In a speech given to a conference in Lisbon held by anti-trans conversion therapy lobbying group Genspect, Sex Matters director Helen Joyce discussed a campaigning roadmap to “a total end to the trans child”, and then following on from that the abolition of the concept and practice of transition among adults:
First in places where there’s someone who knows who everyone is and who has a duty of care – for example, prisons and workplaces. And then in other spaces too, because if men can’t use the women’s toilets at work, then why on earth are we letting them do so in the shopping centre?”
In the speech, Joyce lays out her motivations for a step by step campaign to radicalise society against transition, how to work around the empathy people have for trans people in society, and use existing concerns to lead them along a path to total exclusion.
They think doctors are screening out chancers and that “transition” means something – they use expressions like “if they’ve gone through the change” or “if they’ve had the operation” or “if they've fully transitioned”. An increasing number know someone trans or someone who has a trans-identifying child, and they clearly don’t want to get in any sort of argument with them. They may feel personal sympathy.
But there are two topics where people are almost automatically where we want them to be, and those are child gender medicine and sports.
Joyce acknowledges that puberty blockers are not and have not been being prescribed in large numbers, and instead emphasises a quite cynical and propagandist relevance for these as campaigning talking points saying:
This is the real importance of the UK’s ban on puberty blockers. They’re not really a serious treatment option in the UK – I don’t think more than hundreds of kids have taken them, certainly not more than a few thousand. What they are is a rhetorical and argumentative device. …
[T]o someone good and well-meaning working within medicine – someone like, say, an endocrinologist or child psychiatrist who has severe reservations about what’s happening in gender clinics but hasn’t freed their mind from the idea of the “transgender child” or “transition” – that seems like extremism. So it’s tempting, and probably essential, to work step by step. But the story of safeguarding failures shows that’s a big problem too.
This isn’t the first time Joyce has expressed a desire to eliminate trans people and trans recognition out of society. In summer of 2022, she appeared on a podcast where she appeared to promote a campaign of eugenics against trans people, called “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition” and described trans people as a “huge problem for a sane world”.
As well as being a director of advocacy at anti-trans charity Sex Matters, Helen Joyce is also the author of the book “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”. This was widely criticised on release for appearing to parrot antisemitic conspiracy themes originating with gender critical author Jennifer Bilek. Philospher Christa Peterson said the book “claims the trans “global agenda” is “shaped” by three Jewish billionaires”1. Legal scholar Alex Sharpe reviewing the book said it would “have been wiser and more balanced to have given more thought to the selection of wealthy funders” listing a number of non-Jewish philanthropists who were overlooked for Joyce’s book. Although Joyce deleted tweets encouraging fans to follow Bilek's work in the run up to her book, archive copies surfaced online where she said “Details in my book! But in the meantime have a look at Jennifer Bilek’s pieces about the billionaire funders of transactivism”. Joyce has refuted any link to Bilek’s work. However Bilek herself claims that Joyce interviewed her in 2020 while she was writing it and accused Joyce of plagiarism when the book was released.
Compatible with democratic human rights?
Much has been made of the claim that gender critical views are “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. What this means in lay terms, is that in a liberal democracy such as the UK, it must be acceptable to have a diversity of views on important matters so long as they do not cross a line into being totalitarian and degrading the rights of others, following what are called the “Grainger Criteria”. In the United Kingdom, especially following Forstater v CGD, but also previously in cases such as Asher’s Bakery, this has been interpreted liberally to include protection of potentially offensive views, so long as they do not cross over into actual practices of harassment or discrimination. That is to say, it is okay for a person’s sincerely held religious or philosophical beliefs to be protected even if others might find these offensive. A Christian baker does not have to make a cake celebrating same sex marriage when their religious beliefs hold that marriage is a religious institution involving a man and a woman rather than secular one. Similarly, a gender critical person can not be required to act against their belief that sex is immutable, real, and not to be confused with gender identity.
However, this protection is not a free pass to discriminate against other human rights. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people are protected in British law from discrimination, under the categories of “sexual orientation” and “gender reassignment”. A Christian may refuse to write something on a cake they don’t believe in but they are not allowed to discriminate in general against gay people in service provision, for example in healthcare or retail more generally. A gender critical person is not (as was shown in the Mackareth case) allowed to blanketly disrespect trans people who are using services they are working for by refusing to acknowledge their gender identity on the basis of their beliefs.
Trans Safety Network believe that while the Forstater case showed that Gender Critical views can be legally “worthy of respect” in limited circumstances, public bodies and institutions need to be aware that the leaders of key gender critical campaigning bodies like Sex Matters are openly laying out plans for the abolition of trans people’s civil rights. This at odds with the principle in human rights law that human rights are “universal and inalienable; indivisible; interdependent and interrelated”. What gender critical activists are doing is working, as they openly say in speeches like Helen Joyce’s above, not to foster good relations of human rights protections between different groups, but instead to cynically create and amplify divisions between them, using cracks as points of leverage rather than points of healing, in order to abolish the entire construct.
One of the three billionaires mentioned in Joyce’s book Trans is not Jewish, but is widely alleged to be Jewish, by antisemitic conspiracy theorists peddling theories about Jewish funding behind the trans agenda. We have quoted Christa’s words verbatim, and understand that this detail is likely an elision likely due to the short post format of Twitter. See for example this screenshot from the conspiracy theorist blogosphere describing him as a gay Jew foisting Gender Dysphoria on society as part of a conspiracy by Cabalist Jews, using Bilek’s work. Nevertheless, the same group of 3 wealthy philanthropists - George Soros, Jennifer Pritzker and Jon Stryker - as are routinely targeted as a Jewish conspiratorial "cabal", are the villains of Joyce’s book as they are in Bilek’s writing, which Joyce promoted in the run up to her own book. Elsewhere neonazi writers have praised Bilek’s single-minded focus on Jewish, or allegedly Jewish funders to the exclusion of others, and Bilek has expressed appreciation of neonazi authors on the subject too. We are not alleging that Joyce is an antisemite, but we are highlighting the way that her work has facilitated antisemitic conspiracy theories about the source of funding of what she calls "gender ideology" into the mainstream. This is important contextually to understanding the ways that attacks on trans rights are both reliant on, and help accelerate wider attacks on dignity and human rights of other protected characteristics, whether intentionally or otherwise.
