Helen Joyce



And in the meantime, while we’re trying to get through to the decision-makers, we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. That's for two reasons – one of them is that every one of those people is a person who's been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world. [...] Whether they're happily transitioned, whether they're unhappily transitioned, whether they're detransitioned – if you've got people who've dissociated from their sex in some way, every one of those people is someone who needs special accommodation in a sane world where we re-acknowledge the truth of sex. [...] Those people deserve every accommodation we can possibly make, but every one of them is a difficulty. Helen Joyce is an Irish journalist and former mathematician noted for her anti-trans writing.

Background
Helen Janeith Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in July 1968, moving to the town of Bray at age eight. She is the eldest of nine children, and the only one who isn't a cricketer. Five of her siblings (,, , , and ) have played the sport at an international level. She was raised as a Roman Catholic, but has since become an atheist.

Mathematician to journalist
At age 16, Joyce moved to England to pursue a career in dance, having been offered a place at a musical theatre school. However, she dropped out after two years, realizing she wouldn't be happy as a professional dancer. In 1987, she enrolled at Trinity College Dublin, receiving a BA in mathematics in 1991. She went on to complete the notoriously intense course Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge. This earned her a scholarship and a PhD place at the University College London. She received a PhD in geometric measure theory in 1995.

In 2000, having become interested in the "business of telling non-mathematicians about maths," Joyce joined a Cambridge-based maths education initiative called the Millennium Mathematics Project. She spent two years developing puzzles for a partner project of the MMP that allowed mathematicians to interact with schools via video chat. She was named editor of Plus Magazine in 2002, and became founding editor of Significance, the Royal Statistical Society's quarterly magazine, in 2004.

However, after 11 years in the field of mathematics, Joyce "decided she didn't like it any more." She entered journalism in 2005 as an education correspondent for the The Economist. In 2010, she relocated to São Paulo, Brazil, where she was the paper's bureau chief until 2013. Upon returning to the UK, she served as editor of the international section, and later of the finance section. She left the paper on an unpaid one-year sabbatical in 2022.

Drinking the anti-trans Kool-Aid
Joyce has stated that she first became aware of transgender issues after her editor at The Economist broached the topic during a "fateful lunchtime conversation" in 2017. The editor wondered "why so many kids [are] identifying as trans or non-binary," which prompted Joyce to do some research and write an article that was, in her own shifting assessment, "70 or 80% successful" (2021) or "dreadful" (2022). In 2018, for a programme celebrating The Economist's 175th anniversary, Joyce proposed the paper "do a debate on trans issues" in keeping with its principle of "open debate." The series ran in July 2018 and featured pieces by both TERFs and trans-rights supporters, including , and Kathleen Stock.

In December 2018, Joyce abandoned this experiment with listening to both sides, publishing a screed in the far-right web-rag Quillette decrying "the new patriarchy" of "trans radicalism." In a statement published by The Daily Dot, Zeke Stokes, chief programs officer of, declared the piece "alarming" and expressed the view that "journalists have an ethical responsibility to hold an unbiased and fact-based opinion on all issues, but especially on sensitive issues." Zach Ford of ThinkProgress, also quoted in the Daily Dot article, similarly called Joyce's journalistic objectivity into question, arguing that the essay collection she curated for The Economist had "justified publishing numerous anti-trans essays" containing "junk science and scaremongering" under the "guise of 'debate'." Joyce maintained that GLAAD supplied the Daily Dot with a "dossier" as part of a harassment campaign against her by the UK board member she believes "co-opted" the organisation.

Joyce became active in the gender-critical community on Twitter in late 2018 and early 2019. In various tweets, she described the provision of gender-affirming care to trans children and youth as "child abuse," "unethical medicine," "mass experimentation," and a "global scandal."

Writing and publication
By her own account, Joyce "went right down the rabbit hole" while on holiday in the summer of 2019, doing "nothing but think about [trans issues]" and "downloading books every night." It was at this point that Joyce "realized that [she] had to write a book" on the subject even though she "still didn't know whether [she] was really ready" for the task. Joyce has also stated that listening to a panel of detransitioners at the November 2019 launch of the Detransition Advocacy Network was a key factor in motivating her to write a book. As she told the TERF magazine The Radical Notion in a 2021 interview: "It was very straightforward: 'They are sterilizing gay kids. And if I write this book, they might sterilize fewer gay kids.'"

Joyce reportedly "anticipated a rough ride" when putting together the book and faced difficulty in pitching it to publishers. Her manuscript was eventually picked up by independent British publisher Oneworld. It was released as Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality in 2021. The book hit shelves around the same time as a bevy of similarly-subtitled anti-trans manifestos: Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock, and Hidden Agender: Transgenderism's Struggle Against Reality by, and Expelli-sexus!: The Reality-Distorting Spell of Gender by Robert Galbraith. Trans was met with praise by the trans-hostile UK press, receiving favourable reviews from The Evening Standard, The Times, The Telegraph, The Scotsman, and New Statesman.

The book debuted at number seven on The Sunday Times list of bestselling general hardbacks, remaining in the top ten – at number 10 – for another week before dropping off. The book also became a top-ten bestseller on Amazon in the UK.

Claims of 'cancellation'
Despite the positive sales figures, Joyce's fans became convinced that Waterstones shops were "suppressing sales," reporting that would-be readers were often "obliged to special order" because locations had "one or two copies at most," which were allegedly "shelved in bizarre locations like media studies or stashed under the counter." Stock amplified these speculations in the Daily Mail, stating that she had been contacted by people claiming Waterstones staff had informed them Trans was "out of print", had a "short print run", or "even that it was being kept behind the counter out of respect for a trans colleague because it was a hate book." Waterstones' official response stated it was "not true that [they were] boycotting the book" and that "stock was low initially as sales exceeded expectations."

Joyce further claimed that she had been snubbed by the BBC radio programme Woman's Hour due to an apparent editorial decision not to mention Trans on air. The BBC responded with an official statement declaring that "our wide-ranging book coverage often includes interviews with authors, but of course, we can’t feature them all."

UnHerd announced in early 2022 that they would be holding a debate between Joyce and American trans academic Grace Lavery in London that April. Lavery pulled out of the engagement after receiving a wave of online harassment from transphobes, including having of "consensual, loving and mildly kinky sex" with her husband sent to her mother. On February 20, the Twitter user @F4bP4m, a transphobe and supporter of the 2022 far-right Canadian "trucker convoy", suggested that Lavery be barred from entering the UK despite being a British-American dual citizen, alleging she intended to "incite public order offences" on a tour promoting her memoir in the UK. Lavery fired back with a sarcastic tweet stating "oh I hope the queen dies also." This lead to her account being mass-reported by TERFs and permanently suspended by Twitter.

Criticism of Joyce's evidence
In a double review of Trans and Kathleen Stock's Material Girls for the blog Critical Legal Thinking, law professor Alex Sharpe wrote that both books "set themselves against trans rights activism" and thus "advance broader toxic politics that embolden the Christian right, free-speech absolutism, and government attacks on higher education." Sharpe deemed Trans to be "clearly the weaker book," highlighting the contrast between Joyce's "zealous, born again" writing style and Stock's "forensic, Jesuit-like" approach, but found both authors united in "their mission to slay 'sacred cows.'" She particularly took issue with the standard of evidence presented by Joyce in her book: "[Trans] is poorly referenced, contains a great deal of anecdote, draws conclusions barely supported by evidence, fails to weigh evidence properly, or to consider fully or at all counter evidence even where such evidence accords with medical or other consensus." As an example of Joyce's favouring of "outlying figures to medical consensus," Sharpe cited the book's uncritical presentation of the "debunked theory" of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, as well as its reliance on "sexological outlier" Ray Blanchard's "discredited theory" of autogynephilia.

A review of Trans by Publishers Weekly branded the book an "alarmist treatise" and a "one-sided takedown," finding that "Joyce's unwillingness to take the claims of trans people seriously undermines her arguments," and that "her talk of the billionaires, academics, and profit-hungry healthcare companies behind 'gender-identity ideology' has elements of conspiracy thinking."

Even the American journalist, infamous for churning out think-pieces expressing his not-at-all ideologically-motivated concerns about gender identity, judged Trans to be "very thin on citations" in a New York Times review that otherwise hailed the book as an "intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight." Gaby Hinsliff, writing for The Guardian, similarly found "some curious holes" in Joyce's book, while otherwise expressing identification with or at least understanding of "gender-critical thinkers." She lamented that Joyce had produced an "exasperated polemic" accusing "activists" of "so aggressively overreaching" as to incite a "backlash" against "ordinary trans people", opining that the book would have "benefited from fewer pages of highly contentious speculation about what makes people trans" and "more interviews with policymakers, activists, the ordinary trans people she considers misrepresented."

Allegations of antisemitism
Joyce has come under fire for a passage in Trans that advances the conspiracy theory that "a few wealthy people" have "shaped the global agenda" through charitable giving:

Critics have pointed out that at least two of the three billionaires named by Joyce are Jewish. In a statement on her website, Joyce rejected the allegation that she believes a "cabal of Jewish billionaires is funding transactivism," stating she did not "deliberately select three Jewish donors," as it had "never occurred to [her] to think about their religions." Sharpe countered in her review of Trans that Joyce ought to have paid "more thought to the selection of wealthy funders" given that "her thesis of a 'global agenda'" is a "classic anti-semitic trope."

Aaron Rabinowitz of The Skeptic linked Joyce's claims concerning the billionaires allegedly "behind the trans agenda" to similar claims made by Jennifer Bilek in a 2018 piece for conservative site The Federalist. Bilek's piece asserted that the trans-rights movement is a front for a transhumanist Big Pharma plot to lure people into a "lifetime of anti-body medical treatments" and a "never-ending saga of body-related consumerism." Bilek wrote a similar screed in the Catholic magazine First Things in 2020. Joyce encouraged her Twitter followers to "have a look at Jennifer Bilek's pieces" on the "billionaire funders of transactivism" in January 2021. After the release of Trans in July 2021, Bilek published an article on her blog accusing Joyce of having "used [her] work without attribution," positing that she hoped to avoid the "taint" of "the anti-semitism" and "the conspiracy theorist." Joyce has denied Bilek's charge of plagiarism and stated that she unfollowed Bilek on Twitter after she "noticed her speculating about (of course non-existent) links between Judaism and transgenderism." Bilek stated on Facebook in January 2021 that she learned of the so-called "jewish [sic] aspect" of the "transgender/transhumanist agenda" from a video by Irish neo-Nazi Keith Woods. Bilek's claims are cited in Scott Howard's rabidly antisemitic 2020 book The Transgender Industrial Complex. The words "Jew" and "Jewish" occur 1,128 times in Howard's book. Howard's publisher, Antelope Hill, mostly reprints old Nazi propaganda.

Journalist Katelyn Burns called attention to Joyce's incorrect assertion in Trans that George Soros donated $100 million to the pro-LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign in 2010. This seems to have been the result of Joyce confusing the HRC with an actual 2010 donation by Soros to the similarly-named but unrelated Human Rights Watch. Joyce downplayed her blunder as a "minor factual error" corrected in the book's third printing. However, she claimed that because Soros "does fund the HRC" through his and the "HRW does campaign for gender self-identification," the correction "makes no difference to [her] point" that "rich individuals and foundations pour money" into trans-rights campaigns. Joyce also highlighted a "multi-million-dollar" donation to the ACLU by OSF in the paragraph about Soros in Trans. ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio noted that this donation was targeted at U.S. prison reform rather than LGBT causes. Sharpe, in her Critical Legal Thinking review, called out Joyce for misleadingly presenting donations to "broader LGBT (eg. GLAAD)," "human rights (eg. HRC)," and "civil rights organisations (eg. ACLU)" without showing how much money was specifically allocated toward advancing trans rights.

False narrative of oppression
In her review of Trans, Sharpe objected to Joyce's attempt to "spin a tale of 'gender critical' hobbits" taking on a "powerful trans cabal backed by billionaires," stating that this David-and-Goliath framing "serve[s] to diminish the harsh realities of being trans in Britain today." Studies have consistently found that trans people on both sides of the Atlantic experience increased rates of poverty,  homelessness,  unemployment,     and employment discrimination. This grim reality hasn't stopped TERFs (including billionaire J.K. Rowling) from declaring trans acceptance to be a bougie "luxury belief."

Tucker Lieberman, in a Medium piece examining the dust jacket blurb of Trans, found the double standard set up by its copy to be illustrative of Joyce's moral philosophy:

Lieberman argued that this framework creates a feedback loop in which cis people "complain that transgender people are focused on their own feelings when they should be thinking or relating in some other way," face criticism from transgender people who dispute "whatever exactly it was that the cisgender people said about them," and finally "feel shame at having been disagreed with, and their negative feelings are an unacceptable outcome of the interaction." In plainer terms, Lieberman held that Joyce is implicitly "telling us whose feelings matter" with her framing, with her conclusion being that "cisgender feelings matter more than transgender feelings." Compassion for the trans community, in Lieberman's inventory of Joyce's worldview, is "anti-intellectual", "a chilling effect", and "otherwise obstructionist", posing a "problem" for the advancement of "science and debate."

Weaving a cotton ceiling
Like many in the anti-trans movement, Joyce professes support for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people when she needs convenient rhetorical props and wants to look less narrow-minded. In November 2019, she penned a piece for Quillette singing the praises of the then-newly-founded pretend gay-rights group LGB Alliance, arguing that it was being unfairly attacked by the "ultra-woke homophobes" of the "self-described progressive left". According to Joyce, this was because the group acknowledges the "importance of biological sex as a driver of attraction," thus making it guilty of "that grave modern thoughtcrime, transphobia." In Joyce's view, the shift toward trans acceptance has lead to the "quasi-spiritual" and "indefinable internal essence" of gender identity replacing biological sex, resulting in the "logical consequence" of same-sex attraction being perceived as bigotry. The notion that radical activists are trying to bully and shame cis lesbians and cis gay men into accepting trans partners they don't want is a common anti-trans scare story.

On September 9, 2022, the first day of a hearing challenging the charitable status of the LGB Alliance due to its doing more anti-trans political lobbying than LGB charity work, Joyce again invoked the "cotton ceiling" in a series of tweets:

I'm not homophobic, but…
In a September 2021 tweet, Joyce responded to a mixed review of her book by Washington Examiner critic Ryan T. Anderson, affirming that she "ardently supported gay marriage" but doesn't believe its "opponents are thereby homophobes." The review by Anderson, a prominent opponent of same-sex marriage, took issue with Joyce's "rhetoric about 'homophobes' and 'homophobia'", holding that it "abets the very same social and cultural forces that accuse her of being a 'transphobe.'" He further charged that Joyce was a hypocrite for branding opponents of "the legal redefinition of marriage" as bigots while maintaining that opponents of "the legal redefinition of sex" have been "unfairly maligned."

Joyce once again invoked the fact that she supports same-sex marriage as a pre-emptive defence against homophobia in a January 2022 tweet expressing how "enormously grateful" she was for the ruling against "legally compelled speech" in. This 2018 case, as its name likely suggests, was Britain's very own "gay cake" Supreme Court decision, and had the same finding as its American cousin .

While discussing how "trans activism" is supposedly creating "loopholes [...] that pedophiles can exploit" and "riding roughshod over child safeguarding," Joyce drew a "parallel" to the alleged "infiltration of gay-lib movements in the 70s."

Transing away the gay
Joyce has espoused the anti-trans myth that gender-affirmative approaches are actually homophobic attempts to "trans away the gay." In her book Trans, she argues that bans on conversion therapy restrict how therapists may approach young gender-dysphoric patients, legally compelling them to "reinforce their cross-sex identity" at risk of criminal penalties. Joyce claims this means that "more gender non-conforming children" are placed on an inevitable path toward being "socially transitioned and put on puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones," asserting that these children are "much more likely than the average to grow up gay, as long as they are left in peace to work that out themselves."

Joyce brought up the "transing away the gay" canard in a July 2021 interview on the podcast of British TERF group :

At face value, Joyce's concern for the bodily integrity and reproductive rights of gay people appears to be a progressive, anti-eugenicist position. However, its disingenuity is laid bare by the fact that many anti-trans advocates, including Joyce, oppose shifting to a self-identification framework for changing one's legal sex, preferring the process remain highly medicalised (if they support transitioning at all). Many jurisdictions require bottom surgery as a condition of granting a change of one's legal sex change or did so until fairly recently, thus effectively placing many trans people under a government-imposed policy of.

From a 2021 interview with Jane Clare Jones of The Radical Notion, it's clear that Joyce's objections to affirmative approaches centre less on gay people, and more on fertility loss and its perceived negative impact:

In a November 2021 appearance on the YouTube channel Keep Talking, Joyce asserted that puberty blockers are a "massive, massive medical scandal" in which "troubled children" – a category in which she places autistic and gay youth – are being set up for a grim future as "sexless creature[s]" who are sterile and incapable of orgasm. She repeated this claim during an August 2022 interview on Spiked editor podcast: "And what's happening is children are being sterilised because critics of gender ideology have not been allowed to speak out."

Legitimising "prehomosexuality"
Joyce claimed in March 2022 that "We've known for many decades that some pre-gay kids are hyper gender non-conforming." Prehomosexuality is a rather obscure term used in conversion therapy literature and promoted by the Christian Right as well as the "ex-gay" movement for that purpose. It indicates a child who engages in behavior that is societally considered gender-incongruent. Conversion therapists encourage parents to monitor children for "prehomosexuality" and, if detected, put their so-called "prehomosexual" children through efforts to change their gender-nonconforming behavior in order to prevent homosexuality from emerging.

Though Joyce's word choice mentioned above may seem minor, it becomes more questionable in light of the fact that she has also misrepresented the work of who was involved with similar conversion therapy efforts (he is also cited in a section of A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality about monitoring for "signs of prehomosexuality"). In fact, J. Michael Bailey and Kenneth Zucker are two of his colleagues (especially at the Archives of Sexual Behavior journal that Green founded) who were influential in building a concept of childhood "prehomosexuality".

As for Green's own research, he is quoted in one case as having encouraged a young boy to cease his girlish behavior; he told the boy that "if he continues to do sissy things… he won't have many friends, and people will make fun of him… he'll be very unhappy." In another paper co-authored with Green stated, "part of the successful rearing of a child is orienting him, from birth, to his biologically and culturally acceptable gender role." In one other case, Green stated that his goal with a child's parents "was to discourage any support of his cross-gender behaviors, and to encourage boyish behaviors". Despite this evidence to the contrary, Joyce claims that, in fact, Richard Green "tried hard to persuade the parents of his 'sissy boys' to be accepting".