, able to identify any medical expertise that she might have to opine on that issue.” Helen Joyce, Director of Advocacy at the GC group “Sex Matters”, purported to give “expert” evidence in the Australian case. The judge said she: “…does not have any formal education or qualifications even in biology, let alone in gender, sex or law… she is not an expert at all. She has no recognised expertise in any of the areas in which she expresses an opinion.” In April the Cass Report gave a veneer of scientific legitimacy to the GC movement’s various claims. Both Labour and the Conservatives used the report as justification to prevent trans children from accessing puberty blockers (which, contrary to popular myth, do not prevent puberty but, rather, delay its onset). Cis children are still given access. The report was swiftly rejected by medical bodies around the world. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society said, in a joint statement, “Medical evidence, not politics, should inform treatment decisions”. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists followed suit. The British Medical Association called Cass’ claims “unsubstantiated”. I’d argue the report was largely debunked by a Yale School of Medicine review.

15 September 2024

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: The One Joke

[mysterious circle of robed figures] JK Rowling: hello children Rowling: today i am going to tell Rowling: the one joke Allison Bailey: the joke! the one joke! Helen Joyce: dark master is going to tell the one joke! Jesse Singal: masterful gambit, mommy!

Rowling: Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whosse large gametes were fertilissed resulting in ssmall humanss whose ssex was asssigned by doctorss making mostly lucky guesssess Joyce: she did it! she told the one joke! Bailey: the absolute madwoman!!

Joyce: haha i could hear that one joke a million times -- and i have -- and it never gets any less funny! Joyce: you should take that act on the road! Rowling: you think? Joyce: oh yeah definitely, people need to hear that one joke

JK Rowling: [at open mic] hello ladiesss and germsss Rowling: i'm "Just Kidding" Rowling and thisss Rowling: iss the anti-woke "you can't ssay that on televisssion anymore due to woke" comedy tour Rowling: sso Rowling: are there any jewss in the audience tonight

Rowling: but ssserioussly ladiess and germss Rowling: there'sss a lot of wokiesss out there Rowling: and i think they might Rowling: ssound a little like thisss Rowling: "Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametessss..."

Rowling: "Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametess were fertilissed resulting in ssmall humanss whose ssex was asssigned by doctorss" Ben Shapiro: SIR!! Shapiro: SIR how dare you SIR that joke SIR is my one joke!! Rowling: ya sssnooze ya lossse, shapiro!

Shapiro: i have a paper trail SIR going back decades proving ownership, i have told that joke SIR every year at mothers day SIR and fathers day SIR Shapiro: which by the way SIR today is NEITHER Shapiro: so that joke doesn't even make sense SIR Shapiro: owned with facts and logic

Rowling: ha ha get a load of this heckler Shapiro: SIR!!! Rowling: kid don't tell me how to do comedy, i don't come down to the sssissster fucking factory and tell you how to do your job [rimshot] Shapiro: SIR!!!

Shapiro: SIR!! Rowling: look i'm not saying ben sshapiro is sshort but when he liess around the housse he really liess around the housse [rimshot] Shapiro: SIR!!!!   Shapiro: SIR!!!! you have the boorish manners of a yalie!

Rowling: [reading newspaper] the reviews are in! Rowling: "rowling killss in new one joke comedy sspecial" Rowling: "no sseat left dry asss comedy-loving public pissss their pants in ssusstained debilitating laughter" Rowling: "you are legally mandated to enjoy it"

Rowling: "we look forward to hearing jk rowling tell her very hilariouss joke for yearss to come" Rowling: "jk rowling is the kindesst, bravest, warmesst, mosst wonderful human being we've ever known in our life"

[self-loving-vampire]

the ideological leaders of the transhumanist movement are generally eugenicists or soft eugenicists. you can define "true" transhumanism however you like, but the loudest voices and major historical precedents are all tied to eugenic beliefs. this is embodied inherently in the term "transhumanism". if we hold the transcendance of human limitations as an instrumental value, that neccesarily implies some hierarchy of ranking people by ability that is seen as desireable. imo transhumanism in this form rather than decentering the human enshrines the worst aspects of it. for these reasons i prefer "posthumanism" and think people who identify with transhumanist as a label should reconsider if they don't already agree with that stuff

Eugenics doesn't even make sense as a vehicle for transhumanism if you know the first thing about evolutionary biology, not to mention that it doesn't align with transhumanist values. Even if you somehow got it to work it would take ages, would not help you individually, and would not enable most people to do body modifications.

Even in a best case scenario where you mainstreamed consensual genetic modifications of fetuses so no one gets clinical depression anymore or something rather than doing what most people usually associate with the word that would still leave already-living transhumanists out.

The closest thing to actual transhumanism would be medicine in general, especially given that the top human limitation that people want to overcome is aging.

The second closest thing would be radical and consensual body modifications such as transition.

Not to mention the fact that conservatives, TERFs, neo-nazis, and etc. use transhumanism as a sort of bogeyman that shows up in their conspiracy theories.

That's Jennifer Bilek citing a neo-nazi as a source on how trans people are part of a jewish transhumanist plot. Bilek's ideas are laundered and mainstreamed into TERF worldviews, being referenced by many high-profile radfems like Julie Bindel, Helen Joyce, LGB Alliance, Allison Bailey, Sheila Jeffreys, and Transgender Trend.

Obviously not all reactionaries think the same (and neither do all transhumanists) but it doesn't look as if transhumanism has anything close to mainstream acceptance among them. In fact, anti-transhumanism stems from a lot of the same bioessentialist impulses appeals to nature that motivate transphobia.

Furthermore I think you may be mistaking "rich and famous people" for "ideological leaders". As if the anarchist catgirls are loyal disciples of Peter "Trump 2024" Thiel or something.

When you think about transhumanism the first thing to come to mind probably should not even be rich normie cis men in suits who want to control other people's bodies. They're generally not the ones actually embodying or even advocating for these values and rights. You would unironically get more transhumanist thought out of Touhou.

It's not even a "you can define transhumanism however you want" thing. That's a term that actually has a definition that is not even difficult to grasp.

Some of us don't want to be human or subject to all the horrible things that come with human forms. Some of us don't want people to get sick and die and reject bioconservative arguments that "nature knows best" or that modifying your body is automatically bad.

The central idea is that you have a body that belongs to you that you should be able to customize to your liking even in ways that are not "natural" or "normal". Arguably all kinds of assistive technology, and even things like clothing and cooking, are transhumanist tech. We are not born wearing shoes after all.

[lesbianismstrength]

"Established gay-rights groups have stood by as people who assert same-sex orientation are told that they have a ‘genital fetish’ and lesbians are told to accept penises as female sex organs. Indeed, those groups have joined in the bullying. Stonewall was founded to fight homophobia. Yet, at a Pride March in 2019, when lesbians waving banners that read ‘Lesbians don’t have penises’ and ‘Pro women not anti-trans’ were threatened, the chair of Stonewall’s board praised the bullies, tweeting: ‘Thank you! The right instinct’.

Planned Parenthood, which used to provide contraception and evidence-based sex education to teenagers, now prescribes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones practically on demand, and presents gender-identity ideology as scientific fact. ActionAid UK, which campaigns against female genital mutilation and period poverty, says there is ‘no such thing as a biologically female/male body’.

The NSPCC, Britain’s largest children’s charity, provides training in child-safeguarding principles, which include separating children’s sleeping quarters by sex and ensuring that concerns about child safety are not ignored. But it cancelled an ‘ask me anything’ session on Mumsnet because most of the pre-submitted questions concerned the impact of gender self-identification on child safeguarding.

The British Humanist Association says it aims to ‘make sense of the world through logic, reason, and evidence’. But its president, Alice Roberts, has blocked Twitter users who asked her to define sex and cited clownfish as evidence that no such definition exists."

- Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021)

[sleeppaw]

Patrick Ness, an author, stood up for Sandi Toksvig, a lesbian, after she showed support for trans rights. And received a pile-on from TERFs for showing support to transgender people. Ness is the guy who wrote "The Chaos Walking Trilogy" and "A Monster Calls", the latter inspired by a friend of his who died of cancer, Siobhan Dowd. Dowd was dying of cancer, and knowing she was dying, came up with the idea of a monster that visited children whose parents were dying, but knowing she would not live to write the book, she gave the outline to Ness and set up a foundation to help disadvantaged children and young adults, with royalties from her books going to the foundation, The Siobhan Dowd Trust. Even on the cover for "A Monster Calls" it reads "Based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd".

[on-a-lucky-tide]

Roxanne won!

No link because fuck the Guardian, to be honest.

Legitimately had to reread this a few times. I am so used to UK media and politicians dehumanising trans people that it was jarring to see someone acknowledge terf cruelty and check their arrogance.

Because that is what they are: cruel. There is no rationale behind their ideology beyond being as cruel and as exclusionary as possible. They are driven by disgust and a need to control. They're a hate cult. My partner said transphobia and terfism should be classified as mental illness because it's so irrational and it destroys their lives. I say it gives them an excuse. Hate is a learned behaviour. And they should be repeatedly and decisively destroyed in every single one of our social, cultural, legal, political arenas.

Well done, Roxanne. And well done Australia. I know you've got issues over there, but fuck me, you're a thousand leagues ahead of the UK.

(Note: also the country with the judge that dismissed Helen Joyce, author of trash book 'Trans' and a leading member of 'Sex Matters', an anti-trans hate group in the UK that was awarded charity status by our corrupt charity commission, and is frequently quoted in anti-trans hit pieces. The judge said she had no expertise in the area. It was a good moment.)

[friendlymathematician]

wanna read grace lavery tying himself into rhetorical knots trying to prove that he is a gender abolitionist while the evil women writing pop-feminist books about being gender critical (trans, material girls, feminism for women) are being stupid, possibly anti-semitic, meanieheads?

highlights:

insisting that no one ever used gender as a synonym for sex, therefore early feminists being critical of the category "women" as a legal/social categoroy are in fact saying that there is not such thing as a woman.

claiming that de beauvoir says that sex characteristics may exist "at the level of the cell", but since mushrooms and plants and hemaphroditic species reproduce differently that means sexed bodies do not exist among humans.

first dismissing helen joyce's "sex is why women are oppressed, gender is how" as ""complete and utter bullshit" and then reaching his own final conclusion: "gender is how women are oppressed, sex is the excuse patriarchy uses for the oppression of women". which is obviously entirely different from joyce's quote.

[fang-toothed]

The book “Trans” by Helen Joyce is one of the most profound and important evidence-based theory books I have ever read, and I strongly recommend it (if you haven’t read it already!) Here’s her website, where you can learn more about her and her efforts:

One quote from Chapter 2 is the best summation and interpretation of trans vitriol I have ever found.

“In ‘Galileo’s Middle Finger’, [Alice] Dreger offers another insight: since autogynephilia involves a fantasy of truly becoming, or already being, a woman, any reference of it can be considered an insult. ‘There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labelled,’ she writes. ‘When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak it’s name.’

“This explains why such rage is mostly directed towards women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’” (“2: Sissy Boys and the Woman Inside.” Trans: When ideology meets reality, Oneworld, London, 2021, pp. 44) [Please cite your sources, kids!]

I would say, based on the latter paragraph, that the disturbing and disgusting graphic descriptions of imagined rape by TiMs (and, in less sexual terms and more vague threats of violence, some copying, particularly desperate to be seen as masculine TiFs) are autogynephiles’ only way to reconcile with not being accepted as women in blunt and uncertain terms: they take their fury and sexualise it as they do women in general, perhaps even describing their own internal fantasies but with “TERFs” in their place. We are the women they are desperate to be - of the female sex, largely lesbian, and fully aware that we cannot ever be removed from the category. Of course, autogynephiles are blind to the knowledge that being a woman is not fun and games and as erotic for us as it is to them, but they still envy us. And in the ultimate male move, they take that anger and fantasise about degrading us by taking the male social standards of women (‘virginal’ and ‘unsoiled’) and ensuring we are ‘wrecked’ or ‘ruined’ - raped, ejaculated within, and/or impregnated into submission.

[anotherpapercut]

Hi! I just saw your post about queer books in libraries, and my local system has always surprised me with its many good queer and trans books!

It does bring to mind a Library Question that you might be able to answer for me, though: if a library book (say, anti-trans, antisemitic screed "Trans" by Helen Joyce) is destroyed (by accident of course) and the upstanding library patron who did it pays the lost book fine, will the fine be used to replace that book in the system, or just go to general library needs?

as a quick disclaimer I don't know how all libraries work across the country or world but most libraries I am aware of just have it go into their general revenue which will be allocated somewhere, probably to the collections budget for the purchasing of other books

HOWEVER! if it is a super popular book like if trump wrote a book or something they would definitely have to replace it to fulfill demand. but an older Ben Shapiro or whatever that no one has cared about for years? probably won't be missed :)

[jenatwork]

As pants-wettingly hilarious as it is that UK top terf Helen Joyce got caught reading Dramione smut fic on a train this week, to me this suggests that she and her ilk are absolutely gearing up to come for fandom and fanfiction. HJ has since said she's conducting research into how fanfiction might influence young people into 'adopting trans identities' (her words).

Especially given how some (not all) of the responses have focused on the ickiness of that one specific fic - this is not the moment to start debating problematic fic content, not when the conservative orgs and politicians driving the anti-trans movement are also pushing for restrictions on online content and access and will take any opportunity to demonise online spaces that are queer-positive.

Yes, let's call out HJ for the hypocrisy of looking at smut in public while also being a leading voice in a movement that labels trans folk as 'porn-addled'. But let's not allow anyone to reframe this as 'fanfiction is dangerous'.

[liskantope]

Since I have a continuing history of keeping up with IDW-ish podcasters on YouTube (Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, etc.) who occasionally do episodes on trans issues as well as a spotty history of clicking on videos with clips of Jordan Peterson, the algorithm recommends a lot of videos on "transgenderism" and "the trans debate" and so on to me. A noticeable and (to my thinking) really concerning aspect of the whole set of issues is how reliably anyone who expresses interest in debating or even critically discussing trans issues is, um, on one general side of them, and how little debating or critical discussion there seems to be available. I avoid clicking on videos with titles involving "transgenderism" or "transgender ideology" or "the trans debate" and other tribal buzzwords for a bunch of reasons, but I decided to make an exception the other day when I saw a video entitled "DEBATE: does transgender ideology threaten liberal values?" (a terribly-phrased question, like most debate questions are) because it appeared to be... an actual debate! With people on both sides showing up! (Though apparently not among the audience, which by the sound of it was entirely on the anti-trans side.)

So of course, as I should have fully expected, this debate only supported my conviction that the rhetoric of nearly everyone on all sides of this is just terrible. The only nuanced and halfway decent debater here was Peter Tatchell (on the trans rights side), and some of even his arguments were used to catch him in a bind later on (more on that later). The debate as a whole was generally a bit of a -- I can only use the term shitshow here -- with debaters (mainly Freda) interrupting each other, the (seemingly entirely anti-trans) audience heckling the trans-rights debaters, and the somewhat awkward and ineffectual moderator mostly failing to keep everyone in order. Well, what better could I have expected?

Marc Glendening (on the anti-trans-rights side) had less to say than everyone else and was basically just a robot trying to churn out dry legal summaries of the situation and spouting claims about free speech rights being taken away that I find extremely dubious as phrased by him (I don't know too much about what's going on in the UK, but if we took Marc's depictions of the situation at face value, they do not jibe with his teammate Helen's completely lack of inhibition in misgendering Freda in a video-recorded debate!).

Helen Joyce was the only person involved that I was familiar with from before, since many months ago I watched an episode of Coleman Hughes' podcast where he interviewed her, thought she had some reasonable points and liked her overall rational manner of arguing, but lost any sense of her credibility because of her completely unbending and extreme absolutism. YouTube had been recommending me videos with her ever since (I really hate how stubborn the algorithm is), and I had refused up until now to click on anything involving her again. In this debate I saw the same extremist tendencies and genuine TERFiness (up until fairly recently my exposure to TERF ideology was mostly indirect as something people on Tumblr criticized and I was beginning to wonder how much of it was actually out there in force and what it really looks like -- it seems to have plenty of force in the UK and Joyce is probably one of the gentler examples I suppose!) and also saw a rational and dignified approach which I admire but unfortunately didn't lead to actually good arguments. There is plenty of room for rebuttal to Helen's arguments from my perspective, and of course almost none of that material was ever rebutted by the other side, which again doesn't surprise me given how little (in my experience of watching/reading criticisms of, say, JKR's arguments) people on the trans rights side seem to actually directly address certain types of opposing arguments. I can't decide which bothers me more: Helen's repeated comments about how the rest of the debaters went through male puberty and therefore their male voices enabled them to talk over her (easily refuted, mainly in the case of the trans women sitting on the other side, and meanwhile neither of the men ever interrupted or talked over her, but nobody addressed this, and it places Helen across my personal "too borderline-misandristic for me to feel comfortable hanging around her" line), or her claim that those men who do insist on trespassing women-only spaces have proved that they are among the dangerous ones because they don't care about women's boundaries (a very dangerous mentality, and displaying exquisite lack of theory of mind, and again nobody tried to rebut it).

Freda Wallace is... a complete mess, and I think an embarrassment to her cause. She spoke a lot (while delusionally muttering that Helen wouldn't stop talking), and very little of what she had to say comprised actual argumentation but was more of a semi-incoherent jumble of points that often ended in punchlines that seemed to be deliberately phrased into ridiculous and bizarre statements perhaps crafted to be provocative and eliciting scorn from the audience. She frequently interrupted all three of the debaters generally with childish and semi-irrelevant ad hominems, even eventually visibly pissing off her own teammate Peter. Freda appears to be exactly the caricature of aggressive, loud, attention-seeking, obnoxious, shameless, hedonistic, fetishistic trans woman that J. K. Rowling types seem to imagine among trans activists. ("So, when I fuck men, with my female penis, in fetish clubs, it is my choice. It doesn't matter what you think. And those men support Sex Matters, because in public they will, but in private, they'll fuck me [ending in a smug grin]" is... I guess technically a way that someone can talk during a recorded public debate, but maybe shouldn't be recommended? I didn't notice until I read the comments later how a minute or two after that, her teammate Peter repeated tries to get her to stop interrupting, then gently grabs her arm as she lifts her glass of wine again saying, "No more drink.") If the trans-rights organization involved wanted to strengthen transphobia and transmisogyny in particular, they probably could not have chosen a better trans woman to put on their team. There's something to discuss here (although if I tried to develop where I speculatively want to go with this, I might quickly get myself into hot water) about how difficult it seems to be to get a member of the trans community to participate in an event like this, and how it requires the very thickest-skinned type of personality which unfortunately in this case also coincides with the most loud and shameless. (This is a very under-developed and perhaps sloppily-phrased point that I probably shouldn't be leaving in this post!)

As I said earlier, Peter Tatchell, along with many of his arguments, I actually liked; he seems like a pretty cool guy all around. He did get backed into a corner at one point through an audience member's question: he had repeatedly made the argument that excluding male-bodied people from women's shelters because men are more likely to be violent was choosing to treat an entire group based on a generalization and that he was against this on principle (compare to refusing to allow immigration from certain groups because some tiny minority of them is more likely to be dangerous, etc.), and he was asked whether he wasn't generalizing in the exact same way by being in favor of excluding cis men ("all men, as you identify who's a man") from women's spaces. At first Peter seems to misunderstand that the questioner is talking about cis men and be trying to duck the question, but eventually he is backed into acknowledging the question and taking the stance that "people who present as men" should be excluded from women's bathrooms but trans women shouldn't -- a position that sounds quite blatantly transphobic in more than one way by the lights of much of trans activism! Also, Peter's stern coldness in stopping Freda from interrupting him with disagreement during his point about transness showing in people's brains says all we really need to know about his opinion of his own teammate, and I do kind of feel bad for him for having been paired with her, which I imagine was not his choice.

I looked briefly through the comments section to see if there was any discussion of why the video (annoyingly) cuts off abruptly before the end of the event (which wound up mentioned only once that I could see). Never have I seen a sea of comments so 100% skewed in favor of one side of an issue and in one direction: how amazing Helen Joyce is (and with a heap of derogatory and sometimes extremely transmisogynistic comments about Freda Wallace -- they go further than Joyce did by naming her Fred, a few do call her Freda and use feminine pronouns, but in at least one instance someone's use of "her" was "corrected" in a one-word response by another commenter!). It makes me wonder what happens to create a section of hundreds of comments that are literally 100% on one side -- is there a sort of tipping point when one side becomes a strong enough majority that everyone on the other side is just afraid to comment, or gets downvoted to invisibility by the rating system? Either way, this debate strikes me as weak enough on the pro-trans side that trans right activists probably wouldn't want to advertise it on YouTube.

Anyway, very very discouraging for anyone who would like our public discourse on this set of issues to stop being more of a complete mess than the public discourse on pretty much every other contentious social issue has been.