Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

In a speech in 2013, Masen Davis, then the executive director of the American Transgender Law Center, told supporters that ‘we have largely achieved our successes by flying under the radar . . . We do a lot really quietly. We have made some of our biggest gains that nobody has noticed. We are very quiet and thoughtful about what we do, because we want to make sure we have the win more than we want to have the publicity.’

This pattern of funding helps explain the gap between trans campaign groups’ rhetoric and the policies they pursue. The talk is about the world’s downtrodden: poor, homeless trans people forced into survival sex work, lacking health care and harassed by the police. But the money comes in large part from the world’s most powerful people: rich, white American males. The two groups’ needs and desires barely overlap at all.

statistics available suggest that trans people in safer places are not at greatly elevated risk of violence. Their life expectancy depends mostly on the same things as everyone else’s – sex, occupation, state of health and so on – and not on their identity. But they do have specific needs that would be worth addressing. They are on average poorer than their fellow citizens, and more likely to have mental-health problems. Above all, they would benefit from high-quality research into the origins of cross-sex identities, and how to care for a body altered by cross-sex hormones and surgeries as it ages.

And their articles on crime will mislead their readers: an axe-wielding woman laying waste to customers in a supermarket; police warning about a homicidal, sex-offending teenage girl; a woman punching and squeezing a one-year-old to death out of frustration; a female paedophile prosecuted for grooming children online and then meeting up with and raping them. (These are all real examples, and in every case the fact that the ‘female’ person was in fact male was left out of many reports.) Women almost never commit these sorts of crimes – and yet reports of women committing them are becoming commonplace.

In fact, most businesses are happy to play along. In an age of corporate social responsibility, it is convenient to have a tiny oppressed minority to focus on. Rainbow lanyards, pronoun badges and ‘all-gender’ toilets cost little or nothing. Opening a crèche, offering paid internships for working-class youngsters or adapting the workplace for disabled employees would do more for genuine diversity and inclusion. But these policies would be expensive and, without powerful lobbies promoting them, do less to burnish a company’s reputation.

profitable. In the US, puberty blockers cost around $20,000 a year. Cross-sex hormones are cheaper, but taken for decades. ‘Top surgery’ – breast implants for transwomen and double mastectomy for transmen – costs at least $10,000. Vaginoplasty costs $10,000–30,000; more for someone whose missed out on puberty and hence has child-sized genitals, since skin will have to be harvested from elsewhere. ‘Bottom surgery’ for transmen starts at around $20,000 for metoidioplasty, which takes advantage of the clitoral growth caused by testosterone to create a small pseudo-phallus. Phalloplasty costs as much as $150,000. For reshaping facial features to look more typical of the opposite sex – shaving bone from the jaw, nose and brow for transwomen and building them up for transmen; plumping up or slimming down lips; altering the eye sockets – the sky is the limit. And the rise of novel gender identities is creating new, lucrative possibilities. The US has a few doctors willing to satisfy the fantasies of men who want vaginas but not to sacrifice their penises. In ‘penile preservation vaginoplasty’, skin is taken from the scrotum, and perhaps also the abdominal lining, to create a neovagina. Other non-binary surgeries include ‘gender nullification’: the removal of all sex organs, and perhaps the nipples and navel too.

Every single member of the committee that produced the WPATH standards had potential conflicts of interest, in this sense. Some were simply experts (Ken Zucker was one). But others had received grants from trans-advocacy groups, and several members, including the chair, came from a single department at the University of Minnesota that receives funding from Jennifer Pritzker’s Tawani Foundation.

In 2019 Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, published a report it had prepared pro bono for IGLYO, a European network of youth LGBT organisations. Entitled ‘Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth’, it argued for the right to change one’s legal sex at any age without parental consent. It acknowledged that this would be unpopular with the public. But other unpopular trans-rights policies had already become law, it explained – citing gender self-identification in Ireland. It recommended linking such proposals with unrelated ones that commanded broad support; in Ireland, it said, self-ID had been brought in under cover of same-sex marriage. And it advised staying out of the news. Irish transactivists had ‘directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum’.

But if you create a loophole, soon enough someone undesirable will use it – and it will be the most vulnerable who suffer.

Ireland is a small country with relatively little crime. Around a thousand women receive prison sentences each year, almost all short ones for petty offences. At any moment, around 170 are behind bars, of whom between zero and three have committed sex crimes. Until 2019, not a single woman had ever been imprisoned for a sex crime against an adult. Since then, Irish prisons have experienced a sudden influx of ‘female’ sex offenders – according to official records. As you will have guessed, the perpetrators are in fact male. The first, whose name is not public, was convicted in July 2019 on ten counts of sexual assault, and one of cruelty to a child. This person has changed legal sex but undergone no surgical or hormonal transition – in other words, is a physiologically normal male. The sentence is being served in a women’s prison, where the prisoner is accompanied by two guards whenever in communal areas.

Reporting restrictions in Ireland mean I cannot name the transwoman concerned – absurdly, since the case was widely reported before the restrictions, and the information is from official sources. So I will call this person Kandi, which captures some of the obsession with plastic femininity that clearly inspired the female name this transwoman chose. In 2020, Kandi was charged on two counts of sexual assault and four counts of threatening to murder women. Kandi’s history merits a good deal of compassion. But I am sorrier for the women who are Kandi’s targets, and I think that the fiction that this horrifyingly damaged male is a woman only causes further harm to everyone. Here, in brief, is Kandi’s life story. At the end of 2001 a male child was born to a woman with a sadistic and abusive partner. Straight away, the father started to abuse the child, too. As he grew older, the child was recruited to join in the abuse of his mother. Later psychiatric reports found that he identified with his father and had learned to be violent to order. His mother fled home with him when he was eight. Aged ten, he carried out a serious attack against her. In the years following, his behaviour became more violent and sexualised. Aged thirteen, he committed another serious assault on a woman. He was twice sentenced to young offenders’ institutions for violent crimes. At fifteen he said he was a girl. He was assessed at the Tavistock (Ireland has no paediatric gender clinic), where clinicians c...

Established women’s groups are the most obvious culprits. If they had stood up for women’s right to single-sex spaces and services, gender self-ID could never have made such inroads. Instead, as they adopted a postmodern, ‘woke’ style of feminism, they abandoned the women who needed them most.

In 2015, Chart had been sacked from her job with a reproductive-rights campaign group for writing about her opposition to legalised prostitution and gender self-ID. None of the allies from her long history of feminist and environmental activism supported her; instead they ‘unfriended me, denounced me, described me as a physical threat to trans people, said I was genocidal’. Then, as one left-wing group after another adopted the self-ID cause, she watched those former allies campaign for male rapists and murderers to be allowed to transfer to women’s prisons on demand.

‘I did not come to politics to work with people who gave this little of a fuck about women prisoners, who everybody knows have overwhelmingly been victims of child-abuse, domestic violence and commercial sex exploitation,’ she says.

The idea that what makes someone a man or woman is performance of, or identification with, gender is incompatible with the foundational feminist belief that women, like men, are fully human and should not be restricted by stereotypes.

Planned Parenthood, which used to provide contraception and evidence-based sex education to teenagers, now prescribes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones

As journalism became a graduate profession, new entrants brought the censoriousness of campus activism with them.

I could find no mainstream, liberal American outlet that quoted the Obama-era departmental circular ordering gender self-identification in schools. Instead, they cited transactivists and described it as ‘preventing transphobia’ or ‘advancing trans rights’ – suggesting a benign crackdown on bigotry that affected no one but trans people. It was left to conservative and religious publications such as The Federalist, National Review and Daily Signal to report what the document actually said.

As WoLF became active in opposition to gender self-identification, Chart and the other members received rape and death threats.

This sort of faux journalism, which presents an extreme agenda as a fait accompli, has undermined trust in the media and left governments and electorates flying blind.

A Twitter user who calls himself Sam Barber tracks accounts sanctioned for crimes against gender. Among the hundreds on his list are women suspended or banned for saying that ‘only women get cervical cancer’; for saying that ‘we need to talk about male violence’; for quoting verbatim from the parliamentary debate in 2004 on the UK’s Gender Recognition Act; for stating the definition of rape in British law; and for saying, correctly, that the limited statistics available suggest that transwomen in the UK are more likely to commit murder than to be murdered.

Universities are supposed to perform many roles essential to civil society: submitting received wisdom to re-examination; producing fresh research; and turning out graduates who are familiar with a broad range of ideas and able to reason clearly. But as they have adopted gender-identity ideology, they too have taken the side of the censors. The attacks on Rebecca Tuvel for comparing transracialism with transgenderism, or Lisa Littman for researching teenage gender dysphoria, should have been met with a ringing defence of academic freedom. Instead, academics joined the witch-hunts – or led them.

As gender studies replaced women’s studies, and queer theory leaked into other disciplines, the number of academics who make their living from gender-identity ideology grew. You do not have to be particularly cynical to think that the holder of a chair of transgender studies funded by a trans billionaire or campaign group is unlikely to produce research showing that gender self-identification is harmful for women.

These academics’ work ripples out into wider society. Some of their ex-students become teachers or HR professionals, and pass on what they have learned to children or write it into company policies. Together with campaigners and lobbyists in human rights and health care, they form an interest group that far outnumbers transgender people themselves. Their interests are in spreading their ideology and keeping their jobs, rather than in making trans people’s lives better. And they bring to mind the famous remark of the American writer Upton Sinclair, that ‘it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’

All female athletes will lose from admitting males into women’s sports, but each individually has incentives to stay quiet. Trans athletes are, after all, not numerous, so each woman can cross her fingers and hope to get through her career without coming up against one.

Compared with men, women score higher in tests of agreeableness and anxiety, and are keener to get along with others and easier to guilt-trip. They face harsher social sanctions for asserting themselves and prioritising their own needs.

‘The judge concluded that by using the definition of “woman” in the Equality Act I had said something that was not worthy of respect in a democratic society,’ she says. ‘It’s Kafkaesque to say that when you quote the law that protects your rights you are being offensive, and should therefore have no rights.’

As for the Equality Act, the argument that ‘male’ and ‘female’ refer to gender identities not only seems weak, given common usage, but contradicts the most relevant precedent-setting court case since the law passed. That concerned Craig Hudson, who was sentenced in 2004 for murder. Over the two years of his marriage, he and several relatives tortured his wife, Rachel, to death. The autopsy found eleven fractured ribs, a detached lower lip and dozens of bruises, burns and scalds. She died of a blood clot on her brain. ‘I see a lot of people who have been beaten,’ the Home Office pathologist said. ‘I have to say, I have never seen anything like this before.’ By 2013 Hudson was identifying as Kimberley Green, and demanded outsize women’s clothes, a wig, tights, prosthetic breasts and a prosthetic vulva. They were refused on security grounds – the clothes were available only from specialist websites, and prisoners were banned from going online; make-up and a wig could aid in disguise and escape; tights could be used as a ligature, and the prosthetics, to conceal drugs. Green claimed discrimination on the basis of gender reassignment. In such cases, British anti-discrimination law mandates a kind of thought experiment, considering whether the treatment would have been different if everything apart from the protected characteristic had been the same. Green argued that the comparison should be with a (non-trans) woman; the prison governor, that it should be with a (non-trans) man...

And when single-sex spaces are likely to get service-providers threatened and smeared as bigots, many will simply give up.

Alan Henness, a retired electronics engineer, has made it his mission to highlight employers’ infractions of equality law. He became interested in the issue after his wife, Maria MacLachlan, was assaulted by a transactivist in 2017. Under the influence of the Equal Treatment Bench Book, the judge ordered her to refer to her transwoman assailant as ‘she’ while giving evidence. Though the defendant was found guilty, the judge reprimanded MacLachlan and denied her financial compensation because she kept forgetting to use female pronouns for the obviously male person who had punched her in the face.

British women could look across the Atlantic to see what was coming, and had time to organise.

And the achievements of British feminism, from reproductive rights to paid maternity leave, gave them confidence and authority. American feminism has no comparable record of success.

The UK lacks the human-rights tribunals that act as a parallel justice system in Canada and some American states. Those in Canada have a mandate to push anti-discrimination laws into new areas, and have adopted gender-identity ideology with enthusiasm.

Canada is also hobbled by its self-image as more progressive, kinder and all-round nicer than the US, which predisposes its politics to virtue-signalling and institutional capture.

And sometimes, in what social scientists call preference falsification, we claim to hold views that we are well aware we do not because we think others will despise us if we admit the truth. All this misrepresentation and second-guessing can create ‘pluralistic ignorance’ – a situation where people do not understand their fellow citizens’ true views, but think they do.

Then came a concocted row over Troubled Blood, the latest of the crime novels Rowling has written under the pen name Robert Galbraith. An early review mentioned a transgender killer; in fact, the killer merely disguises himself briefly in a woman’s wig and coat. Journalists around the world who hadn’t read the book credulously recycled the story. Pink News, which hadn’t received a review copy, ran forty-two stories about Rowling’s ‘transphobia’ in a week. Twitter allowed #RIPJKRowling to trend, and the threats and insults became ever more vile. It was the digital equivalent of a mob waving pitchforks – and, as the lies proliferated, a reminder of Jonathan Swift’s epigram: ‘Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.’

Kevin Simler, an author and scientist, distinguishes between ‘merit beliefs’ and ‘crony beliefs’, which are held and abandoned for different reasons. It is my contention that many people’s adherence to gender-identity ideology is cronyistic, in this sense, and will be abandoned when it is no longer in the ascendant.

Similarly, we know at some level that our crony beliefs are fragile, and do not subject them to vigorous testing. Instead we become defensive when they are challenged, and seize on even the flimsiest arguments in their favour. We do not allow anything that really matters to depend on their truth. And we boast about them, since being known to hold them is the point.

The main sign that a belief is cronyistic, says Simler, is exhibiting strong emotions about it, ‘as when we feel proud of a belief, anguish over changing our minds, or anger at being challenged or criticized’.

Proclaiming that transwomen are women is a way of showing that you are a member of an elite intellectual tribe – university-educated, left-leaning and too sophisticated to categorise people by their physiology. Adherence is signalled with pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios.

Picture a person who insists that transwomen are women in every circumstance. If transwomen commit crimes, they belong in women’s prisons; if they play sport, they belong on women’s teams. If they are attracted to women, lesbians must regard them as potential sexual partners. Such a person will accept no distinction between sex and gender. Transwomen differ from ‘cis women’ only in having been mistakenly ‘assigned male at birth’. Now, what will our true believer do if they need a gestational surrogate? I am familiar with some men in this situation. They spend a good deal of time harassing the women they call TERFs, and trying to get them fired. But when it comes to something central to their own lives, their beliefs fly out the window. The distinction between male and female that they refuse to admit even exists is tacitly accepted once it is crucial to something they really want.