“Trans - When Ideology Meets Reality”
It may be the most important book you will ever read.
The murder mysteries I like to read have nothing on this book by journalist and Economist executive editor Helen Joyce. It is the intellectual equivalent of a cool, refreshing shower after a hot and humid day in the online swamp, where baseless nonsense hits us from every direction like acid rain storms. It brings hope for sanity when medical doctors - the people with whom we must entrust our lives and health - behave as if they couldn’t possibly pass a middle school biology test.
This book is brilliant, riveting, immensely readable, and impossible to put down. It is not the most important book of the year. It is the most important book of the decade. Americans need this book’s message - not just to protect the lives and wellbeing of children, women, and trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. They need it to save their democracy. I am not exaggerating. As the author points out, the overreach of transctivists’ demands, when the general public finally realizes what they are, is likely to provoke a backlash that will have far-reaching consequences. “The blame may not land with the activists, where it belongs.” Where it will assuredly (and deservedly) land is on Democratic politicians, whose pandering to the obnoxious, insufferable transactivist lobby, will lose them the House, Senate, and the White House to the American fascist movement and usher in a brand of illiberalism that won't have much sympathy for the trans people the activists purport to represent, for women, or children (or working people, for that matter). Roger Stone couldn't have done it better.
What sparked my curiosity about the trans debate was the vicious hate and abuse that trans activists threw at author J.K. Rowling, and I heard Joyce make the same point in an interview. People need to know that writing this book was an act of civic heroism that took some serious courage (I almost wrote cojones). Criticism of the transactivist movement is not for the faint of heart. Those who dare disagree risk their livelihoods and lives. They and their families are subjected to threats of violence and death and the most atrocious verbal abuse campaigns on social media. It’s not just public figures and celebrities who are “canceled” and “de-platformed.” People like myself, with 2 1/2 Twitter followers, are silenced for daring to disagree with the anti-reality demands of the activists or simply expressing basic scientific facts. Medium deemed an article I published on the platform, criticizing a transactivist’s libelous piece calling for depriving people of their free speech rights, “hatespeech,” removed it and warned me that further “violations” would get me kicked off the platform. I republished the article on Substack. It is a sad commentary on what passes for acceptable public discourse in the United States.
This ferocious hatred makes it difficult to square gender ideology activism with the battles of civil rights movements. The civil rights icons of our times did not campaign with threats of murderous violence and death. However, those tactics, as we know, were liberally employed by the movement’s opponents. I’ll leave you to draw your own comparisons and conclusions.
I took the liberty of typing a few paragraphs from the book’s introduction to share here. I hope they will convince you to read this book. “Trans - When Ideology Meets Reality” may be the most important book you will ever read.
“Ideas have consequences... One of the consequences of the idea of gender self-identification is that children are being manipulated and damaged… Demanding that self-declared gender identity be allowed to override sex is not as with genuine civil rights movements, about extending privileges unjustly hoarded by a favoured group to a marginalized one… Most people are in the dark about what is being demanded by transactivists. They understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity… The belief systems accommodated in modern democracies are, by and large, held privately. Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim.
“This is, rather, a book about transactivism [than about ordinary trans people]. It is a story of policy and institutional capture, of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change… This powerful lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. And it serves their interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification… Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. Once the public finally realizes what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the activists… [B]acklast is imminent in paediatric medicine. Early signs suggest that the number of children appearing at gender clinics is levelling off in Sweden…” [whose Karolinska Hospital has ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric patients under the age of 18, considering it “among medical interventions that have a low certainty of benefits, while carrying a significant potential for medical harm.’]
“Underlying my objections to gender self-identification is a scientific fact: that biological sex has an objective basis lacked by other socially salient categories, such as race and nationality. Sexual dimorphism - the two sexes, male and female - first appeared on Earth 1.2 billion years ago. Mammals - animals like humans…- date back 210 million years. In all that time, no mammal has ever changed sex… The distinction between the sexes is not likely to be at all amenable to social engineering, no matter how much some people want it to be.” (As the author pointed out in a television interview - being born with one foot doesn’t change the fact that humans are bipedal).
“What finally pushed me to write this book...was meeting some of gender-identity ideology’s most poignant victims...detransitioners: people who took hormonal and sometimes surgical steps towards transition, only to realise that they had made a catastrophic mistake… They speak of trauma from experimental drugs and surgeries, of having been manipulated and deceived by adults… I have seen them abused and defamed on social media, accused of being transphobes and liars. Their most obvious wounds are physical: mastectomies; castration; bodies shaped by cross-hormones. But the mental wounds go deeper. They bought into an ideology that is incoherent and constantly shifting, and where the slightest deviation is ferociously punished. They were led to believe that parents who expressed concerns...were hateful bigots, and that the only conceivable alternative to transition was suicide… Their motive for speaking out is to save other young people from suffering as they did. That is also my motive for writing this book.”
“Trans - When Ideology Meets Reality” by Helen Joyce