You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 89. Helen Joyce.mp3
Helen Joyce: You can tell people sex all the way through their bodies.
Helen Joyce: It's not just our sex organs.

Helen Joyce: There's a good name for people thinking it's just about our sex organs, which is bikini medicine.

Helen Joyce: Bikini medicine is the idea that humans are the same except for the bits that are covered by the bikini.

Helen Joyce: Well, actually, your fingers are different.

Helen Joyce: Your tendons are different.

Helen Joyce: Everything's different between men and women, a little bit.

Helen Joyce: In some ways, a lot, but in some ways, a little.

Helen Joyce: Yeah, so basically, anything where the fact that we come in two sexes and that one of those sexes bears pretty much all the burden of reproduction

Helen Joyce: Anywhere that that matters, it matters that you acknowledge sex.

Helen Joyce: And that means toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, positive action, anti-discrimination law, education.

Helen Joyce: You probably need to be thinking about it in terms of tracking, like anything that requires you to track data in order to look at or fight discrimination.

Helen Joyce: Of course, it matters in sexual orientation.

Helen Joyce: If you haven't got sex, you haven't got sexual orientation.

Helen Joyce: So if you care about homophobia or bigotry towards same-sex attracted people, you're going to have to pay attention to sex.

Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist.

Stephanie Winn: Well, my next guest hardly needs any introduction.

Stephanie Winn: In fact, many of you listening to this podcast only know who I am because of her.

Stephanie Winn: But that being said, I could not be more delighted to welcome back Helen Joyce and to kick off the new year.

Stephanie Winn: As I might have mentioned, in 2024, I will be welcoming back previous guests, deepening my relationships over time.

Stephanie Winn: with people you've heard from in previous episodes.

Stephanie Winn: And what better way to start this off than with Helen Joyce.

Stephanie Winn: Helen was featured in episode 11 of my podcast, Debunking the Myth of Conversion Therapy in 2022.

Stephanie Winn: And that was a unique episode because she interviewed me.

Stephanie Winn: Now that was for a very particular reason, which is her advocacy work with Sex Matters addressing this issue of conversion therapy and the importance of stories like mine from therapists like me in assisting with that work.

Stephanie Winn: But the number one complaint, although that is still the most watched video, the most listened to episode of my podcast, the number one complaint is that I did all the talking.

Stephanie Winn: So we're going to fix that today.

Stephanie Winn: Helen is here, and I'm going to let her do some of the talking.

Stephanie Winn: Helen, so great to have you back.

Stephanie Winn: Welcome.

Helen Joyce: Oh, thank you for having me back.

Helen Joyce: And you know, for your listeners, that was what I wanted.

Helen Joyce: I wanted to hear about Stephanie's stories of how it works being somewhere that there's law on the books already about conversion therapy, because I wanted to present those stories here in the UK where we don't have such laws.

Helen Joyce: And we need to get politicians to understand that there's a massive cost to these laws that they don't hear about from the trans lobby.

Stephanie Winn: And we will get to all of that today.

Stephanie Winn: Your background in journalism, you're an excellent interviewer.

Stephanie Winn: And so that, I think, is a great place to start.

Stephanie Winn: I forgot the rest of your bio, but of course, you know, of course, it's like you need no introduction.

Stephanie Winn: But just in case anybody doesn't know who you are and they're somehow listening to my podcast, Helen Joyce is the author of Trans When Ideology Meets Reality, which I had not read when we interviewed, but I have read since then.

Stephanie Winn: She's a former journalist at The Economist who now works part-time as Director of Advocacy for Sex Matters and part-time doing freelance journalism.

Stephanie Winn: So maybe let's start there.

Stephanie Winn: Last year you interviewed me about my experience of facing down allegations of so-called conversion therapy.

Stephanie Winn: Can you tell us what was that a part of?

Stephanie Winn: What was that for?

Stephanie Winn: And then where are those issues currently in the UK?

Helen Joyce: So probably most people listening to this show will know that there's been a global push to pass laws banning so-called conversion therapy for both sexuality and gender identity, sexual orientation and gender identity, which are sort of conflated and shoved into this single acronym SOGI.

Helen Joyce: And what conversion therapy means is this practice that's basically obsolete across the developed world, like it's 50 years ago, where therapists tried to inverted commas fix gay people, basically by torturing them, you know, making them associate their natural attraction to people of the same sex with, for example, getting electric shocks or, you know, taking things that make you sick.

Helen Joyce: and then trying to get them to associate pleasant things with looking at, say, pornographic materials of the opposite sex.

Helen Joyce: And this doesn't work.

Helen Joyce: I mean, the most that you can do is temporarily make people feel aversive towards their natural sexuality, but it's also very cruel.

Helen Joyce: And so no reputable, no registered, in fact, therapist of any sort would do this.

Helen Joyce: It doesn't happen.

Helen Joyce: What does happen is

Helen Joyce: what can be quite coercive levels of praying, chanting, laying on of hands, etc, etc, infringe churches, in particular sort of some evangelical churches or some Muslim groups.

Helen Joyce: Like I'm talking here now about, you know, countries like the UK and the US.

Helen Joyce: And, you know, that's, that's actually very hard to ban.

Helen Joyce: And if you tried to ban it, you would be probably infringing upon freedom of belief.

Helen Joyce: But it's also not good.

Helen Joyce: And I say that as the mother of a gay child, I'm very glad that my son hasn't had to

Helen Joyce: to deal with beliefs about his sexuality that are dreadfully depressing and upsetting for people who, you know, honestly, there are people who were born this way.

Helen Joyce: So that's the sort of historical picture.

Stephanie Winn: So sorry to interrupt, but when you talk about this happening in fringe religious groups, this is outside of the context of the licensed practice of psychotherapy.

Stephanie Winn: If anything, there's maybe pastoral counselors, but that's a whole separate licensure and credentialing path.

Stephanie Winn: So that's, as you say, a matter of religious freedom versus how the practice of psychotherapy is regulated.

Helen Joyce: Yeah, I mean, there's nobody who's got any sort of licensed therapy, psychoanalysis, psychiatrist, any of that who does anything remotely like this.

Helen Joyce: So starting from sort of 2015, 2016, this new narrative came up that conversion therapy was something that was to change someone's sexual orientation or gender identity.

Helen Joyce: And that's hugely problematic straight away, because there isn't the same stable construct of gender identity as there is for sexual orientation.

Helen Joyce: Like, especially for children, we know that people who identify as trans or in some way as something other than their sex, as small children or teenagers, really are super likely to stop doing so if it isn't affirmed.

Helen Joyce: Like, that's just, you know, it's a growing through thing.

Helen Joyce: And often, actually, it's started by being gay, being gender nonconforming because you're gay, being, you know, internalizing homophobia and so on.

Helen Joyce: So now you're not meant to try to change somebody's gender identity, but their gender identity is quite likely to change anyway and might be

Helen Joyce: where it is because of things that you could help in with in therapy.

Helen Joyce: So that's very hard to explain.

Helen Joyce: I mean, look at the five or 10 minutes it's taken for us to discuss this.

Helen Joyce: And so politicians seize on these things, and they say, like, we must ban sexual orientation and gender identity conversion therapy.

Helen Joyce: And that's happened in many countries or in many jurisdictions.

Helen Joyce: So some American states, some Canadian, Australian states.

Helen Joyce: And there's a push to make it happen in the UK.

Helen Joyce: And it's a real virtue signal for politicians, because what we have managed to get across to politicians, in my experience here, is that it's not happening.

Helen Joyce: It's not happening in therapy.

Helen Joyce: There's no therapy that does this.

Helen Joyce: But politicians don't mind doing things that are pointless, as long as they get some brownies or cookies for it, whatever you want to call it.

Helen Joyce: They want some praise.

Helen Joyce: They want something they can stand and say, stop torturing gay kids, that sort of thing.

Helen Joyce: And then you say to them, but nobody's torturing gay kids.

Helen Joyce: That's historic practices.

Helen Joyce: They're like, yeah, well, what's the harm?

Helen Joyce: And then it takes you 10 minutes to explain to them what the harm is.

Helen Joyce: So it keeps coming back, the idea of SOGI,

Helen Joyce: conversion therapy bill here.

Helen Joyce: We've got conservatives in government at the moment and they're highly, highly likely to lose the next election.

Helen Joyce: So there was a push to get it into the law phrased very broadly and I think that probably the people who want to get it into the law are now waiting until Labour are forming a government either on their own or with one or two minority parties that are even more woke than they are and even keener on trans ideology.

Helen Joyce: But it looked briefly about a year ago when you and I talked earlier this year, whenever it was, that they were going to get this bill out.

Helen Joyce: And the difficulty of it is the harm that it does.

Helen Joyce: It's not just that it isn't happening, so it's a law that's trying to ban something that isn't happening.

Helen Joyce: It would be the first time that the phrase gender identity is in law in the UK.

Helen Joyce: It puts this concept into law without any real explanation, and suddenly now there is a thing, gender identity.

Helen Joyce: But more than that, it doesn't really matter how many safeguards you put into the law.

Helen Joyce: It's a law against conversion therapy.

Helen Joyce: And we know that ideologues in social services, teaching, the police,

Helen Joyce: you know, local councils, employers, all those places, they will use this as a tool to basically terrify, even terrorise would be a not too strong a word, anyone who disagrees with them on this.

Helen Joyce: So already here in the UK, without such a law, we hear from parents at Sex Matters who email us and say that social workers have said, unless you use your child's preferred pronouns, we're going to, you know, we're going to investigate you with a view to considering taking your child away.

Helen Joyce: or they say to therapists, we're going to report you to your licensing body, as happened to you, of course.

Helen Joyce: And it doesn't matter that the law contains within it, because the government always says, well, there'll be safeguards.

Helen Joyce: It doesn't matter if the law contains within it for ethical, open-ended exploratory therapy or for parents having conversations with their children.

Helen Joyce: If it says it's a conversion therapy bill, banning conversion therapy for

Helen Joyce: gender identity, the law will still be used in that way.

Helen Joyce: Parents know that they'll be reported and they'll be terrified and they'll go along with what it says.

Helen Joyce: So we want to keep the law off the books entirely.

Helen Joyce: That's going to be really hard.

Helen Joyce: I mean, I suspect that we'll manage until the end of this government.

Helen Joyce: And I know that the tide is moving in the right direction, like more and more people every day understand the things that I'm saying.

Helen Joyce: But it's a really, really tough sell for politicians, because they always want to be doing something.

Helen Joyce: I don't know if you've ever heard of the politician's fallacy.

Helen Joyce: It said, something must be done.

Helen Joyce: This is something.

Helen Joyce: Therefore, this must be done.

Helen Joyce: And that's the way they think.

Stephanie Winn: So a point of clarification, you talked about parents, and I'm wondering if you've heard this.

Stephanie Winn: I've heard of this and I don't know the examples or the details because it's just so bizarre every time I hear about it, my brain scrambles.

Stephanie Winn: But have you heard about these laws against conversion therapy being used

Stephanie Winn: to attack people who are not even therapists, because I have heard of this where, and to be clear, these are laws that are in the sections of the codes of the law that are specifically about the regulation of the practice of psychotherapy.

Stephanie Winn: And yet people who are not therapists, parents, you know, not wanting to affirm their children, for example,

Stephanie Winn: have been accused of doing conversion therapy.

Stephanie Winn: So how can you be accused of doing something that is illegal in a profession that is not your profession in a situation that's not a professional situation is just mind boggling.

Stephanie Winn: But have you heard of this?

Stephanie Winn: And can you explain what you've heard?

Helen Joyce: Yeah, completely.

Helen Joyce: I mean, the law that's being imagined here is not actually just about therapists.

Helen Joyce: It says generally, so a teacher could.

Helen Joyce: They're calling it conversion practices rather than conversion therapy, and they might say coercive conversion practices.

Helen Joyce: So there's a woman who talks a lot about it and who's been one of the major campaigners, Jane Ozan, is her name.

Helen Joyce: So Jane is lesbian, but she was born and brought up in an evangelical church that was very homophobic.

Helen Joyce: And she believed that it was sinful.

Helen Joyce: Her orientation was sinful.

Helen Joyce: And she spent a lot of her early adulthood going around trying to find people to straighten her out.

Helen Joyce: She traveled to different countries.

Helen Joyce: She sought out the sort of pastors who do do these very coercive sort of fringe practices and so on.

Helen Joyce: So she now campaigns to have all

Helen Joyce: conversion therapy as she sees it, which is much broader than just what happens in the therapist's office.

Helen Joyce: It's what parents might say to you.

Helen Joyce: It's what teachers might say to you.

Helen Joyce: It's what a pastor might say to you.

Helen Joyce: For those to be banned and for them to be criminal offences.

Helen Joyce: But more generally than that, once a law is on the books, it's out there in the wild and how it's used

Helen Joyce: isn't necessarily the way that was imagined.

Helen Joyce: I've had personal experience of that.

Helen Joyce: I have friends of mine where the police use what's called the Law on Malicious Communications here in the UK, which is a law that predates social media.

Helen Joyce: It was intended for

Helen Joyce: harassment campaigns done by phone, where somebody might phone you hundreds of times a day and threaten you and stalk you and call you horrific names and tell you they're going to burn down their house and things like that.

Helen Joyce: That law is now being cited when police talk to women about a single tweet.

Helen Joyce: in which they misgender somebody.

Helen Joyce: In other words, say what sex they are.

Helen Joyce: And listen, there's not one chance in a million that this would lead to a successful prosecution.

Helen Joyce: But that's not the point.

Helen Joyce: There's an expression in criminology, the process is the punishment.

Helen Joyce: So if the police turn up and they say, you know, we want to talk to you about this, and we're going to arrest you if you don't come in voluntarily for an interview,

Helen Joyce: Like, already you're terrified, and so you quieten down.

Helen Joyce: So there was a case here a couple of weeks ago of a lesbian woman who tweeted, I think, four or five things that were completely lawful.

Helen Joyce: Like, absolutely 100% lawful.

Helen Joyce: They were not in any way intimidating.

Helen Joyce: They were just basically like, men can't be women type stuff.

Helen Joyce: And she was brought in for an interview, and the duty solicitor, like she didn't have her own solicitor, so a duty solicitor stood up for her.

Helen Joyce: And at the end, the duty solicitor said, well, she'll be more careful in future.

Helen Joyce: She won't say these sorts of things in future.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, this law was not written for this, but that's how it's being used.

Helen Joyce: So that's what will happen with conversion therapy.

Helen Joyce: There will be malicious complaints to people's regulator.

Helen Joyce: There'll be malicious complaints to the police.

Helen Joyce: Even before that, it'll be cited.

Helen Joyce: How many parents who were already very unhappy about how unhappy their own child is will even have the knowledge to say to a social worker, but I don't fall within the remit of that law.

Helen Joyce: They're just going to go, shit, shit, shit.

Helen Joyce: I better do what this person tells me.

Helen Joyce: I don't want to go through an investigation.

Stephanie Winn: here in the United States, we have protections for freedom of speech.

Stephanie Winn: Although it feels like they're constantly under attack, but we have an international audience here.

Stephanie Winn: So

Stephanie Winn: It's just, I mean, are there, what protections are there?

Stephanie Winn: I'm very naive about UK law.

Stephanie Winn: What protections are there for freedom of speech, freedom of belief?

Helen Joyce: I mean, there are lots.

Helen Joyce: On paper, you know, Britain is a signatory to the international, the UN declaration, or is it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Helen Joyce: And also it's a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Helen Joyce: They're basically the same thing with some different wording and the rights are in different orders.

Helen Joyce: And the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights,

Helen Joyce: domesticated in UK law under the Human Rights Act 1998.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, that lists freedom of expression, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, and very stirring words that say, and there have been court cases that are precedent-setting since then that say things like,

Helen Joyce: Freedom of speech is not the freedom to only say inoffensive things.

Helen Joyce: Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend.

Helen Joyce: This is UK law.

Helen Joyce: These police, if anyone wants to get arrested, they always get you to come in for a voluntary interview.

Helen Joyce: But if anyone wants to say no, if you want to talk to me, arrest me, and they arrest you,

Helen Joyce: And they say that it's because of a tweet in which you said, men aren't women, though.

Helen Joyce: You've got a great case of wrongful arrest.

Helen Joyce: But you've got to do that, don't you?

Helen Joyce: You've got to get dragged from your house.

Helen Joyce: You've got to get handcuffed in front of your neighbors.

Helen Joyce: You've got to get released in the middle of the night and try and find your way home.

Helen Joyce: You've got to be without your diabetes medication, whatever the hell it is.

Helen Joyce: You've got to fight for months.

Helen Joyce: The process is the punishment.

Helen Joyce: And here you and I are sitting as professional, middle-aged, middle-class white people.

Helen Joyce: I really very rarely mention race, but it is relevant on this one.

Helen Joyce: If we were teenage black boys living in a poor community in central London, we would not be this naive.

Helen Joyce: We would not be going, this is disgraceful.

Helen Joyce: Why are the police acting like this?

Helen Joyce: We wouldn't have that assumption that the law is there for us.

Helen Joyce: This is the first time that I've come up against an issue where the police wildly misuse the law.

Helen Joyce: And it's its own special type of misuse because it's very much driven by lobbyists.

Helen Joyce: But yeah, whatever's on the books, the police use it.

Helen Joyce: And they aren't used to getting pushback on these things.

Stephanie Winn: Wasn't there a case in the UK that confirmed that gender-critical beliefs are protected by law?

Helen Joyce: Completely, yes.

Helen Joyce: I mean, that's my colleague Maya Forstatter's precedent-setting judgment in the Employment Tribunal.

Helen Joyce: So the two big laws that are relevant from the UK point of view are the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010.

Helen Joyce: The Human Rights Act is about your universal human rights, some of which are balancing rights, so they're things that can be overridden.

Helen Joyce: So privacy and free speech do come up against each other.

Helen Joyce: And sometimes one person's privacy gives away to another person's free speech or vice versa.

Helen Joyce: And there's absolute rights, like the right to not be tortured or subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment.

Helen Joyce: And that law puts a duty on governments

Helen Joyce: as well.

Helen Joyce: So if there's a situation that a court decides is torture or inhuman and degrading treatment, it is a positive obligation on the government to stop it.

Helen Joyce: They can't just say, well, that's very bad.

Helen Joyce: And then the Equality Act is about discrimination.

Helen Joyce: It's about when it's lawful or unlawful to discriminate on the basis of nine protected characteristics.

Helen Joyce: Because we discriminate all the time.

Helen Joyce: Discrimination sounds awful.

Helen Joyce: But if you put up a sign saying playground for under 10s or no pregnant women on this ride in a fairground,

Helen Joyce: or, you know, pensionable age is 70, or, you know, we only do cervical smear tests for female people.

Helen Joyce: You're discriminating.

Helen Joyce: You're noticing difference.

Helen Joyce: So the Equality Act says when you can discriminate and when you can't in the provision of goods and services and in employment.

Helen Joyce: And it's a complex piece of law because it's more than a hundred previous laws, entire acts and precedent setting court cases all rolled into one.

Helen Joyce: And each of the nine protected characteristics is different, like race and belief and sex and gender reassignment are all different.

Helen Joyce: They all have different exceptions.

Helen Joyce: And within that and the Human Rights Act, you know, there's plenty of room for these people who want to

Helen Joyce: Push misconceptions and misinterpretations and to compare things that aren't alike to say that having women only changing rooms is like having white only changing rooms.

Helen Joyce: No they're two different characteristics with different exceptions.

Helen Joyce: So that was more than you wanted to know about UK law sorry about that.

Stephanie Winn: And we will come back to some of that when we talk about why sex matters.

Helen Joyce: Sorry, you asked me about Maya Forstater.

Helen Joyce: So she managed to get her court case, her employment tribunal case, established that under the Equality Act, religion or belief protected characteristic.

Helen Joyce: Believing that there are two sexes and that acknowledging that is important is a protected belief now in UK law.

Stephanie Winn: There we go.

Helen Joyce: So you can't discriminate against someone in employment or the provision of goods or services if you know that they think this.

Stephanie Winn: I recently told you about a group called Do No Harm, who's working to do just that.

Stephanie Winn: Eliminate the harm that so-called gender-affirming care for minors and political ideologies in medicine are causing.

Stephanie Winn: Do No Harm is made up of thousands of members across the country, from doctors to nurses to policymakers to concerned parents who see what's happening at practitioners around the country and are waving a red flag.

Stephanie Winn: Membership is free, and you get unlimited access to information from experts, on-the-ground updates from people working in medicine or state houses to take a stand, and collaboration with other thinkers.

Stephanie Winn: Learn more and sign up at do-no-harm-medicine.org slash some-therapist to learn more.

Stephanie Winn: That's do-no-harm-medicine.org slash some-therapist.

Stephanie Winn: But you're making this also important distinction between what's actually protected in law and then the fact that, like you said, the process is the punishment and there are still people who will be tested in these ways.

Stephanie Winn: So we'll come back later to why sex matters and all these different areas that you work on.

Stephanie Winn: But while we're talking about the UK, let's talk about the Tavistock.

Stephanie Winn: Again, just, you know, knowing a little bit of a lot of things over here in the US, you know, I've sort of witnessed, as I'm sure a lot of listeners have,

Stephanie Winn: as we all celebrated that the CAS review, at least the interim report, found very little and low quality evidence to support the experimental medical practices that were being done on young vulnerable people.

Stephanie Winn: And the Tavistock-Gibbs Clinic was ordered to close, and that seemed like a good thing on its surface.

Stephanie Winn: But I hear that there's more to the story.

Stephanie Winn: So can you fill us in on what is currently happening in the UK with the provision of these

Stephanie Winn: so-called gender identity services?

Helen Joyce: So it's a specialist service, and the way the NHS works is that specialist services are commissioned at fewer places than just general services.

Helen Joyce: So that would be true, say, for cancer, and certainly for pediatric cancers, which are rare.

Helen Joyce: And JIDS, the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock, was the sole provider of NHS gender medicine for under-18s in the UK.

Helen Joyce: It had a satellite

Helen Joyce: It has a satellite clinic in the further north in England, but that's still run by JIDS.

Helen Joyce: So there's a clinic also in Scotland.

Helen Joyce: It was totally captured by gender identity ideology.

Helen Joyce: For example, they lobbied to lower the age at which people could take cross-sex hormones, which was fixed at 16 minimum in the NHS.

Helen Joyce: You know, they basically were an arm, they turned by the end into an arm of Mermaids, which is our main paediatric trans ideology charity.

Helen Joyce: And Cass, Hilary Cass, she's a very eminent paediatrician who's sort of basically on her last job.

Helen Joyce: You have to always be close to retirement to do these things well, because you're just never going to get another job after doing this sort of work.

Helen Joyce: And she took a really good look at the evidence base and the practice at JIDS and she said it was not safe.

Helen Joyce: The caseloads were huge, people weren't well trained, kids were being, you know,

Helen Joyce: waiting a long time, like two or three years, and then being assessed extremely quickly and put straight onto puberty blockers, or indeed cross-sex hormones, and that the evidence base for all of this was lacking.

Helen Joyce: There was no follow-up.

Helen Joyce: The Tavistock couldn't even answer how many of the kids it had put on puberty blockers had comorbidities like autistic spectrum disorder or eating disorders or self-harm.

Helen Joyce: It didn't know what had happened to them next.

Helen Joyce: if they got transferred.

Helen Joyce: It was absolutely a shockingly badly run service, both ideologically and in terms of its day-to-day.

Helen Joyce: So she recommended that it be closed down and that it be replaced by four regional clinics.

Helen Joyce: And I see why she wanted that.

Helen Joyce: She wanted it more closely integrated into general health care, because in particular, general mental health care.

Helen Joyce: What she said was an expression I hadn't heard before.

Helen Joyce: It'd be interesting to know if you had, which was that when the word gender is mentioned,

Helen Joyce: there's what she called diagnostic overshadowing, that as soon as gender was on the table, everything else that was happening to this child was parked.

Helen Joyce: It turned out that general doctors, family doctors, GPs, didn't want to handle kids who had gender issues, even when they knew that that child also had an eating disorder or depression or self-harm or autistic spectrum diagnosis.

Helen Joyce: So those kids wouldn't get help for those things.

Helen Joyce: They wouldn't even be referred to the local mental health services.

Helen Joyce: They'd just be parked to suffer.

Helen Joyce: and become obsessed with gender and then get referred to the gids where they were just railroaded through because there was such a high caseload.

Helen Joyce: So she wanted to just become part of general healthcare, in particular, general mental health healthcare.

Helen Joyce: Unfortunately, it's been slower to

Helen Joyce: switch over than one would have hoped.

Helen Joyce: Also, the ideologues have just taken over at least some of the four, and the service specs for them are even worse than they were at the Tavistock.

Helen Joyce: Meanwhile, a few people, including people who've been let go from the Tavistock, have set up as private gender doctors.

Helen Joyce: They will offer a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Helen Joyce: As far as I know, if you ask for it, you're going to get it.

Helen Joyce: I've never heard of anyone being told, no, actually, you don't have gender dysphoria.

Helen Joyce: With a few Zoom calls, you can get it for 600 quid, and they will write you a prescription.

Helen Joyce: And then you can bring that prescription to your NHS family doctor and ask them to turn it into an NHS prescription.

Helen Joyce: So actually, we've just seen a news story very recently that more children, like double the number of children at least, have taken puberty blockers since Hillary Cass said, there's no evidence base for these.

Helen Joyce: no evidence that they help and significant evidence that they probably cause harm.

Helen Joyce: It's extremely depressing it just shows you you know we can't fix this by law or regulation alone we actually have to stop the demand for these things like as long as children are very distressed and turning up and convinced absolutely convinced that what's causing their problem is gender, this will continue.

Stephanie Winn: That's a bummer.

Stephanie Winn: And, you know, I, I know so little about the law, but sort of going back to our conversation earlier on conversion therapy, I did testify here in my state of Oregon against a law that was proposed to expand the ban on so-called conversion therapy from where it's currently under 18s to all ages.

Stephanie Winn: And I, it was, it was a matter of sort of giving feedback to my state representatives from someone who actually works in the field.

Stephanie Winn: Like, I know what your intentions might be with this law, but here's how it plays out in impact.

Stephanie Winn: And they didn't want to hear it.

Stephanie Winn: And similarly, you know, I've looked at proposed laws in other states, like I'm working with a medical ethics group on

Stephanie Winn: a different state that's not my own.

Stephanie Winn: And we were looking at some legislation, and I was seeing, again, like, oh, I can kind of see what they think they're doing, but also all the loopholes that are built into it.

Stephanie Winn: And the problem really is the cultural part.

Stephanie Winn: And it's the demand from both sides, right?

Stephanie Winn: It's the demand from the vulnerable people who think this is going to fix their problems.

Stephanie Winn: And we can talk about diagnostic overshadowing, because that's a great point related to that.

Stephanie Winn: But it's also from the indoctrinated providers, from what they're getting out of this.

Stephanie Winn: And so I've looked at these laws and thought, I can imagine what this law looks like.

Stephanie Winn: from the standpoint of a provider who really thinks that they are making history and, you know, saving vulnerable people from evil people.

Stephanie Winn: And they're just going to look at how this is worded and say, great, these are the hoops I have to jump through now, I'll jump through them, I will jump through these hoops to give these prescriptions to provide the so called life saving care.

Stephanie Winn: And so it doesn't really

Stephanie Winn: affect any change in the long run.

Stephanie Winn: So it feels like a cultural shift is needed twofold for both the vulnerable people and those who position themselves as rescuers, which kind of reminds me of the whole idea.

Helen Joyce: And I want to give you another example of this.

Helen Joyce: Sweden, before the UK,

Helen Joyce: There were moves in particular at the Karolinska, which was a very famous hospital in Stockholm, where a lot of the treatment of minors happened.

Helen Joyce: They said that they were going to stop prescribing, I think, only puberty blockers, but maybe also cross-sex hormones, except as part of a proper randomized controlled trial.

Helen Joyce: And yet I'm told that it continues.

Helen Joyce: And it continues the same sort of level that it was happening before because there's some phrasing around exceptional.

Helen Joyce: And so if you're convinced that this is life saving care and you got a child in front of you who's become incredibly fixated like total tunnel vision that this is the thing that they need and then you add into the mix.

Helen Joyce: These absolutely unethical and disgraceful attempts to terrify everybody into thinking that a child kills themselves if they aren't put on the gender affirmative pathway.

Helen Joyce: You've got a situation where it's going to get called exceptional and the numbers don't change.

Helen Joyce: It's amazing.

Helen Joyce: We've actually done some work at Sex Matters and we've written what we think is a proper conversion therapy bill.

Helen Joyce: So we don't think that there's any way of writing a bill that's meant to stop the old-fashioned things that aren't happening in therapy, and then to stick in enough safeguards that it won't catch anything that it shouldn't catch.

Helen Joyce: We think that's impossible.

Helen Joyce: You'd end up with so many safeguards that you end up with an offence that can't be prosecuted, actually, and government lawyers will notice that, but also that you'll see it used as a cudgel

Helen Joyce: in totally inappropriate ways like the malicious communications example I gave.

Helen Joyce: What we think is that in the same way that we talk about modern slavery, which exists, and it's about trafficking of children and women across borders for prostitution and similar, it's nothing like the chattel slavery of, you know,

Helen Joyce: the antebellum period in the US.

Helen Joyce: So we talk about modern slavery.

Helen Joyce: We think there's modern conversion practices.

Helen Joyce: And that is what happens in gender clinics, where they take a kid of one sex and they give them things that are explicitly meant to convert them into facsimiles of the opposite sex.

Helen Joyce: And very often, the person they're doing this to is gay.

Helen Joyce: So they are turning healthy gay bodies into sterile, permanently medicalised straight ones.

Helen Joyce: That's conversion therapy.

Helen Joyce: And we don't think that right now we could get that into the law or anything, but we think it's time to start talking about what is the modern day version of conversion therapy, and it's what's happening in the gender clinics.

Helen Joyce: And I think we've got to get all the way there before we manage to stop this, all the way to saying what you are doing is unethical, so unethical it shouldn't be allowed.

Stephanie Winn: I'm curious for your take on, as we've seen the exponential increase in the number of trans-identified young people,

Stephanie Winn: It seems to me like going back, let's say 2016, maybe, that a significant portion of the young people at that time more kind of fit the classic profile that they would have grown up to be gay.

Stephanie Winn: But I think increasingly, the more prevalent it becomes, the more we are hearing that, let's say, 40% of Gen Z Americans identify as LGBTQ.

Stephanie Winn: The more

Stephanie Winn: The more we see of this, the more it seems to be my impression that gender typical children are also getting swept up into it.

Stephanie Winn: So we have these kind of girly girls.

Stephanie Winn: who were very girly right up until age 12, when within six months, they had this rapid ROGD process.

Stephanie Winn: And then we also have a different profile of boys.

Stephanie Winn: So this is kind of multiple questions in one for you, because on the one hand, I'm curious if you're seeing this and what your observations are from the UK.

Stephanie Winn: And then also kind of wrapped up in that as a question that I had written down for you before, which is

Stephanie Winn: And sorry that I'm giving you so much to respond to at once.

Stephanie Winn: It's about Ray Blanchard's typology and how we have, you know, the autogynephilic and the homosexual transsexual as two categories of male.

Stephanie Winn: But do you also see a third category emerging of

Stephanie Winn: Boys who don't necessarily fit the classic profile of either of those, but just like we have these girly girls who are straight, who are actually quite gender typical, who get swept up into this because they feel too vulnerable being female, because they've seen porn that has traumatized them, because they want their peers to like them.

Stephanie Winn: or for whatever reason, it seems like we're also seeing a new category of boys who are quite typical, often somewhat autistic, often have very male typical interests like engineering and video games, and who aren't feminine in the slightest, but who also kind of hit this ROGD craze and get really stuck in it.

Stephanie Winn: So what are your thoughts on all of that?

Helen Joyce: Yeah, I completely agree.

Helen Joyce: Ray Blanchard's work was excellent.

Helen Joyce: It was properly done.

Helen Joyce: It was properly researched.

Helen Joyce: It was beautifully written.

Helen Joyce: He's an excellent writer.

Helen Joyce: I recommend to anyone to read the original papers.

Helen Joyce: They're a joy to read and not at all like academic work generally is.

Helen Joyce: I'm sure he was capturing the enormous majority of everybody that they saw at the clinic.

Helen Joyce: But with these socially mediated conditions like anorexia or bulimia or self-harm,

Helen Joyce: they would be other examples.

Helen Joyce: There's no reason to think that the etiology stays fixed as the culture changes.

Helen Joyce: So I'm absolutely certain that there are still very gender atypical gay kids who go through the classic process of being very gender nonconforming, realizing to their horror that that makes them outcasts, maybe getting homophobic messages at home or in the culture or wherever, and then the awful thought occurs to them, was I meant to be a member of the opposite sex?

Helen Joyce: Oh, I must really be a girl.

Helen Joyce: That definitely still happens.

Helen Joyce: And autogynophilia, whether you think it's born or made, definitely happens.

Helen Joyce: I mean, it is so obvious in so many of the men who are causing the most problem at the moment that they're getting a massive sexual thrill out of it.

Helen Joyce: But there's no reason to think that research that was done before the internet even existed caught everything that's happening now.

Helen Joyce: And we know that it didn't capture everything that was happening for girls, because the only females who turned up at gender clinics, the only ones they knew about, were adult and lesbian.

Helen Joyce: and were hyper-gender nonconforming and knew perfectly well they weren't changing sex and weren't even massively driven by sex, most of them.

Helen Joyce: I mean, there were some.

Helen Joyce: There's this somewhat controversial term of autoandrophilia.

Helen Joyce: But by and large, it's women who are so hyper-masculine, so hyper-butch, that they just thought, like, this is just much easier.

Helen Joyce: I can move around the world so much more easily like this.

Helen Joyce: But now we know we've got these teenage girls who were never seen before.

Helen Joyce: Why would we be surprised that there are also teenage boys of a type we haven't seen before?

Helen Joyce: And you said about how it's gone beyond the original cohorts, even the ones that we saw in 2015-16.

Helen Joyce: Absolutely.

Helen Joyce: Absolutely.

Helen Joyce: There are schools near me, state schools near me, where I happen to know that pretty much 20% to a fifth of all the girls on roll between 11 and 16

Helen Joyce: are on roll at the school as something other than their sex, either boy or non-binary.

Helen Joyce: And that's just the ones who've gone to the bother of telling their teachers and not the ones who are playing around with pronouns or whatever among their friendship groups.

Helen Joyce: There's just no way that 20% of those girls are in any way gender non-conforming.

Helen Joyce: And then the parents who approach us or approach me personally and that I end up talking to, I mean, they tell me stories that just don't fit with any of the narratives that we had even back in 2016.

Helen Joyce: The analogy I'd use is like when COVID started, it was people who had pneumonia or compromised immune systems or whatever.

Helen Joyce: And then every now and then, it was like basically we were all going to get COVID, and we all basically did.

Helen Joyce: And then every now and then, you'd hear these tragic stories of a perfectly healthy 25 or 30-year-old who just catastrophically got a degree of COVID that killed them, or maybe maybe six a year or whatever.

Stephanie Winn: I was a healthy person in my mid-30s who got COVID, and it's never been the same.

Helen Joyce: a year and a half later.

Helen Joyce: Yeah.

Helen Joyce: That's very typical for a new syndrome or a new disease.

Helen Joyce: It attacks the most vulnerable first.

Helen Joyce: But then as it goes out into the general population, which is, of course, a much larger population, there's a lot more people are gender conforming than gender nonconforming.

Helen Joyce: So even if it's rarer in them, that ends up being the predominant things you see.

Helen Joyce: So I now have had conversations with families.

Helen Joyce: And you do sometimes wonder if you're not hearing from the parents what the children would say to you.

Helen Joyce: But I've sometimes met the children, too.

Helen Joyce: And I can guarantee you that these are rock solid families with parents who are lovely people, no mental health issues, strong marriages, great communication with their kids, great parenting skills.

Helen Joyce: The kids are very happy, not being bullied.

Helen Joyce: Nothing is wrong.

Helen Joyce: And yet they identify as trans.

Helen Joyce: And then, of course, something is wrong.

Helen Joyce: Because now you've got a child who's looking for medication, who wants to brine their breasts, who's seeking to do dangerous things.

Helen Joyce: Like someone was telling me recently about a niece of hers who has some learning difficulties.

Helen Joyce: Now, this is an adult, a young adult.

Helen Joyce: And she's not the smartest kid in the sense of risk.

Helen Joyce: She's somebody who does risky things.

Helen Joyce: And they have to be very careful what she does and so on.

Helen Joyce: And now she's using men's toilets in public places because she's a man.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, she just looks like a woman.

Helen Joyce: She's not in any way passing as a man.

Helen Joyce: So she's now doing dangerous things under the influence of this ideology.

Helen Joyce: And then with the boys, what the unfalsifiable thing that the people who insist that it's all Ray's typology say is, you just don't know that they're autogynophile.

Helen Joyce: They're not telling the parents.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, I'm sure there's some truth to that.

Helen Joyce: Like a mother was telling me the story of her 19-year-old last week.

Helen Joyce: And there were many sort of vulnerabilities in mental health.

Helen Joyce: You know some physical issues and so on and covid covid the lockdowns has been a huge part of the story for a lot of kids of that sort of age now but then she said to me you know i have found things that have made me think this is a sexual thing for him i read your book i read about autogynephilia and i wouldn't be surprised.

Helen Joyce: Now, he's not saying that to her.

Helen Joyce: He says, I'm the devil.

Helen Joyce: My book had to be taken out of the house, because he wouldn't come and visit if it was there.

Helen Joyce: And he says that it doesn't exist, and it's been debunked, and so on.

Helen Joyce: But she still thinks it might be him.

Helen Joyce: There's a load of narratives that were not around when Ray was writing.

Helen Joyce: And one of those narratives is a very pornified narrative that's pushed by some really predatory and nasty men online that life is much easier for girls.

Helen Joyce: And if you're a beta, like not an alpha male, if you're a beta male, or you're a cuck, identify as a girl, take hormones, and then you can have a sugar daddy, and life will be easy because girls have it easy.

Helen Joyce: And boys who are lonely or bullied or a bit hyper-focused in their teens, they just get caught.

Helen Joyce: I think the amount of grooming that happens online in this

Helen Joyce: There really are men.

Helen Joyce: I mean, if you have a teenager, you need to know this.

Helen Joyce: There really are men who hang around on sites like Reddit where children go looking for kids who are vulnerable.

Helen Joyce: And it seems to me their pleasure, their fun in life is getting those kids to transition.

Helen Joyce: And they'll be kids who didn't have any issues on that lines.

Helen Joyce: So we are missing an absolute moral and medical scandal.

Helen Joyce: one of many tied up together in this.

Helen Joyce: And it does strike me as odd that people are so determined to say that all the boys are caught up in this for one of two reasons.

Helen Joyce: Like, the internet has changed everything.

Helen Joyce: Social media has changed everything.

Helen Joyce: Why would it not have changed this too?

Stephanie Winn: I can confirm everything you're saying from my side of the elephant, you know, in terms of the blind men and elephant, right?

Stephanie Winn: You know, here I am doing

Stephanie Winn: my work of mostly talking to parents, that's mostly what I do now between counseling and consulting, and so much of what you're saying fits with what I've witnessed from here.

Stephanie Winn: Sorry, just thinking of where to go with this.

Stephanie Winn: I've seen families from all walks of life, including some very well-off families,

Stephanie Winn: some families that are blessed.

Stephanie Winn: And this is where we have to acknowledge the role of social justice ideology, because isn't it true also that one of Elon Musk's own children is both identifying as trans and hates their father's guts?

Stephanie Winn: That's right.

Stephanie Winn: And I've seen so many families where it's, it's this white guilt.

Stephanie Winn: It's this privileged guilt.

Stephanie Winn: It's this, they hold beliefs that are inherently self-destructive.

Stephanie Winn: They hold, um, beliefs that make themselves the enemy.

Stephanie Winn: So they have to attack themselves in some way and turning into trans identification is just kind of the next either being trans identified themselves or being a social justice warrior who makes being an ally, their whole identity.

Helen Joyce: If I could pick up on that.

Helen Joyce: I really agree, but I would also say, you know, maybe here it's a bit less obvious, the white guilt.

Helen Joyce: I mean, we are following you down the rabbit hole as fast as we can.

Helen Joyce: But the racial history of Britain is, of course, very different from the US.

Helen Joyce: And in particular, there was never

Helen Joyce: um, you know, institutionalized chattel slavery in UK law on UK, like in these islands, like absolutely Britain did slave trading and so on.

Helen Joyce: I'm not saying that the Caribbean slave trade didn't happen, just that we haven't got it in our, you know, written laws from so recently.

Stephanie Winn: You don't have the same racial politics there.

Helen Joyce: Yes.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, you know, having chattel slavery as part of your constitution

Helen Joyce: is a wound that I don't know if we know how long it takes to heal.

Helen Joyce: It certainly hasn't healed in either Brazil, where I used to live, or in the US by now.

Helen Joyce: It's too soon.

Helen Joyce: But we haven't got that history here in the UK, and so racial politics is somewhat different.

Helen Joyce: What I see here is

Helen Joyce: what some people call the victimhood culture, so the glorification of being a victim.

Helen Joyce: If you are not a victim, then you're an oppressor.

Helen Joyce: And oppressors are bad, and victims are good.

Helen Joyce: And this is a replacement of two previous cultures, honor culture, where, you know, an eye for an eye, and it's the code of the mafia, basically.

Helen Joyce: Like, someone insults you, you

Helen Joyce: off their entire family, and they won't do it again.

Helen Joyce: And then there's dignity culture, which sees it elevates people who have self-control, but also people who turn to authority to fix their problems.

Helen Joyce: So it does require having good institutions.

Helen Joyce: And now we've got victimhood culture, in which the good people are the people who are downtrodden.

Helen Joyce: And if you're not downtrodden, that means you're not good.

Helen Joyce: So everyone wants to be good, everyone wants to feel good about themselves, everyone wants to be liked and admired, and if the only way you can do that is by being oppressed, but it so happens your parents are lovely, you live in a nice home, you know, there isn't a racial issue for you, whatever that means for wherever you are, you know, there's nothing you can identify into except being non-binary or trans.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, I don't know if you've heard the expression spicy straight.

Helen Joyce: Oh, yeah.

Helen Joyce: So this is straight people who identify as non-binary or agender or asexual or queer or whatever with that, you know, basically.

Helen Joyce: I have a story about that.

Helen Joyce: Julie Bendell calls them the blue fringe brigade.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, I do have a gay son.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, he doesn't hang around in any of these LGBT groups or whatever because they're just basically full of straight girls who call themselves they them.

Helen Joyce: And, you know,

Helen Joyce: polygender or asexual or queer or something.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, there's just nothing to do with him, nothing at all.

Stephanie Winn: I have a funny story about the Spicy Straits.

Stephanie Winn: So I went to grad school in California between 2010 and 2013.

Stephanie Winn: And so I saw some of this ideology then, but also when it was much smaller, it wasn't the dominant narrative in every situation.

Stephanie Winn: And so

Stephanie Winn: I remember one in one of my graduate counseling classes, the teacher divided us into basically like the straight people and the LGBT.

Stephanie Winn: And now, but this wasn't like full blown woke, it was more like, let's have a little focus group.

Stephanie Winn: amongst the people with this lived experience.

Stephanie Winn: And then let's reconvene.

Stephanie Winn: And this was from the perspective of people who are supposed to be learning cultural competency in providing counseling to people of diverse backgrounds.

Stephanie Winn: So I have no problem with that in theory.

Stephanie Winn: It's not like, it's not like the level of segregation that they're doing nowadays.

Stephanie Winn: But it was really for a particular exercise.

Stephanie Winn: And there is this one

Stephanie Winn: girl in my class who was always the wokest in every situation.

Stephanie Winn: She was the one who did presentations on things like fat phobia, for example.

Stephanie Winn: But she was sort of the minority voice in that time.

Stephanie Winn: She was the one social justice warrior in our class.

Stephanie Winn: And she basically said, I identify as queer, but I'm heterosexual.

Stephanie Winn: She wanted to join the queer people.

Stephanie Winn: And the teacher was like, no,

Stephanie Winn: She was just like, go join the other straights.

Stephanie Winn: And that would never happen.

Stephanie Winn: I mean, that was maybe 2011, 2012.

Stephanie Winn: Back then, the teacher was like, sorry to break it to you.

Stephanie Winn: You belong at the straight table.

Stephanie Winn: And nowadays, if the teacher divided the class like that, it would be like 60% in the I identify as queer group.

Stephanie Winn: And what would they come up with that's actually useful to the rest of the class in terms of insight into the unique counseling needs of gay and lesbian people?

Helen Joyce: Because they're just everybody now, yeah.

Helen Joyce: I mean, it's extraordinary when you think.

Helen Joyce: It's not like homophobia has gone away.

Helen Joyce: I was thinking about this just the other day because I was listening to somebody really do their best not to refer to their child

Helen Joyce: according to their sex.

Helen Joyce: The child wasn't there, but I happen to know the child identifies as a they-them.

Helen Joyce: Obviously, the parents felt it was so important to their child, and I don't know what conversations have been had, that they weren't willing to refer to their child according to their sex in any circumstance.

Helen Joyce: Because if you do that, even when you're just talking to friends, you might do it in front of your child, I presume.

Helen Joyce: And I thought, they are the most liberal people I know in the American sense of liberal.

Helen Joyce: They're not at all liberal in my sense of the word.

Helen Joyce: They absolutely don't believe in freedom of anything, in my opinion.

Helen Joyce: But anyway, so they will be the equivalent of your portal and social justice warrior.

Helen Joyce: They're also absolutely lovely people.

Helen Joyce: They're some of the people I like best in the world.

Helen Joyce: But they're people that there was nothing left for their child to rebel against, like literally nothing.

Helen Joyce: I'm not sure what this child could possibly have done to

Helen Joyce: shock their parents.

Helen Joyce: So what was left was to impose an incredibly irritating speech code on their parents.

Helen Joyce: I mean, this is a child who's left university.

Helen Joyce: This is not a little child.

Helen Joyce: It's not somebody who lives at home.

Helen Joyce: I just thought going home, wow, you know, you really managed to cause your parents really significant difficulties there.

Helen Joyce: You know, getting a tattoo wouldn't have worked.

Helen Joyce: Any sort of tattoo, no piercings would have worked.

Helen Joyce: You could have shaved your skull.

Helen Joyce: You could have dyed your hair any color you liked.

Helen Joyce: They'd be positively pleased if you were gay compared with straight.

Helen Joyce: There's no job that you could have done that would have disappointed them.

Helen Joyce: They just would.

Helen Joyce: There's absolutely nothing left.

Helen Joyce: So this child has found something really, really excellently irritating.

Stephanie Winn: Let me look back through my notes and see if there's anything we touched on earlier that I want to come back to before we move on.

Stephanie Winn: Well, I do have a couple questions going back, actually.

Stephanie Winn: You had mentioned that the Tavistock had basically become an extension of mermaids.

Stephanie Winn: I know there was some drama that went down in the last year regarding Susie Green and mermaids.

Stephanie Winn: Again, I can't quite keep fully informed on everything, so do you have any updates on

Helen Joyce: their affairs?

Helen Joyce: I mean, not really.

Helen Joyce: Like, you know, it's obviously it's in crisis in the sense of leadership type crisis.

Helen Joyce: I mean, I'm not suggesting anything untoward in the way of finances or anything like that.

Helen Joyce: Susie Green left and was replaced.

Helen Joyce: And then that person has stepped down.

Helen Joyce: And Susie Green went on to Gender GP, which is one of these, you know, we'll give you drugs, very young

Helen Joyce: after a Zoom consultation run by a couple, Helen Webberley and her husband, who were both investigated for fitness to practice.

Helen Joyce: And actually, Helen Webberley came through that, but some of the things that came up in the hearing were very distressing.

Helen Joyce: And Susie Green has now left Gender GP, and I don't know what she's doing instead.

Helen Joyce: So Mermaids was being investigated by the Charity Commission, I think over safeguarding, because they lost a member of the board and a key member of staff who was digital engagement.

Helen Joyce: The member of the board had written paedophile apologist material as part of his academic work before he was actually headhunted, apparently, by Mermaids.

Helen Joyce: And the digital engagement guy, who somebody would be engaging with vulnerable children,

Helen Joyce: He was a they-them non-binary person, and he liked posting pictures of himself as a very sexualized schoolgirl, like in little miniskirt school uniform and stockings and, you know, the sort of poses and things like that.

Helen Joyce: And had also done some really very graphic porn shoots that were available easily if you searched online.

Helen Joyce: Now, look, people can do porn.

Helen Joyce: It does make you a bit not quite the right person for a job when your porn is on the internet and you're interacting with vulnerable kids.

Helen Joyce: but also your Instagram has these sexualized schoolgirl type things.

Helen Joyce: So they both went.

Helen Joyce: And I don't know.

Helen Joyce: I don't know what's happening with any of that.

Helen Joyce: I don't know what's happening with the Charity Commission investigation.

Helen Joyce: And of course, there's plenty of people who misunderstand all of this and think that it's just homophobes or transphobes who are attacking mermaids, that it's a brilliant charity.

Helen Joyce: It still gets donations.

Helen Joyce: I mean, what we can definitely say is that they are

Helen Joyce: To put it at a minimum, they are not using safer recruitment practices.

Helen Joyce: There's a whole backstory here about recruitment for safeguarding purposes into positions where there are vulnerable people, whether that's children or adults with learning difficulties or so on.

Helen Joyce: And there's a whole way that you're meant to think about recruitment into those charities and schools and so on.

Helen Joyce: to try to stop infiltration because we all know that that's exactly where people try to infiltrate who have not got children's best interests at heart.

Helen Joyce: And I'm absolutely not saying that of either of the two people I've mentioned.

Helen Joyce: I have no idea what their interests are.

Helen Joyce: What I'm saying is if you hired those people, you cannot have been doing proper safeguarding in your recruitment because it's meant to pick up the other things in a person's life and whether that person is prone to lying or whether they might have

Helen Joyce: vulnerabilities that mean that they are not the right person to work with children.

Helen Joyce: I mean, Mermaids has shown itself to be unfit to work with any children, let alone vulnerable children, and yet on it goes.

Helen Joyce: I mean, it's very depressing the extent to which inertia keeps these awful things, like at the Tavistock, like Mermaids.

Helen Joyce: You feel like you've got enough material that surely, surely you should be able to get them to close down, but there's no mechanism for getting them to close down.

Helen Joyce: Most people don't hear what we're saying.

Helen Joyce: You know, we're not on the BBC.

Helen Joyce: We're not put out by the New York Times.

Helen Joyce: You know, loads of people still think mermaids is good.

Stephanie Winn: Wasn't there something that went down in the last year where mermaids came after the LGBT Alliance and it ended up backfiring on them?

Helen Joyce: So they did something that, as far as I know, is unprecedented in UK law, which was that they challenged the Charity Commission's registration of LGB Alliance as a charity.

Helen Joyce: And it's not common to do that.

Helen Joyce: And in particular, it's not common to do it on ideological grounds, because charities can have completely opposing ideologies.

Helen Joyce: Like this country has pro-abortion and anti-abortion charities.

Helen Joyce: It has atheist charities that regard all religion

Helen Joyce: as a very bad thing.

Helen Joyce: And it also has, obviously, lots of religious charities.

Helen Joyce: So Mermaids, it brought this challenge to the Charity Commission.

Helen Joyce: And it was very costly for the LGB Alliance, which was not fair, actually, because it wasn't a challenge against LGB Alliance.

Helen Joyce: It was a challenge against the Charity Commission.

Helen Joyce: But the Charity Commission didn't do a proper job of defending itself.

Helen Joyce: It just said it stood by its decision or something like that.

Helen Joyce: So LGB Alliance had to lawyer up and had to have expensive barristers, too.

Helen Joyce: at the hearing, which went on for days.

Helen Joyce: I mean, I went to the beginning of it, but I couldn't stay to all of it.

Helen Joyce: It went on for several days, but the most extraordinary things were done.

Helen Joyce: I mean, really.

Helen Joyce: You know, they said that it was bigotry for a lesbian.

Helen Joyce: Like, the LGB Alliance was founded by two lesbians.

Helen Joyce: Like, it's for gays and lesbians, but it was two lesbians, two real stalwarts, women in their 70s who did amazing work back in the day, fighting actual homophobic laws, and still doing amazing work, of course.

Helen Joyce: You know, telling them that they were bigots for saying that a man can't be a lesbian.

Helen Joyce: And yeah, that really just happened in a UK court.

Helen Joyce: So then it took absolutely ages for the decision.

Helen Joyce: And the decision was that the charitable registration was acceptable, that it had not broken charity commission guidelines.

Helen Joyce: So LGB Alliance is still a charity.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, I think Mermaids came out of that much worse.

Helen Joyce: But again, the superficial narrative, the controversial charity LGB Alliance challenged yada, yada, yada.

Helen Joyce: And if all you hear is transphobia is the modern homophobia,

Helen Joyce: or, you know, you judge what's going on in the country according to what's in the BBC or the New York Times, you know, then as far as you're concerned, you know, LGB Alliance hung on by the skin of its teeth.

Helen Joyce: It's very depressing.

Stephanie Winn: So not exactly the most inspiring news.

Stephanie Winn: You know, sort of another one of those examples where, well, just like you were saying, the process is the punishment.

Helen Joyce: Oh, completely.

Helen Joyce: And then one of the things they complained about was that LGB Alliance hadn't been doing enough for gay and lesbian people.

Helen Joyce: You're like, well, that's because we've had to spend hundreds of thousands defending this absolutely vexatious legal process.

Helen Joyce: Like, they're a tiny organisation.

Helen Joyce: And for 18 months, that was the main thing they had to do.

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Stephanie Winn: One other thing that we touched on briefly and not come back to was this idea of diagnostic overshadowing.

Stephanie Winn: And I'm just wondering if there's anything to talk about there.

Stephanie Winn: I'll just kind of give my sort of pitch on this, which is that it very much ties in to the ideological capture of the counseling profession.

Stephanie Winn: Because it takes those of us who are actually in a position to diagnose to contribute to this problem, which is really that the indoctrinated therapists

Stephanie Winn: have this unsubstantiated but, but stubbornly held view that when you see depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, PTSD, whatever it is, in a person who is or might consider themselves to be trans identified,

Stephanie Winn: or who has gender dysphoria or what have you, that all the other problems are secondary to this fundamental existential problem of having been so-called born in the wrong body, which of course is an unfalsifiable belief.

Stephanie Winn: There's no diagnostic way to confirm this.

Stephanie Winn: There's not a blood test or a brain scan for it, but it's this idea

Stephanie Winn: And so it's that everything is downstream of that.

Stephanie Winn: And it's really a hypothesis.

Stephanie Winn: So the idea is all the other problems must be downstream of that.

Stephanie Winn: If we fix that, it'll change everything else.

Stephanie Winn: And if it doesn't, it's because of bigotry.

Stephanie Winn: It's because of external factors.

Stephanie Winn: It's not because there's anything inherently self-destructive about these beliefs or anything that we're not addressing here.

Stephanie Winn: You know, it's sort of like this double whammy, this one-two punch with the conversion therapy laws that basically create a situation in which anybody else

Stephanie Winn: you know, with views like mine is afraid to work with this population.

Stephanie Winn: And I know there's, there's debate in our field, there are therapists who would challenge me on this, they, there are therapists who would say, stop fear mongering, Stephanie, we need competent clinicians to not be afraid to work with this population.

Stephanie Winn: And, you know, there's nothing actually written into law that says you must affirm.

Stephanie Winn: And it's like, well,

Stephanie Winn: Well, yes and no.

Stephanie Winn: It's like you and I are talking about how the process is the punishment.

Stephanie Winn: And yes, I went through my process, and that was its own punishment.

Stephanie Winn: And I did not get a punishment besides that.

Stephanie Winn: I did not lose my license.

Stephanie Winn: I did not have to pay a fine, take continuing education, have any kind of slap on the wrist.

Stephanie Winn: So I think it's yes and, right?

Stephanie Winn: And I've talked to other therapists who have said, well, I've never had, I've never had attacks on my license.

Stephanie Winn: I've never harmed a patient.

Stephanie Winn: There's no evidence that I've harmed a patient.

Stephanie Winn: I would not harm a patient.

Stephanie Winn: So therefore I'm fine.

Stephanie Winn: But if anybody ever comes after me, I'm willing to lose my license.

Stephanie Winn: And that is the place that someone has to get to.

Stephanie Winn: I think they have to be willing to face the possible worst case scenarios in order to have the freedom to practice how they see fit.

Stephanie Winn: But I think the dilemma is that

Stephanie Winn: Therapists tend to be empathetic, agreeable, conscientious.

Stephanie Winn: Therapists tend to have worked very hard to get where they're at in their career and be afraid of losing that status and the financial security that it affords them.

Stephanie Winn: So I want to, on the one hand, acknowledge my critics in the therapy field who have told me that I shouldn't fear monger, that I shouldn't make people think that it's truly illegal or you're truly going to lose your license if you do exploratory work or

Stephanie Winn: You know on that note the gender exploratory therapy associations actually changing its name to therapy first so it's not like there is a specific type of therapy called gender exploratory therapy but just.

Stephanie Winn: True proper therapy that addresses whatever is truly going on with the patient which is one reason by the way that we should not have laws written to say things like.

Stephanie Winn: in order to go through these hormonal, surgical, so-called treatments, a person must have X number of hours focused on the subject of gender identity, which I've seen in some places.

Stephanie Winn: That's, you know, maybe what they need is therapy that's not focused on gender.

Stephanie Winn: Maybe what they need is to discover what gender is sort of a red herring for.

Stephanie Winn: So that's sort of my take on diagnostic overshadowing is that a lot of us know what's happening, but it's just that those are the people who are gung-ho about working with this population.

Stephanie Winn: They sign up, they volunteer to be on these lists of therapists that will write a so-called gender-affirming letter after one visit, and they all have this belief that all the other problems are secondary to either having been born in the wrong body or being discriminated against for being trans.

Stephanie Winn: And those of us who think about this properly tend to just

Stephanie Winn: have too much fear or too much that we feel is at stake, which is why I appreciate when you pointed out earlier that Hillary Cass was near retirement, right?

Stephanie Winn: And I think, you know, I definitely encourage people who are near retirement or feel like they have less to lose to speak out because I think they are in the best position to do so.

Helen Joyce: Absolutely.

Helen Joyce: And, you know, I was listening to you talking about these unfortifiable and unevidenced beliefs that the other problems are all secondary to gender, and it reminded me of a very stupid thing that happened here a little while ago.

Helen Joyce: So the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is the statutory body that tries to uphold the Equality Act, in effect, and it has done some good things.

Helen Joyce: I mean, I'll skip over the grief that their very nice and very good boss has had over the past year from people who are attacking her because she thinks that sex is real.

Helen Joyce: But they brought out this idiotic recommendation to schools to track bullying in schools according to the characteristics of the children, in particular according to their sexual orientation and whether they have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, which is the legal category that's nearest to being trans, to identifying as trans.

Helen Joyce: And we wrote a response to this.

Helen Joyce: We at Sex Matters wrote a response to this, which was focused on how very bad that is seen in the light of safeguarding.

Helen Joyce: You looked to see what the Equality and Human Rights Commission's safeguarding policy was, discovered it didn't have one.

Helen Joyce: It has a huge policy.

Helen Joyce: Literally, the word safeguarding doesn't come up in it.

Helen Joyce: You do not tell adult teachers to ask children questions about their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Helen Joyce: And so we wrote that.

Helen Joyce: We said, you know, this should have been picked up if you had a safeguarding policy, you would have picked this up.

Helen Joyce: And then we were talking to somebody else who works in the education field in law.

Helen Joyce: And she said, yeah, that's completely true.

Helen Joyce: But there's something much worse about it, which is that you don't talk about bullying in terms of the characteristics of the bullied person.

Helen Joyce: It's the bully.

Helen Joyce: Bullying is about the bully.

Helen Joyce: And when you say, let's do a census of schools, which they literally use that word census, let's do a census of school kids to see who's gay and who's trans and what their bullying experiences are.

Helen Joyce: You're saying that bullying is because people are gay or because they're trans.

Helen Joyce: No, bullying is because of bullies.

Helen Joyce: Bullies look around for all the vulnerabilities.

Helen Joyce: They'll bully somebody who's fat.

Helen Joyce: They'll bully somebody who's, you know, racially different from the other kids in their class.

Helen Joyce: They'll bully on the basis of being spotty or redhead or wearing glasses or gay or trans.

Helen Joyce: And, you know, some of those aren't protected characteristics.

Helen Joyce: There's no protected characteristic of being a glasses wearer or being spotty.

Helen Joyce: And it's putting the thing in the wrong place.

Helen Joyce: I understand that, you know, that's not a great way to put it, but this idea that

Helen Joyce: you know, you've got this evidence-free belief that it's because of the characteristics of the person that they're experiencing this.

Helen Joyce: And then you look for the solutions in the wrong place.

Helen Joyce: Like you think about the bullied child.

Helen Joyce: You think, well, what can I do to make gay kids more robust?

Helen Joyce: If you've got a gay kid, you're going to think about that.

Helen Joyce: Of course you are.

Helen Joyce: But the fact is, it's the bullies that a school needs to tackle.

Helen Joyce: It needs to have an anti-bullying policy.

Helen Joyce: They don't need to be concerning themselves with what the child who's bullying people is doing it on the basis of.

Helen Joyce: They need to think, like, where's the problem with the bullying?

Helen Joyce: Anyway, this identity stuff, it's just driving a lot of people to look in completely the wrong places for solutions.

Stephanie Winn: That's a really good point.

Stephanie Winn: I have two major things I want to still interview you about and a question from my locals community.

Stephanie Winn: So I'll sort of bookmark those two things.

Stephanie Winn: One is the domains of life in which sex matters, since that is the name of your organization.

Stephanie Winn: And another is blowups in GC land, as you said before we started recording.

Stephanie Winn: But before we get to those, I do want to make sure, because last time I did an interview, I squeezed in my locals question to the last three minutes, and I don't want to do that again.

Stephanie Winn: So here's a question from my audience.

Stephanie Winn: So Psychedelic Karen wanted to ask you, well she says, I am so happy she, Helen, is on again.

Stephanie Winn: I'm wondering if she is aware of any research or interventions framing the gender ideological phenomenon as Munchausen by proxy.

Stephanie Winn: Does she think framing it this way might actually address the root of the issue, parents needing the attention and sacrificing their children?

Helen Joyce: I mean, I think any of us who've looked at some of the materials that are put out, who've heard of Munchausen by proxy, do have to wonder, don't we?

Helen Joyce: Like, there is a sort of toxic motherhood

Helen Joyce: which is about living through your child, which is by no means only Munchausen's, of course.

Helen Joyce: To subsume yourself to such an extent in your children and to think of yourself as a good mother for doing that, that it then becomes hard for your child to be their own person.

Helen Joyce: Of course, you don't want to be entirely hyper-individualistic as a mother.

Helen Joyce: You can't.

Helen Joyce: You've actually brought another human being into the world and there's something between the two of you that nobody else, there's no other relationship quite like it.

Helen Joyce: So you look at that and you think, you're putting yourself in the center of this story and you see your child as a prop.

Helen Joyce: And I don't see that so much with fathers.

Helen Joyce: I really see that happening with mothers.

Helen Joyce: I'm not aware of any research on it.

Helen Joyce: Do I think that it would be getting to the root of the problem?

Helen Joyce: Not really.

Helen Joyce: It might be getting to the root of the problem for certain families.

Helen Joyce: I suspect families that are not seeking help, I'm afraid.

Helen Joyce: because it's the adult that has to seek help, isn't it?

Helen Joyce: Or at least give permission for help to be sought.

Helen Joyce: I'm very sorry for those children, and I don't see really how I can get or how anybody can get to be helping them.

Helen Joyce: It seems to me to be child abuse, but of course it's framed as being a great mother at the moment.

Helen Joyce: I don't think it's as easy as that there's any one route of all of this.

Helen Joyce: I think one of the reasons that this movement has had so many successes is that it's got many motive forces.

Helen Joyce: We have to look at these autogynophilic men and see them as, I think, the single biggest reason that this movement has succeeded to such an extent.

Helen Joyce: There just are these very powerful men whose entire aim in life is to transgress women's boundaries and to force everyone else to pretend that they're women because they get a neurotic thrill out of it.

Helen Joyce: And those men think about nothing else, like men and their boners.

Helen Joyce: excuse me, that is the greatest force in human history, as far as I can see.

Helen Joyce: There's nothing else that comes close to it.

Helen Joyce: And then there's the capture of institutions.

Helen Joyce: There's the vulnerability of teenage girls.

Helen Joyce: There's these weird predatory guys convincing kids that they should transition because that's what they get a kick out of.

Helen Joyce: There's just so many different bits to it that I don't think we could say, well, if we fixed that one bit,

Helen Joyce: And if I can link that to the question of where the domains that sex matters and what our institution does, I think that at the stage that we're at at the moment, it's probably best not to be worrying too much about why people are doing what they're doing.

Helen Joyce: Like if you're a therapist, that's absolutely essential.

Helen Joyce: And if you're trying to help somebody that you know, in particular a child, that's absolutely essential.

Helen Joyce: But if you're trying to think like, how can we make progress against this anti-science, anti-woman, anti-child, anti-reality, and anti-liberal ideology, you don't need to be worrying about why people are doing what they're doing.

Helen Joyce: You just need to be thinking, what should the rules be?

Helen Joyce: What should be happening?

Helen Joyce: So sex matters is a single issue.

Helen Joyce: organisation.

Helen Joyce: It just campaigns for recognising that there are two sexes, that they are immutable, and that that matter is in law and life.

Helen Joyce: And we don't, it's not a feminist organisation, though I think all the women who work for Sex Matters would probably say they are feminists.

Helen Joyce: We're non-partisan, we don't take a religious position for or against, we have a mixture of people who are religious and non-religious working for us.

Helen Joyce: It's really just that, and it doesn't matter why, you think,

Helen Joyce: that sex is important.

Helen Joyce: There are religious people who are motivated because of that.

Helen Joyce: And it doesn't matter why you think the people who insist it's not important are doing it.

Helen Joyce: Some of them will be autogynophiles.

Helen Joyce: Some of them were sadly misinformed because they went to university and were taught bullshit in gender studies.

Helen Joyce: We just need to get back to it does matter.

Helen Joyce: And then you asked, where does it matter?

Helen Joyce: Well, I would argue that in interpersonal relationships, it probably always matters.

Helen Joyce: We always notice what sex the person we're talking to is, and probably we talk differently to people of the two different sexes in ways that we would also talk differently to people of different ages or different backgrounds to ourselves or whatever.

Helen Joyce: So to some extent it always matters, but if you're talking about law and policy, there are places it doesn't matter.

Helen Joyce: So it doesn't matter in the voting booth, for example.

Helen Joyce: It used to.

Helen Joyce: Women weren't able to vote.

Helen Joyce: It doesn't matter when you take an exam to enter one of the professions.

Helen Joyce: It used to.

Helen Joyce: Women were barred from the professions.

Helen Joyce: Same with university entrance.

Helen Joyce: Same with what subjects you study at school.

Helen Joyce: It used to matter.

Helen Joyce: And that doesn't mean that people will all do the same things.

Helen Joyce: I mean, women and men do choose different subjects at university and do have somewhat different interests.

Helen Joyce: But we don't impose those in law and policy.

Helen Joyce: So where does it matter?

Helen Joyce: Well, it matters where biology or physicality come into play, broadly speaking.

Helen Joyce: So it matters in sport, very obviously.

Helen Joyce: Women's and men's bodies are systematically different, and men are bigger, faster, stronger, have more stamina.

Helen Joyce: And in pretty much every sport, a relatively mediocre man, like a man who's at the 10th or 20th percentile, will beat all women.

Stephanie Winn: Their skulls are thicker, too.

Stephanie Winn: Their brains are better protected against concussions.

Helen Joyce: Their necks are more rigid.

Helen Joyce: Their eyes are better protected by their brows.

Helen Joyce: Actually, you can tell people sex all the way through their bodies.

Helen Joyce: It's not just our sex organs.

Helen Joyce: There's a good name for people thinking it's just about our sex organs, which is bikini medicine.

Helen Joyce: Bikini medicine is the idea that humans are the same except for the bits that are covered by the bikini.

Helen Joyce: Well, actually, your fingers are different.

Helen Joyce: Your tendons are different.

Helen Joyce: Everything's different between men and women, a little bit.

Helen Joyce: In some ways, a lot.

Helen Joyce: But in some ways, a little.

Helen Joyce: So it matters in sport, it matters in matters of privacy.

Helen Joyce: Like every society we've ever known of, people feel a bit different about being vulnerable or naked or sleeping or disclosing personal experiences, depending on the sex of the person, the other people around them.

Helen Joyce: It matters for safety because men commit nearly all the crime, and in particular nearly all the sexual crime, and also they're much stronger.

Helen Joyce: So women experience much higher rates of crime, violent crime, sex crimes, in places that they can't get themselves away from men, all men, when they're at their most vulnerable.

Helen Joyce: Um, it matters for positive action.

Helen Joyce: So different countries have different laws on this, but there's, it's generally recognized that women have been historically discriminated against and, you know, still, we still own less property.

Helen Joyce: Um, there's still stereotypical beliefs about women that women, you know, are less capable or, um, you know, less good at leadership or something like that.

Helen Joyce: And for those things, you may decide to do positive action in order to, for example, have a woman only leadership program.

Helen Joyce: Yeah, so basically anything where the fact that we come in two sexes and that one of those sexes bears pretty much all the burden of reproduction, anywhere that that matters, it matters that you acknowledge sex.

Helen Joyce: And that means toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, positive action, anti-discrimination law.

Helen Joyce: Yeah, education, you probably need to be thinking about it in terms of tracking, like anything that requires you to track data in order to look at or fight discrimination.

Helen Joyce: Course matters in sexual orientation.

Helen Joyce: If you haven't got sex, you haven't got sexual orientation.

Helen Joyce: So if you care about homophobia or bigotry towards same-sex attracted people, you're going to have to pay attention to sex.

Helen Joyce: I think I've probably summed it up there.

Stephanie Winn: And in medicine, it's my understanding that we've been aware for a while now of the issues of the fact that in medical research, male has been treated as the default because females are more complicated.

Stephanie Winn: We have hormonal cycles that make it hard to get sort of an even read on things.

Stephanie Winn: And so males have been treated as the default, but this has implications for things like the fact that crash test dummies have been modeled after

Stephanie Winn: male bodies rather than female bodies.

Stephanie Winn: Or the fact that what doctors are taught about what to look for as symptoms of a heart attack are more typical of the symptoms as they present in men than in women.

Stephanie Winn: So it seems like we've already known for a while that using males as the default in medical research has problematic implications for women.

Stephanie Winn: And it just leaves me wondering how much more knowledge we're

Stephanie Winn: losing with this.

Helen Joyce: Oh, completely.

Helen Joyce: I mean, I should have said that one.

Helen Joyce: That's a very obvious place, sex matters in medicine.

Helen Joyce: There's a good book, I'm sure you know of it, Caroline Criado Perez's book, Invisible Women.

Helen Joyce: Oh yeah, I really recommend it to anyone listening.

Helen Joyce: It's an entire data-driven book about the way that males are the default.

Helen Joyce: And listen, in medicine, I do hear what the drug companies would say.

Helen Joyce: They're the ones who are going to get sued if a pregnant woman takes a drug because she didn't know she was pregnant.

Helen Joyce: And I mean, you do want to look at things without the confounding factor that some women are on the pill.

Helen Joyce: Some women have hormonal IUDs.

Helen Joyce: Women have cycles.

Helen Joyce: Some women don't have cycles.

Helen Joyce: Some are premenopause.

Helen Joyce: Some are postmenopause.

Helen Joyce: I get it.

Helen Joyce: I really do.

Helen Joyce: But the fact is that a very significant number of the people who are taking the drug in the end are going to be female.

Helen Joyce: So you've got to work around that.

Helen Joyce: But it's not just there.

Helen Joyce: It's in all thinking about what height, like ridiculously, what height kitchen worktops are.

Helen Joyce: what height chairs are.

Helen Joyce: Every time I get the train into London, the chair is a little bit high for me and my feet can't reach the ground unless I either press too hard on the backs of my thighs or I sort of flex my foot and put just my toe on the ground.

Helen Joyce: And I actually have problems with my hamstrings and my Achilles.

Helen Joyce: So I can't sit comfortably on the train.

Helen Joyce: I'd have to bring along a sort of box to put under my feet.

Helen Joyce: And honestly, it'd be better to have it a bit lower.

Helen Joyce: And the men could just have their knee up at a little angle.

Helen Joyce: It'd be better for them.

Helen Joyce: So the whole world has been designed by and for men.

Helen Joyce: And that's still the case.

Helen Joyce: And at the same time, now that we've just noticed that, we're starting to say you can't collect data on sex.

Helen Joyce: And you can't design things around sex.

Helen Joyce: And you can't record data in health care or anywhere else on sex.

Helen Joyce: So we're never going to fix it.

Helen Joyce: In the areas where men and women are most different,

Helen Joyce: Sex crimes being a really big example.

Helen Joyce: Literally almost no sex crimes are committed by women, and women are the large majority of the victims, especially paedophilic sex crimes or violent sex crimes.

Helen Joyce: They're really, really rare among women and really very common among men.

Helen Joyce: So if you record just a few male paedophiles or male rapist murderers as female, you double the rate at which women commit these crimes, apparently.

Helen Joyce: And it does matter that we know who does what when we're thinking about designing prisons, designing programs to rehabilitate people if that's possible, thinking about risk analysis, how to keep children safe in schools, all these sorts of things.

Helen Joyce: We're actually actively obfuscating the data.

Stephanie Winn: I'm reminded of something alarming I saw on X maybe about a month ago where

Stephanie Winn: I read a statistic that something like 9% of men and 6% of women, it said, own sex dolls.

Stephanie Winn: I don't know what country this was in or the context, but I read this and thought, 6% of adult human females?

Stephanie Winn: Or 6% of a woman is anything that identifies as a woman?

Helen Joyce: I have to say I don't believe those figures anyway.

Helen Joyce: I really don't.

Helen Joyce: I mean, I don't know where they came from.

Helen Joyce: So I used to work for the Royal Statistical Society.

Helen Joyce: So my PhD is in maths and I used to work at the University of Cambridge in public understanding of maths and also for the Royal Statistical Society editing their magazine.

Helen Joyce: And I'm deeply, deeply suspicious now of all figures unless I can find out who produced them and why.

Helen Joyce: That's the sort of figure.

Helen Joyce: How do we know how many, whatever country it was, owns a sex doll?

Helen Joyce: The only people who have any chance of knowing that, because it's not part of the national census or anything like that, would be the people who sell sex dolls.

Helen Joyce: So straight away, I just don't believe it.

Stephanie Winn: That's fair.

Helen Joyce: But yeah.

Helen Joyce: But on much more meaningful ones, I've literally seen, there is an increase in the rate of women committing pedophilic sex offenses in this country, a significant one.

Stephanie Winn: And I don't believe it.

Stephanie Winn: And it's not women.

Stephanie Winn: I think it's men.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie Winn: Very well said.

Stephanie Winn: Thank you so much for that, that piece on why sex matters.

Stephanie Winn: So, um, I lost it.

Stephanie Winn: Oh, blow ups in GC land.

Stephanie Winn: Let's go there.

Helen Joyce: So I'd already been thinking about this.

Helen Joyce: I mean, there's absolutely no reason for us to rehearse what happened at Genspect with the wretched blue dress.

Helen Joyce: In case anyone doesn't know, don't bother looking.

Helen Joyce: It's over.

Helen Joyce: But it was, I'd already been thinking about this because I've seen it happen several times and it's kind of happened to me as well.

Helen Joyce: You know, there's just a lot of different people who are exercised about this question of where sex matters and how gender identity ideology or trans ideology is a huge threat in many ways.

Helen Joyce: You know, people come into this because they care about kids or they care about women's rights or they care about free speech or they care about science.

Helen Joyce: They're really different people.

Helen Joyce: They're right and left wing, they're religious, they're atheist.

Helen Joyce: And, you know, they find other people who agree with them on this.

Helen Joyce: And that's great.

Helen Joyce: And I really admire people who can work together across the aisle.

Helen Joyce: But then something happens, and you realize it's actually more fundamental than you realized.

Helen Joyce: And people you thought were your allies have beliefs that you find inimical.

Helen Joyce: Or it turns out they have very different beliefs about why people might be identifying as trans, or what we should do about it, or what the happy end state that we might reach is.

Helen Joyce: And because those things have not been surfaced,

Helen Joyce: you know, because it's a very disparate movement and it's mostly distributed and tends to be sort of self-organized on Twitter and in little groups, these things turn into horrific sort of online pylons and blow-ups.

Helen Joyce: And very quickly, they aren't about the thing they were about anymore.

Helen Joyce: So the one that happened to me was last year, in September 2022, I think it was, it was around then anyway.

Helen Joyce: Knowing that there was controversy about it, I went to the event that Kelly J. Keane, a.k.a.

Helen Joyce: Posey Parker, ran in Brighton.

Helen Joyce: And I absolutely stand by that decision.

Helen Joyce: I think Kelly's Let Women Speak events have been really, really important in progress here in the UK.

Helen Joyce: But Kelly J and left-wing feminists here in the UK have a very uncomfortable relationship.

Helen Joyce: And there's just no point in me going into why or who's to blame or any of that.

Helen Joyce: Let's just say they do.

Helen Joyce: And so I came under really a lot of pressure

Helen Joyce: to denounce Kelly J. And I refused.

Helen Joyce: And then that got me denounced.

Helen Joyce: And there were people I had to block.

Helen Joyce: And I was getting DMs telling me I was a racist from people I had thought were sensible people that I was friends with and would work with.

Helen Joyce: And it was really very painful.

Helen Joyce: And then what I learned from it, though, was that there was a real thing here.

Helen Joyce: It wasn't just people being jerks.

Helen Joyce: And it wasn't just the narcissism of small differences.

Helen Joyce: There really are people who don't believe in free speech, really don't, who agree with me on the importance of gender issues.

Helen Joyce: Like one woman said to me, I wish you wouldn't argue about how we need free speech protections to talk about all of this and that it's wrong that we're being attacked because free speech is important.

Helen Joyce: she said, because we're right and they're wrong.

Helen Joyce: That's why we should be allowed to speak.

Helen Joyce: So she was all for silencing the people she disagrees with because she was convinced she was right.

Helen Joyce: And I was like, ah, OK.

Helen Joyce: Now I know where you come from, and I know that I completely disagree with you.

Helen Joyce: Problem solved as far as I'm concerned.

Helen Joyce: We cannot work together because, for me, the overarching

Helen Joyce: and value that leads us to truth and helps with decent policymaking is the 19th century idea that freedom of speech is what gets us there.

Helen Joyce: That's not hers.

Helen Joyce: We are not allies.

Helen Joyce: So it moved away from being about the event in Brighton to actually both of us uncovering something about the other that we hadn't known before.

Helen Joyce: She thought I'd be the same as her, all for silencing people if they were against me.

Helen Joyce: And then the current one, the genspect one, these things tend to happen at fault lines.

Helen Joyce: A lot of left-wing feminists aren't pro-free speech at all.

Helen Joyce: They just think of it as, you know, that's a liberal value that I don't agree with.

Helen Joyce: In the socialist future, we won't need it because everybody will be doing the right thing, you know, or something.

Helen Joyce: I don't know.

Helen Joyce: And the gen-spect one was about, you know, what do we do?

Helen Joyce: What do we do as feminists about the fact that male sexuality is really nothing like female sexuality?

Helen Joyce: And what are we going to do about autogynephilia?

Helen Joyce: There's a wonderful, wonderful newsletter by Lisa Selin Davis, who's hands down one of my favorite writers.

Helen Joyce: And all of it's very good on what happened at Genspec.

Helen Joyce: And as far as I know, it's in front of the paywall.

Helen Joyce: So if anyone does want to catch up, that's the one article I'd suggest they read.

Helen Joyce: But in it, she says, autogynephiles have come out of the closet.

Helen Joyce: They've seen the light.

Helen Joyce: And they like it.

Helen Joyce: And they're not going back in.

Helen Joyce: And I'm sure that's right.

Helen Joyce: There is no point in us saying, as feminists, as people concerned about child safeguarding, you know, no, you're not welcome.

Helen Joyce: I'm going to point and laugh.

Helen Joyce: I'm going to drum you out of polite society.

Helen Joyce: You can keep your fetish at home.

Helen Joyce: We can say you're not allowed to turn up in a rubber gimp suit, or you're not allowed to turn up dressed like a hooker, or actually use the women's toilets, or flash, or anything like that.

Helen Joyce: We can't say to a man, you can't turn up in a dress that covers all of you and walk around the place, even though I know that that basically turns you on.

Helen Joyce: Can't do it.

Helen Joyce: And he's not going to stop.

Helen Joyce: And so then you start thinking, what causes autogynephilia?

Helen Joyce: Is it born, not made?

Helen Joyce: Does every boy who's got autogynophilia, is he there because of porn?

Helen Joyce: I don't know the answers to this.

Helen Joyce: But these are really tricky questions, and they're very sensitive questions.

Helen Joyce: And some answers, people tell you you're a pedophile if you say them.

Helen Joyce: If you say somebody might be born autogynophilic, they hear you as thinking that three-year-olds can be fetishists.

Helen Joyce: And other people say, well, look, you think everything's socially constructed.

Helen Joyce: That's what got us here in the first place.

Helen Joyce: Feminists who think everything is socially constructed and nothing is innate are what got us here.

Helen Joyce: Now, I don't think that's what got us here, but it's part of what got us here.

Helen Joyce: And so to summarize, one of the reasons that all of this is so difficult is because these are, in theory, empirical questions.

Helen Joyce: We should be able to answer what autogynophilia is.

Helen Joyce: We should be able to answer, you know, can people get over it?

Helen Joyce: Can they contain it?

Helen Joyce: Does it necessarily escalate?

Helen Joyce: How many people are like this?

Helen Joyce: You know, are the people who would be autogynophilic if they weren't, but they were, if they weren't exposed to porn, they'd never know.

Helen Joyce: But, and this was my big mic drop moment for myself, looking at what happened with GenSpec.

Helen Joyce: We don't trust the experts anymore.

Helen Joyce: Rightly, we don't trust the experts.

Helen Joyce: Because who's going to find this out except the sexologists who are exactly the same people who gave letters to men they knew were sexual fetishists to bring into women's toilets to say, I'm under the care of a doctor, you've got to let me be in here.

Helen Joyce: The people who inspired the laws about how sex can change.

Helen Joyce: They're the very same people who got us here, so I don't trust them anymore, and nobody does on my side of the argument.

Helen Joyce: And the same with all of therapy, and the same with all of law.

Helen Joyce: Like it's human rights lawyers who've said, men have the right to go into women's spaces, you bigots.

Helen Joyce: Lesbians can have penises, all this stuff.

Helen Joyce: So we've got this radical distrust of experts.

Helen Joyce: in anything that could help us to answer these questions, because you could have very different viewpoints about the world.

Helen Joyce: Over here, you could be a radical feminist lesbian.

Helen Joyce: And over here, you could be a conservative man whose fundamental values are religious and Christian.

Helen Joyce: But if we could turn to facts, if we could say, well, look, both of those groups can accept that whatever, autogynephilia is born not made, or it's the result of porn exposure, or whatever the hell, then both of them could say, OK, that's the facts.

Helen Joyce: Now let's move forward.

Helen Joyce: But we haven't got the facts, and we haven't got a way to find out the facts, because we don't trust the people we need to find out the facts.

Stephanie Winn: It's a really, really good point, this part about trust.

Stephanie Winn: And it's something I find myself speaking to in my unique position being one of a handful of therapists who is also a public figure, because most therapists are

Stephanie Winn: Most therapists don't have podcasts and social media followings and things like that.

Stephanie Winn: And then being one of the few therapists that's talking about these particular issues, and specifically detransitioners who have some of, understandably, entirely understandably, some of the lowest rates of trust in health care providers, physical and mental health, because it's our fault, right?

Stephanie Winn: And that's why I and others are out here, because we recognize that our field messed up and we harmed a vulnerable population.

Stephanie Winn: But yeah, it's that element of trust in the breakdown that is causing so much of this.

Stephanie Winn: I think combined with our tendency to, you know, when someone has a certain degree of fame, power, whatever it is, there's the tendency to kind of see them as simultaneously less than and more than human and to have certain expectations of them that are very difficult to fulfill.

Stephanie Winn: combined with our kind of black and white thinking and heuristics, and then the alarm signals that are built into our nervous systems to respond to perceived threats.

Stephanie Winn: So all of that and more.

Stephanie Winn: And there was something you were saying when you were talking about the difficulties that we have getting to the root of understanding something like autogynephilia.

Stephanie Winn: that clicked into place for me, and it actually reminds me of something I've been wanting to speak on for a while, and it has to do with this concept in psychology of egocentronic versus egodistonic.

Stephanie Winn: Have you heard these terms?

Stephanie Winn: So probably, you know, therapists in the audience will have heard these terms, most other people will not, but it basically, these are terms that describe, and it's a spectrum, it's not that you're one or the other, but these are terms that describe a patient's relationship to their own suffering.

Stephanie Winn: So is your mental illness, if you will, or is your form of suffering, is your psychopathology linked to your sense of who you are?

Stephanie Winn: or does it feel foreign to you?

Stephanie Winn: So, for example, obsessive compulsive disorder can, for some people, be very egodistonic, meaning that the person feels very distressed by having these obsessions and compulsions.

Stephanie Winn: They want to stop doing it.

Stephanie Winn: They know it's time-consuming or irrational, and that distress associated with the sort of egodistonic nature of their OCD

Stephanie Winn: Um, while it makes them feel more out of control at first, it also means that they're more motivated to work on it.

Stephanie Winn: Um, periods of depression and anxiety.

Stephanie Winn: in a person's life who is, let's say, normally somebody who takes pride in being competent and industrious.

Stephanie Winn: Let's say they're going through a phase where depression or anxiety is interfering with their ability to be that hardworking, positive, upbeat person.

Stephanie Winn: So that's ecodistonic.

Stephanie Winn: They come to a therapist, and they're like, help me get rid of these symptoms.

Stephanie Winn: Now there's something to be said for self

Stephanie Winn: acceptance, maybe going easier on yourself.

Stephanie Winn: But also that sort of, oh, this feels foreign to me, get me out of here is part of the motivation to heal.

Stephanie Winn: But what we're seeing a lot of these days is egocentronic pathology.

Stephanie Winn: And egocentronic pathology tends to be associated with personality disorders.

Stephanie Winn: Narcissistic personality disorder, especially the grandiose variety, is the classic example of this.

Stephanie Winn: Well, of course, I'm the greatest and everyone should worship me.

Stephanie Winn: Isn't it obvious, right?

Stephanie Winn: That person has no insight and no motivation to change.

Stephanie Winn: So typically, if they present to therapy at all, it's maybe because they're being dragged there by a spouse that's threatening to divorce them.

Stephanie Winn: But the therapist in that case is probably out of luck because the therapist might, you know, be charmed and manipulated by the narcissist if they're very clever.

Stephanie Winn: So these are sort of two ends of the spectrum.

Stephanie Winn: Now, for most people, whatever their form of suffering is, is somewhere in between those two extremes.

Stephanie Winn: But what we see these days, especially with the young generation, it ties into what you were saying earlier about victimhood culture, and what I was saying about social justice culture, is a sort of egocentronic

Stephanie Winn: I want to be trans, I want to have gender dysphoria, and then a person sort of talks themselves into this way of thinking where it actually does look a lot like egocentronic obsessive compulsive disorder because they have convinced themselves through all the things that they've been exposing themselves to

Stephanie Winn: That, for example, they should absolutely detest showering because everyone else with gender dysphoria, everyone else who's trans cannot stand to be alone with their naked body and have to contend with what parts they have.

Stephanie Winn: So then they kind of work themselves into this pattern of this downward spiral of functioning.

Stephanie Winn: I can't shower.

Stephanie Winn: I can't date until I'm passing as trans because who would want to be with me?

Stephanie Winn: I hate myself in this sexed body and I'll only be lovable when I'm in the other.

Stephanie Winn: So I think that that's part of the problem that we're not talking about enough in the mental health field.

Stephanie Winn: And I think it relates to the notion you were bringing up earlier of why is it that we can't get to the bottom

Stephanie Winn: of something like autogynephilia, well, because we don't trust our researchers as part of it, but also because there are large swaths of the population for whom these issues are egocentronic and they don't have the motivation that people like you and I might have

Stephanie Winn: to address the problem in the least harmful ways.

Stephanie Winn: We're thinking, if there is such a thing as gender dysphoria, if that is even the primary problem rather than a secondary problem, or in, let's say, a narrative that someone has latched onto to explain their problems, how do we help people recover from that, heal from it, and, you know, in the least invasive way possible?

Stephanie Winn: That's a question people like you and I are asking.

Stephanie Winn: But that requires that we conceptualize gender dysphoria in an ego dystonic way.

Stephanie Winn: And this is a form of distress.

Stephanie Winn: I don't want to be in distress.

Stephanie Winn: I want to be healthy and happy and unbothered.

Stephanie Winn: And a lot of people are lacking that motivation.

Stephanie Winn: So when it comes to autogynephilia, I think because some people's sense of identity is wrapped up in it, and you also can't easily separate it out from narcissism,

Stephanie Winn: it becomes very convoluted because there are people who would want to obscure any information that we could come across that would clarify the matter if it meant that the problem would be solved.

Stephanie Winn: I'm not seeing a whole lot of voices of men coming forth saying, I struggle with autogynephelia.

Stephanie Winn: I suffer from it.

Stephanie Winn: This is getting in my way of loving an actual woman.

Stephanie Winn: My preoccupation with myself,

Stephanie Winn: or my porn addiction or whatever it is caused me to dump the woman I love or ruin my marriage and I need help.

Stephanie Winn: That's the mentality that we're not seeing.

Stephanie Winn: You can now watch No Way Back, the reality of gender-affirming care.

Stephanie Winn: This medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation, is the definitive film on detransition.

Stephanie Winn: Stream the film now or purchase a DVD.

Stephanie Winn: Visit nowaybackfilm.com and use promo code sometherapist to take 20% off your order.

Stephanie Winn: Follow us on Twitter at 2022affirmation or on Instagram at affirmationgeneration.

Helen Joyce: That's so interesting.

Helen Joyce: I was trying to remember, I wrote a newsletter recently, and I literally can't remember what it was about, but one of the answers to it was, you're missing something simple, Helen.

Helen Joyce: It's very hard to persuade people that what they find sexy might be bad.

Helen Joyce: And I thought that's so true.

Helen Joyce: Other people's sexual desires are so inexplicable.

Helen Joyce: What you like is what you like.

Helen Joyce: And it's obvious that the thing that you look at and see as sexy, it's sexy.

Helen Joyce: If you're a foot man or a breasts man, it's obvious that feet are nice or breasts are nice.

Helen Joyce: If you're, as I am, heterosexual, it's obvious what it is that's attractive about men.

Helen Joyce: I can't imagine people not thinking it's sexy.

Helen Joyce: But now, what if what you like is dressing up as an adult baby or wearing what we call nappies and you call diapers?

Helen Joyce: Or what if it's putting on what looked like streetwalker's clothes when you're 65 and haven't got the body for it and parading down the street?

Helen Joyce: It's sexy, therefore it's good.

Helen Joyce: And what used to keep it in the closet was shame.

Helen Joyce: And shame is a very destructive emotion.

Helen Joyce: I'm not giving a

Helen Joyce: 100% shout out for let's bring back shame.

Helen Joyce: But it did keep it in the closet.

Helen Joyce: And now it's not shameful.

Helen Joyce: Not only is it not shameful, it's something to be celebrated.

Helen Joyce: A man who's doing this, he's found his true self.

Helen Joyce: And his wife, who doesn't go along with it, is a bigot.

Helen Joyce: So it's more than just that it's not in the closet anymore.

Helen Joyce: It's out in the sunlight and having a great time.

Helen Joyce: And you look at these guys, they are having a ball.

Helen Joyce: There's no joy like the joy of a bloke who's brought his cross-dressing erotic fetish out into the daylight and is wandering around enjoying himself and being told that he's wonderful, and being validated by being put on an all-female shortlist for election or some bullshit like that, or winning prizes in women's sports and being there.

Helen Joyce: The thing that I hear most about the men in women's sports from people who understand sport, and in particular from men, is aren't they ashamed of themselves?

Helen Joyce: Like, I'd be ashamed if I entered a woman's competition and I won it, is what the men I know who play sport would say.

Helen Joyce: These men have the light in their eyes of validation and happiness.

Helen Joyce: Like, they're just having the greatest time of their lives.

Helen Joyce: And why would they ever come and say to somebody, this isn't good?

Helen Joyce: You know, this thing is motivating me to destroy women's sports.

Helen Joyce: It's motivating me to destroy my wife's life.

Helen Joyce: Like, they're being told that the wife is a bigot and she's got to get with the program.

Helen Joyce: It's completely the wrong narrative.

Stephanie Winn: Well, I think what you're saying applies to people with traits of personality disorders.

Stephanie Winn: I don't think it applies to what we used to call normal neurotics in the field.

Stephanie Winn: You know, I've had therapy patients who are just, you know, they don't have personality disorders.

Stephanie Winn: They're not going around causing havoc for everyone around them.

Stephanie Winn: They just suffer inwardly from depression and anxiety.

Stephanie Winn: And they do have,

Stephanie Winn: sometimes excessive amounts of shame about things like fantasies of cheating on their partner, which they would never act upon.

Stephanie Winn: You know, that that is more the profile of the typical normal neurotic who has some shame and repression.

Stephanie Winn: And it just seems like we're kind of entering an era

Stephanie Winn: where the normal neurotic is on the decline and the egocentronic personality disordered, you know, delighting in crossing the boundaries of others is really trending.

Stephanie Winn: And it might be too flashy now.

Helen Joyce: But I think specifically the link with sexuality, specifically the link with sexuality for men, like it used to be shameful to be gay.

Helen Joyce: And obviously I don't approve of that, but it did keep gay people in the closet.

Helen Joyce: So if you thought that gay was bad, you would think that shame was good.

Helen Joyce: And now we've got men coming out, performing their fetish.

Helen Joyce: And if you don't think that's a problem, well, okay, then you don't need shame.

Helen Joyce: But then it comes back to the why you do things that I said about sex matters.

Helen Joyce: Like, you know, you and I are talking because you're a therapist and I have theories about this.

Helen Joyce: You're willing to indulge me.

Helen Joyce: So, but it doesn't matter why the man wants to do it.

Helen Joyce: If he's, you know, if he's transgressing other people's boundaries, no is the answer.

Helen Joyce: And then that brings me to the role of medicine in all of this.

Helen Joyce: So if you think of a man, and he doesn't have any shame about this, and he's delighting in it, and he wants to be able to wear these things, and he wants to go out, and he wants to join a women's football team, and he wants to go into the women's changing room, and everything that you can possibly think of.

Helen Joyce: And he goes to a doctor, and the doctor is convinced that he has a trans identity, and he's willing to give him surgery, and willing to give him hormones, or whatever.

Helen Joyce: That doctor isn't saying to him,

Helen Joyce: But you'll never be able to go into the women's changing rooms.

Helen Joyce: You're never going to be allowed to play in women's sports.

Helen Joyce: You can wear women's clothes if you want, but you're not going to be able to force women to call you a woman.

Helen Joyce: And if somebody says that you're a man and a cross-dressing man, you're not going to be able to call the police.

Helen Joyce: You're not going to be able to get them fired.

Helen Joyce: I think that man wouldn't do any of it, because the reason he's doing all those major medical interventions is because he's being told by a combination of medicine and the law

Helen Joyce: that it will give him what he wants, namely the right to trample over everybody else's rights.

Helen Joyce: So I think the right place to start for the organization that I work in, which does not do therapy, is the law.

Helen Joyce: Because if we get it so that men, no matter what they do to their bodies, are simply not allowed into women's spaces, then some of those men who have no shame, who take delight in crossing boundaries, will never go down this path because they can't ever get what they want.

Helen Joyce: And that's been made clear to them by the law and by their doctors.

Helen Joyce: So part of this modern conversion therapy bill that I mentioned to you earlier in this interview, one of the provisions in it is that you would do no gender medicine at all, like no puberty blockers, no cross-sex hormones with children at all, nothing with minors.

Helen Joyce: But with adults, you would have to get them to sign saying they understand that nothing that can be done in the gender clinic changes their sex, that getting these treatments or getting any piece of paper from the government does not give them the right

Helen Joyce: to use any facilities or services or spaces that are intended for the opposite sex, and that there will be no restrictions on other people recognizing their actual sex and speaking about it freely and acting accordingly.

Helen Joyce: And if somebody's willing to go along with all of that, then you could imagine, yeah, all right, fine, you can get your genital surgery and you can have your breast implants or whatever.

Helen Joyce: You understand that this doesn't mean that women have to see you as a woman, and they won't, by the way.

Stephanie Winn: Very clear.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah.

Stephanie Winn: And I've often wondered if, if we weren't coddling these people and, you know, providing this illusion for them.

Stephanie Winn: Cause I remember when I was, when I was a, a so-called gender affirming therapist and, you know, I always say like, thank goodness I didn't go on to the next level of training and actually like write those letters.

Stephanie Winn: But I remember, um,

Stephanie Winn: telling trans identified people about this app called refuge that would help them find bathrooms, like single cell bathrooms and things like that.

Stephanie Winn: And, you know, I think that type of action on the part of a therapist is one of about 1000 things that professionals have done to send the message that healthcare providers are going to go above and beyond and try and be activists and try to change the world for you.

Stephanie Winn: We're going to try to

Stephanie Winn: sort of carpet the world so that you don't have to wear shoes, to use a common metaphor, right?

Stephanie Winn: And I think that that's part of the dilemma.

Stephanie Winn: And if there were this cultural shift, where people weren't being cuddled, and they weren't being sent the message that not only are you going to receive this so called gender affirming care, but there's a whole lot of activists and advocates who are going to do all this work to kind of pave things for you.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, that might be a cultural shift that could

Helen Joyce: Yeah, and then we wouldn't need to worry about whether it's Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Helen Joyce: The kid can't get hormones.

Helen Joyce: The parents can't lie to the child and say, I can change your sex.

Helen Joyce: Because the fact is that schools aren't telling that lie.

Helen Joyce: I mean, we're talking a lot here at the moment about social transition in schools, because this guidance eminently due out from the Department for Education on what schools can do.

Helen Joyce: And if you can't socially transition at school,

Helen Joyce: then what's the point of the gender clinic telling you you can?

Helen Joyce: Like, if your parents want to homeschool you, I suppose they can.

Helen Joyce: But I mean, very few kids are homeschooled.

Helen Joyce: It's a real imposition on a family.

Helen Joyce: So it's been, I would say, between law and medicine, but then other institutions like schools co-opted, each of them passing the buck to other ones, each of them responding to decisions that were made by the others.

Helen Joyce: In the end, decisions are made.

Helen Joyce: But it's not clear who made the decision.

Helen Joyce: When you end up with a child who's reached 18, has not gone through puberty because it was blocked, has taken cross-sex hormones, is anorgasmic, is sterile, is about to get surgery on their genitals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you can't point and say who made that decision.

Helen Joyce: It was made by a lot of people, each of them assuming that everybody else would accommodate whatever aspect of the decision they made.

Helen Joyce: And then if you end up with some bit of the whole picture, in this case schools, saying,

Helen Joyce: You can call your child the opposite sex if you like, but we have a hard and fast rule in this school that no boy, no matter how he identifies, is literally ever allowed into any space that's only for girls and vice versa.

Helen Joyce: How can you socially transition your child then?

Stephanie Winn: Those were really good points.

Stephanie Winn: Thank you so much for joining me again.

Stephanie Winn: It's been an absolute pleasure.

Stephanie Winn: So Helen Joyce, where are all the places that people can find you?

Helen Joyce: Oh, thank you for having me on.

Helen Joyce: I've really, really enjoyed this conversation.

Helen Joyce: Loads of great questions and loads of insights from me too.

Helen Joyce: Well, my own website is TheHelenJoyce.com and people can find what I write there.

Helen Joyce: Some of it's behind a paywall, but some of it isn't.

Helen Joyce: I tweet what most people would probably say too much, but actually I don't spend all that much time on the site.

Helen Joyce: I tend to punctuate my writing.

Helen Joyce: When I finish a paragraph, I'll have a little quick look and send an angry tweet about something.

Helen Joyce: And that's at HJoyceGender.

Helen Joyce: So everything that I do can be found on Twitter.

Helen Joyce: And then the third place that people could look for work that I and my colleagues do at Sex Matters is the Sex Matters website, which is sex-matters.org.

Helen Joyce: And my colleague and the executive director, Maya Forstater,

Helen Joyce: who's the person behind the judgment that said that it's not bigoted to notice that sex is real and binary.

Helen Joyce: She is a powerhouse who writes an enormous amount of policy work.

Helen Joyce: Of course, it's all focused on the UK, but anyone who's thinking about any of these issues in terms of law and policy and rulemaking anywhere, you can find a lot of materials that you will find helpful because they're very well written and very clear.

Helen Joyce: Yeah.

Stephanie Winn: Wonderful.

Stephanie Winn: And your book, Trans, sorry, is it When Ideology or Where?

Helen Joyce: When Ideology.

Helen Joyce: So that's the original title, Trans When Ideology Meets Reality, but it has been reissued as Trans Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women's Rights.

Helen Joyce: I have only written one book.

Helen Joyce: Got it.

Helen Joyce: If you find it and it starts trans, it's me.

Stephanie Winn: In any case, your book Trans Various Subtitles is in my bookshop, soundtherapist.com slash bookshop, and will also be in the show notes.

Stephanie Winn: Thank you again.

Stephanie Winn: It's been lovely.

Helen Joyce: Thank you, Stephanie.

Stephanie Winn: I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast.

Stephanie Winn: To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit SomeTherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at SomeTherapist.

Stephanie Winn: If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com.

Stephanie Winn: Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams.

Stephanie Winn: To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Parent, at nowaybackfilm.com.

Stephanie Winn: Special thanks to my producers, Eric and Amber Beals at Different Mix, and to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake.

Stephanie Winn: If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice.

Stephanie Winn: Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist.

Stephanie Winn: This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice.

Stephanie Winn: If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online.

Stephanie Winn: And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself.

Stephanie Winn: Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them.

Stephanie Winn: You're worth it.