Helen Joyce's new book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, is reviewed by David Aaronovitch in the Times. Women exist! The facts of biology trump ideology.
I didn’t look too closely when in 2015 a Conservative administration proposed changing the law on gender recognition. A few trans people want more easily to get official confirmation for the new gender they have become? Well, I thought, that’s probably OK. No skin off any part of me.
Then the issue appeared to morph into a different kind of conflict. It had clearly somewhere along the line become impermissible for those who thought that there was something ineluctable about biological sex to say so. It wasn’t whether they were correct or mistaken on the subject that was in question, but their right even to express their view.
A recognisably totalitarian declension seemed to be being imposed: if you said biological sex was real then you argued with the ability of someone who felt they should be the other sex to simply assert that uncontested. That meant you were denying their “existence” as the new sex. Which was tantamount to denying their existence as a human being. Which was close to saying you wanted them and everyone like them dead. Which is the kind of thing the Nazis did. So you’re a Nazi. And we can’t let Nazis publish Nazi thoughts in books. Or speak at universities, or sully our public spaces with their terrible prejudice.
True enough. The astonishing thing is how quickly this happened, and how so many supposedly liberal well-meaning people bought into it.
Here I drew the line. I saw people I knew being bullied and harassed for having an opinion on biological sex (actually the majority opinion on biological sex), and even if I didn’t know whether I agreed with them, I knew that was wrong. And wrote so, inevitably drawing the accusation from Britain’s most-followed far leftist, Owen Jones, that I was an “apologist for transphobia”, a sentiment published to his one million followers on Twitter.
As to the subject of the dispute itself, I was still deliberately agnostic. But two things were beginning to worry me. The first was the absurdity of what was happening to the language. For health publications to eschew using the word “women” in relation to the need for cervical smears, substituting the phrase “people with cervixes” seemed not just awkward but damaging. Some women, for example, might not even know they had cervixes. Why would a transwoman feel her existence was denied by health authorities recognising that people with cervixes were, to a statistical vanishing point, women?
The other light-bulb issue was women’s sport. It seemed obvious to me that a natal male who had reached puberty as a male would, other things being equal, outperform women in almost any sport. That was why we had women’s sport in the first place. As Joyce writes, the fact is that women were evolutionarily designed for childbirth. The chromosomal difference between men and women bequeaths women with less stable hips and a less efficient gait but the capacity to grow a child and give birth to it.
The average adult man, Joyce reminds us, has 41 per cent more non-fat body mass, 50 per cent more muscle mass in his legs and 75 per cent more in his arms. His legs are 65 per cent stronger and his upper body is 90 per cent stronger. That’s why, as she points out “the fastest time ever run by Allyson Felix, the women’s 400 metre Olympics champion, is beaten more than 15,000 times each year by men and boys”. This athletic advantage will be conferred to a post-pubertal transwoman, even if she takes testosterone suppressors.
A point so obvious that it remains a source of astonishment how so many - again, of the liberal well-meaning kind - pretend not to see it.
Joyce places the origin of this development — which, as she establishes, has (unlike debates over gay equality or reproductive rights) somehow sneaked onto the statute books of several countries — in a new ideology about gender. This holds that biological sex is as much a “social construct” as the idea of gender is.
One benefit of Joyce’s book is its intellectual clarity and its refusal to compromise. So she takes apart this ideology of gender with a cold rigour. What, after all, is the woman or man you want to become, if there’s no such thing as a woman or man? The thing that is yearned for will often be precisely the fashionable and frankly prejudiced notion of what a person who was born a woman or man would ideally be like. So you ditch biological reality for a set of shifting aspirations and call it progress?
Joyce is icily furious. What is happening, she observes, is not an attempt at destroying both biological sexes, but just women and their rights. It is women who benefit from “safe spaces” where they can undress away from stronger human beings with penises from whom, they have learnt the hard way, there can be a threat.
It is young women and girls who are increasingly turning up at clinics wanting to be reassigned as boys and men. And, she argues, all too easily being given life-changing treatment. “In 1989, when the Tavistock clinic [in London] opened, there were two referrals, both young boys. By 2020, there were 2,378 referrals, almost three quarters of them girls, and most of these teenagers.”
But happily, thanks to brave women like Keira Bell, the dangers of the Tavistock approach are now well known.
Something odd has happened and is happening. Younger people in particular are, out of good-natured tolerance, accepting an ideology that is so empty that its proponents hugely prefer assertion and “cancellation” to argument. But in seeking to cancel JK Rowling, trans activists met their Joe McCarthy accuses the US army moment — the point at which they tried to take down a loved and respected institution and came unstuck.
I’m off the fence. I will call people by the name and pronouns they tell me they want to be called by. I am prepared to defend their right not to be discriminated against at work and in shops, to defend them against bullying and harassment. But as Joyce says so passionately, that doesn’t change reality. A penis is a male sex organ, men don’t have babies. Women exist.
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