Listen to the episode here (and scroll down for the book review and interview transcript):

Dr Helen Joyce, author, journalist and editor at The Economist, joins the FiLiA podcast to discuss her newly-released book Trans. An in-depth exploration of the phenomenon of gender identity theory, Helen writes about how these ideas impact our ability to speak about biological sex and what these developments mean for society.

Helen's work outlines how ideas that privilege subjective feelings of personal gender identity over objective definitions of sex are logically nonsensical, with implications that cause damage to children, erode the rights of women & girls, and make homosexuality once again taboo.

Helen highlights the importance of hearing the stories of detransitioners, the ethical duties of a journalist and whether the misogyny and homophobia we see in some aspects of gender identity activism might be a feature, not a bug.

Book Review of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Dr Helen Joyce

Reviewed by: SD

“..because of gender identity ideology, the quest for the liberation of people with female bodies has arrived at an extraordinary position: that they do not even constitute a group that merits a name.” (p70)

There are many ways a woman might first become worried by clashes between biological sex and gender identity. Perhaps she is a mother whose 17-year old lesbian daughter starts breast binding, wants to go by “he/they” pronouns, and fantasises of a life of testosterone, double mastectomy and total hysterectomy. She might be a survivor of female genital mutilation, threatened by strangers online because she uses the word “woman“ when campaigning against other girls being cut. Maybe she’s a feminist whose life taught her the hard way the reality of male violence, who recognises the hatred she gets when she insists refuges must be for women only. She may be an athlete terrified of colliding with the male that recently joined her women’s rugby team. Or she’s a woman whose 43 year-old partner decides to transition, and the only place she can semi-safely talk about her own experiences is anonymously on Mumsnet. In Trans Helen Joyce explains how all of these issues are interrelated. The text should be accessible to a woman starting to wonder “what on Earth is going on?” while compelling to women who have been thinking about these questions for a little while longer (even those so familiar with the arguments online they can play “bingo” on Twitter). Helen Joyce uses a relentlessly logical approach to deliver an account of the key issues that is witty, warm-hearted and firmly anchored in reason. Her book is a reminder of the magic good journalism brings to a complex subject. Trans illuminates the convolutions of gender identity theory in a way that is clear, engaging, well-researched and (crucially for reaching the broadest audience) does not seem to require the reader to consider herself particularly invested in any sort of feminism from the outset.

Trans features interweaving personal perspectives, historical accounts, political machinations and takes an international scope. It is told as a story. While some of the factual content of the book is unlikely to surprise feminists,[1] what makes Helen Joyce’s treatment of this subject uniquely powerful is the way in which she spins the yarn. She is an author deeply familiar with the material underpinning why she makes the arguments she does, but she illustrates her points using common sense, narratives and examples, rather than applying a more theoretical lens. Trans includes supplementary reading material for each chapter, yet the text itself remains unburdened by academic conventions like footnotes or detailed citations, which are prized in many contexts (and demonstrate transparency) but can sometimes put “the average reader” off. The more journalistic style results in prose that flows confidently and is highly quotable. The reading experience is rather like listening to a brilliant woman who has just returned to her local pub after a long adventure, telling the most fascinating and shocking tales of what she’s discovered along the way - stories so unbelievable they can only be true. Because it is so captivating to read, Trans is likely to be of great help to feminists (and, it must be said, likely to be hated by feminism’s detractors in equal measure).

The book follows a solid structure, beginning with the medical roots of the phenomenon and an interesting explanation of gender identity theory using the film The Matrix as an allegory. Three chapters outline the damaging effects of these ideas for children, especially those who would in all likelihood otherwise grow up to be lesbian or gay. Teaching that someone could be born “wrong” or that personal affinities to gender stereotypes are more important than human bodies is confusing and harmful. Trans delineates psychic and physical scars carried by young people who took various steps driven by a belief in gender identity theory, but later regretted it, including the words and experiences of detransitioners (the book was catalysed by young lesbians sharing their stories at a detransition advocacy event in Manchester in 2019 - proof, if ever needed, that women simply coming together, using their voices and telling other women of their lives can change the world). On gender identity theory and modern feminism, Helen Joyce writes: “it is an indictment of both that the first generation of girls to be taught that womanhood can be identified out of are doing so in large numbers.”(p95)

Trans then explains the specific impacts on women, how the movement to centre gender identity means we are unable to clearly name ourselves by our sex, making our spaces and our sports mixed sex. Yet: “Women do not run the world, and their changing rooms are not where they plot to keep men down. Nor is their desire to undress away from the male gaze caused by anti-male prejudice.” (p158) Trying to change the meaning of the word “woman” to something nebulous, rather than rooted in the truth of female biology and human reproduction, impacts all women. “The words ‘male’ and ‘female’ cannot mean both biology and identity. And setting aside the thorny question of what it might mean to feel male or female, why would such a feeling matter, if being male or female does not?”(p205) As the book makes clear from the outset, the popular mantra “trans women are women” is logically incoherent, and results in politicians and policy-makers dodging discussion over the obvious practical consequences, and stumbling when asked the simplest question: “define ‘woman.’”

Trans analyses how US feminists fighting to keep women’s sex-based rights face a different political landscape and obstacles than women in the UK or elsewhere. The book also explains how legislative and policy changes that codify gender identity theory have been brought in globally without much awareness of the general public, with threats for the heretics (especially women) who step out of line. The climax of the story (at least for a reader engaged in this from a British context) features a roster of brave UK-based women resisting the erasure of their sex, including many familiar names of fantastic feminists. (And our very own volunteer organisation; deepest thanks to the FiLiA Trustees for taking the decision to back sex-based rights at that time!) As that chapter title and Maya Forstater say: “They Can’t Fire Us All.”  Trans ends with an exploration of why people may say they hold beliefs, or think others do, alongside a reminder of strategies for successful negotiation tactics and suggestions for a societal way forward. Helen Joyce has a deceptively simple ask: “I demand the same freedom to reject and oppose gender identity ideology, and in return gladly accept that others have the right to preach and live by it.” (p 300)

In Trans, Helen Joyce breaks this subject down for you, feminist or not, newbie or know-it-all. It’s a remarkable achievement. The stories in the book cover everything from Mermaids to Michfest, prisons to puberty blockers, Rowling to ROGD, Yaniv to Yogyakarta, and the golden thread that connects these tales is made plainly visible. If you’ve ever wondered “where do I even start?” whether to understand this mountain of a subject yourself, or explain it to someone else, Trans will help you summit. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more enjoyable guide to the climb.

You can order Trans from good bookshops (Blackwell’s has international shipping) 

Follow Helen on Twitter @HJoyceGender

[1] Note: for a more explicitly feminist evaluation of patriarchal mechanics involved in gender identity theory, readers may also wish to consider Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans’s Transgender Body Politics.

Transcript

Sara from FiLiA in conversation with Helen Joyce.

Sara: Hello everyone. And welcome to this episode of the FiLiA podcast. My name is Sara. I'm one of the volunteers and today I am utterly delighted, just tickled pink to be joined by Dr Helen Joyce.

Dr Helen Joyce is a journalist and editor at The Economist. She is the author of a superb new book called Trans, which has a strap line ‘When Ideology Meets Reality.’

This book is an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon of gender identity theory, how this impacts our ability to speak about biological sex and what these developments mean for society.

Thank you so much for joining us Helen and for this absolutely brilliant book. Your career has described as unexpected and unpredictable.

May I ask you to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and whether you'd still characterise your outlook as an optimistic pessimist.

Helen Joyce:  So, a little bit about myself. Well I'm Irish. I was born in 1968. I'm the eldest of nine kids. I trained as a dancer before I went to university, I have a PhD in mathematics and then became a journalist.

So I've kind of gone all over the place. I would say I've always called myself a feminist, at least since my early teens, since reading Simone De Beauvoir and Germaine Greer and other foundational feminist texts. But I didn't get very involved in activism because I've worked with The Economist since 2005 and just been very busy really, and have two kids who are heading towards being grown up now.

An optimistic pessimist? I think that's a reference to a description I gave of myself once after reading a former Economist editor and his description of his and The Economist’ world outlook, which was as paranoid optimist. And what he meant was he did believe, and the paper believes that the world can become better, but only when we keep being very vigilant for things that go wrong.

And on reading that, I realised that I, by nature, I'm a very cheerful pessimist was how I put it. I wake up every day in a good mood and I enjoy my life extremely, but I actually am quite glum about the prospects for our funny, weird species surviving on this planet and not destroying it. And also just not making such stupid unforced errors all the time, not just on the climate, but other things too, but that doesn't stop me from having a nice time every day and loving my family and having lots of good friends and just enjoying my garden and the other things that I do.

So I don't know whether, you know, my intellect and my emotions are very well aligned, but that's who I am.

Sara: Thank you so much. And generally, why do you think the idea that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman is inherently a bad proposition?  

Helen Joyce: It's a, it's a bad proposition, just on the basis of words meaning stuff. You don't have to be a logician to see that that's a circular definition. So a circular definition is one where you define the term that's being defined using the term itself. And in mathematics, you can sometimes do that in a recursive way. Whereby you say that a shape is something that you get to by doing the same thing again and again, or you define something as the only end point possible of doing a procedure again and again, but we're not talking about that.

We're just saying woman means woman. That tells you nothing. If women can mean women than women can mean anything. And that is indeed what we see inexorably, you go from woman is anyone who feels like a woman who defines themselves as a woman, or it says they’re a woman to anyone can use any of the spaces or facilities or whatever that are set aside for women as in female people.

And there are only two types of people in terms of sex. There are only two sexes. They are male and female. And in most things in life, we don't pay much attention to what sex people are anymore. We used to pay a lot more women weren't able to vote for example, or to own property or whatever.

But now in many ways, the two sexes are treated equally under the law and in society. But where we distinguish between male and female, we do it for reasons and we do it for good reasons.

We do it basically in situations where women are more vulnerable or whether there is privacy or safety at issue for both sexes or for example, in sports, because women are significantly weaker physically than men are for reasons to do with evolutionary biology. And so we segregate the sexes in some limited circumstances. And when we do it's really sex that matters not how people identify.

So as soon as you say that woman is anyone who says that woman you've created a black hole that means that anything that you're trying to do, that's just for men or just for women, can't be done that way. And its women who suffer.

Sara: What was the most surprising thing for you when you were writing this book? In terms of the level to which people were taking this principle of self-declaration literally?

Helen Joyce: I was just completely astounded by it all right from the beginning, it was obvious to me, as soon as I realised that they meant it, when they said that a woman is anyone who says they’re a woman that that was a silly thing that meant that it just destroyed any sex-based rights or any sex-based definitions.

I had always assumed that people just meant that there were a tiny number of exceptional people who, for whatever psychological reason, which I didn't think about in much detail at all, but those people just needed to be accommodated separately. I could imagine that being done.

We have very exceptional situations in the world. You know, people who are very, very rare situations that need to be accommodated differently than everyone else. So I assumed that that was what was being talked about. And then I discovered that, no, people really meant that they've got to change the definition for everybody, that suddenly I was only a woman because I said I was a woman.

And I don't say I'm a woman. I just am a woman. You know, I find it quite offensive to say that I'm a woman, because I say I'm a woman that was suggested that you could define out of your sex. So I was really completely astounded when I discovered that people were really meaning this seriously.

And then people started to just say the maddest things in my presence. So people a good deal younger than me and who had done different subjects in universities, people who had done gender studies or queer theory courses. And they would say things like I was anti-feminist for saying that men were on average, stronger than women. Or they would ask me why I felt most female prisoners were at risk of rape or just made very uncomfortable if you allowed male prisoners to be held with female prisoners on remand. And I couldn't believe I was being asked such stupid questions. It's very strange to be asked really, really, really dumb questions by people you're used to hearing sensible questions from.

You don't know what to say. You know, you are kind of confounded really, you sit there thinking, what have I missed? I'm missing something here. There's actually something serious behind all of this. So I spent about a year, I would say, not just saying ‘this is nonsense,’ trying to find out what I had missed.

You know, I read philosophy papers and tried to find out who the important gender studies theorists were and tried to read what they wrote and found just the most appalling weak, unexamined, poorly argued pieces of work that this whole ‘no debate’ thing, it's not just a slogan, they really don't allow any debate.

And it's amazing how poor a body of knowledge is when people don't want to, to debate it. Like you can knock down all the arguments and not much effort. So I don't think I've appointed any one specific thing. I would just say that right from the beginning, I was completely amazed by people who I thought were sensible and intelligent people, asking incredibly dumb questions or telling me incredibly stupid things like that because clownfish can change sex, you can't define what men and women are.

I mean, you know, we've all heard these things that I was absolutely gobsmacked when I heard them first and I was completely intrigued. That's why I kept looking at the story because I couldn't believe that people I thought were clever were saying such dumb things.

Sara: And did you find that there was a little bit of a sense of disbelief when you were trying to explain to other people that this was happening?

Helen Joyce: Oh, big time, big time. I mean, that's a huge part of why this is all managed to get so far. So basically what you find if you're a journalist or if you're someone who's trying to write on this subject in any way, whether it's as a journalist or verbal or anything like that, you approach people with your heart in your mouth for example, paediatric transitioning. The great lack of wisdom of allowing males to identify into female sports. And you know that some of the people who read your email will think ‘massive bigot’ you know, old women past it, don't know what's going on these days. And if they reply to you at all, they were replying to you in a condescending and rude manner that assumes that you're a homophobe or some young earth creationist or something like that. So it is all very surreal, really for somebody who's an atheist and regards herself as a feminist. And I was delighted when Ireland, brought in gay marriage. And by the way, they're the young earth creationist not me because they're the ones who don't believe in evolutionary biology.

Or actually. They would be sensible people who would think to themselves, this is so stupid and so senseless that it can't be happening.

 I had a great deal of difficulty getting editors to take the story seriously because it's so obviously dumb that you feel it can't really be happening. And that's why a lot of this has happened because anyone sensible just assumed that, you know, this is so silly, it can't be happening and somebody will stop it till it turns out somebody has to be somebody, someone has to do the actual stopping don't they.

Sara: At least from my impression, and there seems to be a very strange split between people who go, well, this is the most controversial thing you could ever say. And then other people who go well, this is just basic common sense. Like, why are you even saying this?

Helen Joyce: The same person, you know, you'll see somebody on social media, they'll say. ‘but nobody is denying the existence and reality of biological sex they're talking about gender’ you know, subtext, you stupid old woman.

And then underneath straight away in will come some trans activist telling them in no uncertain terms that what they've just said is transphobic. So it turns out they really are denying that biological sex exists and can be self-declared.

Sara: That was my own main worry in terms of, I can't believe people are actually saying this and that there isn't that much of a pushback specifically from, I think the scientific and the medical community. What's been your experience?

Why does it seem like doctors and scientists seem a bit hesitant to set the record straight as it were?

Helen Joyce: I guess that the younger ones have all been mis-educated. I know the people who are doing medical training at the moment and what they're learning is nonsense and they're worse than anybody. Really seriously worse than anybody.

I'm very, very, very worried about the future of medical treatment really. I mean, if you've got people coming out of medical school who think that you should be sacked or silenced or kicked off social media, all of the above for pointing out that sex is immutable in a world of mammals, and that includes humans, what sort of medical treatment are you expecting to get from these people?

They're obviously people who've allowed ideology to blind them to any science or any consideration of what their patients need. And then older ones, they just don't really realize what's happening. You don't unless your noses rubbed in it. I still get people telling me that I'm making a lot out of nothing.

That was the response from some of the people that I first pitched the book to that there wasn't enough in this for a book. Well, actually I had to cut the book by 20,000 words from the first draft to what ended up in print. And there was loads of stuff more I could have put it in and I still keep thinking of things that I've missed out.

Sara:  I was going to say, actually that you managed to do a very brilliant job of getting this subject as concisely presented, but still interwoven, it's very broad in terms of the subjects that you cover, but you carry the themes through really, really beautifully.

Helen Joyce: Yeah. Big shout out to my editor on that for sure.

The first draft was not one 10th as good as where it got to. A lot of the time when you're writing, you just have to get things on the page. Then you have to look at it. So I think I filed the first draft to mid or late October of 2020. And then I just took a few weeks away from it. I was quite upset at the feedback from my editor first, normally in my day job, I edit other people and I'm not used to being edited.

And honestly, I didn't much like people telling me what's wrong with what I've written, although I'm very forward about telling other people what is wrong with what they've written. So I explained that it wasn't starting in the right place and that some bits were confusing and I sort of stopped for a few weeks and then looked at it again. And of course, everything she said was completely right. And I was able to just go through it really fast in about three or four weeks and rearrange a lot of the material. So now the structure, I think is very clear. Although in some places that was very difficult. Like I tried to set it out, here's the three chapters that set out the stall, I have three chapters that are about children, three chapters that are about the impact on women and then three chapters that are about the broader impact on society and law, that sort of thing.

But of course, children and women overlap, when you're talking about teenage girls who identify out of their sex, for reasons that would probably have led them to be anorexic or self-harming in a previous generation. Or you need to explain why adults identify out of their sex before you can explain why we think crazy things that we do about children who say they want to identify out of those sex. So there was a lot of structural untangling.

Sara: Well, I think it flows beautifully. And I think the way that it goes is that you are introduced to kind of the key anchor and themes, but then because it's such a complex subject and because like you say, you have to know one thing in order to understand the other and understand the premises of one thing in order to see how those translate into that context or that country. I actually think that it flows together very beautifully.

Helen Joyce: Well, she kept pushing. She kept insisting things had to be simpler so you can praise her for that.

Sara: It was very, very good. I will. I praise you both. I praise everyone involved.

I wondered if I could ask just you anchor the introduction in terms of the, kind of the catalyst, shall we say, for your decision to actually write this book, was hearing the stories of the de-transitioners, mainly young men and young women who had gone through being caught up in these ideas of gender identity, but then later regretted it. And some of them having serious trauma and bodily harms from it. And I wondered if there was a specific moment during the event, I think you said it was the de-detransition advocacy network meeting in 2019 that you had this maybe like an epiphany moment or thing where you went, I have to do this.

Helen Joyce: I was already completely obsessed. I know. I sound like I'm obsessed and that's because I am, it's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life. It's the creation of a new religion. It's a social contagion. It’s institutional capture on a very large scale. It's the perversion of medicine of science, of more policymaking of journalism. You know, it's a lot of very big things, any one of which will be enough to make someone stop and think.

And I really already thought that I should try and write a book about it because I couldn't see who else was going to do it. But I was very hesitant because by this point, Maya Forstater had been ruled to be not worthy of respect in a democratic society for beliefs that I obviously share. And so I was worried for my job, although nobody had said anything in that way at work. I'm not saying that I had been told my job was under threat. Maya hadn't been either. Maya thought that she was working as a think tank where they welcomed evidence and debate and challenge and so on. And then suddenly, you know, saying that there were two sexes lost her her job.

So I was scared and you don't like being unpleasant to people or nasty or hurtful. And I don't think I am unpleasant or nasty or hurtful, but people experience it that way. For one reason or another, I just, I didn't really fancy doing it. I have to say. And then I went to this event and. I think people often misunderstand the de-transitioners they think to themselves: Oh, being trans is a really rare thing. They’re a small number of people and then a very tiny number of that tiny minority misunderstand themselves and go through treatments. But of course every treatment involves regrets. There's nothing, there's nothing that people do, but nobody regrets. That is true. But that's not what de-transitioners are if properly understood.

De-transitioners are apostates. There are people who were brought into a new rapidly changing belief system that has no factual basis and has many of the elements of a cult. I say that advisedly, the speech policing, the casting out of anybody who says anything a bit wrong. It is very cultish in its way.

And these are kids who got caught up. And then they're the ones who want to say that they want to leave. And they are treated like Scientologists treat people who leave Scientology. They are absolutely vilified. They are cast out of any support systems. I've talked to people who de-transitioned and their own therapists tell them that they're lying and that they're, you know, the tools of the Heritage Foundation in America or that they are false flag operations.

And these are kids who've suffered the worst imaginable trauma really, that sounds like a very strong thing to say. But when I started interviewing the de-transitioners, I asked for some advice from a therapist who worked with them and she said that she had trained with Vietnam vets and that these kids were at least as traumatised and maybe more traumatised as some of those people.

And she gave me some very good advice on interviewing them. She said that when you talk to people who have suffered trauma, you must understand that at the heart of trauma, there's a great deal of shame. People are ashamed of are being traumatised, but it's even worse when they brought the trauma on themselves as these kids, unfortunately, did, under the influence of the ideology, that if you feel like the opposite sex, you are actually the opposite sex. They did things that they now regard as very harmful to themselves, things that are irremediable. And so then they feel not just trauma, not just shame, but self-hatred as well. And then everybody else dumps on them. So she said that you must understand how traumatised they are. And the advice that is given to therapists who work with traumatised people is that you must gain their trust before you let them tell you their story. Because otherwise they treat you, and this is her analogy, she said, they treat you like a taxi driver on the way to the airport on a dark rainy night on the motorway. And they tell you their whole story, everything, because they think they will never see you again in the dark, from the back of the cab. And then they ghost you. And that happens to me. And I've heard other people who work with de-transitioners say the same. So what you have to do is you have to talk to them about other things first and get to know them, and then they can then maybe reveal how they feel.

So I found out all of that afterwards. But at this event, it was actually all girls, young women, although there are boy de-transitioners too, this in fact, was all of the lesbians who had, as many gay people do, have been very high gender nonconforming in their early childhood. And in every case basically misinterpreted that gender nonconformity meaning that they were trans, they had removed breasts, they had taken testosterone, someone had lost hair on their heads and had facial hair. A couple of them had had hysterectomy, which has very large effects on your health. And none of which they were told about. My mother had a hysterectomy in her forties or fifties for fibroids, and she wasn't well for a year afterwards, it's a big operation and you know, a 21-year-old has this done and it's meant to make her feel wonderful. And then to affirm her manhood.

So I just sat there listening, and I'd never seen anything so powerful. And I have relatives who are gay. I have young gay relatives and I care a great deal about them. I care a great deal with they aren’t misled into what I see as a conversion therapy. And so at the end of that, I feel well, it's simple. I have to write the book. It doesn't matter what happens because of writing. It doesn't matter if I have to self-publish it. It doesn't matter anything. I just have to write it because I've seen that they're sterilising gay kids. And when you've seen that, it comes with a responsibility. And it's a journalistic responsibility. Somebody has told you their story and you have to pass it on.

Sara: Huge thank you for that, because I think it was a brave thing to do.

Helen Joyce: It didn’t feel brave. What was nice about it was that it was clear cut. Like before that I'd been trying to weigh things against each other: Am I the right person? does this matter enough to potentially blow up my life? What will people think of me? These are difficult things to weigh against each other. And then afterwards it was just extremely simple. This has to be done and there's no calculus anymore. So that was actually a real gift to just know what you meant to do. And that was part of the reason I was able to throw myself into it so wholeheartedly because you know, the first publishers I approached said, no, I still have some quite funny letters, including from a young whipper snapper, who said I was making it all up and I was exaggerating it all. And ‘couldn't the sports be resolved by having weight and height categories’ and all the usual stupid arguments. And then he finished with, ‘there really isn't a book in it’. So I still have that. And then the first agent that said she was interested, she ended up dumping me when she saw the full proposal and what really helps through all of that was this has to be done, there's no consideration about it.

Sara: I did actually have a question about the role of journalism in this, because it sounds to me like what you're saying is that maybe that I don't want to call it an obligation or a duty, but this is just what needs to happen. Seems very much like something rooted in your professional ethos, perhaps.

Helen Joyce: So I am surprised and actually disgusted by how badly journalism has done on this topic. And I think there's a few reasons. One is that the business model for journalism has changed hugely and actually been destroyed in the past 20 years by the internet.

So there's so little money coming into journalism that there's no incentive to, you know, to hire specialists, to give people time, to risk turning off some people like a controversy, to risk getting sued or anything like that. And at the same time that young people who were coming into journalism are mostly people who have studied the sorts of subjects that have changed beyond all recognition in the past 20 years or so.

So lots of them would have taken courses in gender studies or queer theory, or they'll have been taught as if it's fact that, you know, sex is a spectrum. And that its massive bigotry to say that there are only two sexes and they also, much more than they used to, regard themselves as activists rather than journalists.

So they see their role as being to promote social justice. Now, if you just mean social justice without the capital S and J I also regard my role as being to promote social justice. But the way that I do that as a journalist is by going and finding shit out and then doing my best to tell it as clearly, and as unbiasedly as possible.

It's not silencing the stories I don't like the sound of and giving activists space to tell outright lies. And you do see that in a lot of the media, you know, you see people saying things like it is impossible to define the two sexes, or it is not the case that testosterone gives people a strength advantage.

These things are lies, the worst lies than the young earth creationism lies because they're easily disprovable here in front of us. You don't need any theory. You don't need to go and look through a microscope or anything like that. And yet they're said because they're said in the service of what people regard as a greater truth or a greater mission and that mission is no longer a journalistic one. It's an activist one. if you look at what gets into the papers, it's not journalism anymore on subjects like this. To some extent race, especially in America, a lot of subjects have become very distorted and I've had the experience myself, but I've also heard from other people that if you try to pitch something that the activists don't like the sound or that it gets chopped. Like one journalist was telling me that she was writing something and she just used the expression, ‘gender critical feminist’ from an American outlet. And she explained what it meant because not everybody would know. And her editor trying to change that to ‘transphobic’. because the guide from GLAD what used to be called the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation, the press, the media going from them is that gender critical just means transphobic. So she had to really get into a big argument with the editor on that subject, just to save that word.

I myself have had arguments for using the words male and female with senior editors, because they feel that it's too hurtful to say that a trans woman like Rachel McKinnon, who wants to race in women's races is male. But if Rachel McKinnon wasn’t male then he wouldn't be a trans woman. It has to be said because that's the source of the advantage. Yeah. So journalism has allowed itself to be captured.

Sara: And I thought it was quite lovely, and significant that in your acknowledgements you especially thanked, particularly women, but also others who were using their media platforms to shed a bit of light on this subject.

Helen Joyce: Yeah. There's some men. I've taken to jokingly calling them the righteous among men, people like James Kirkup and Jon Kay, who published my first big piece on this subject. They don't have to, you know, they could just do like everybody else and say, oh, this is too difficult or too much trouble, or to bring controversy or they could do the same as everybody else. But they've got commitments to intellectual inquiry to free speech, open debate, to accuracy. to thinking. I mean, they're not all people from one part of the political spectrum, by any means.

Jon was very funny, in the 1990s used to write leaders for the Canadian quite right-wing paper. And he said, he'd be typing these editorials:

‘The radical lesbians are ruining everything’.

And now in the 2010s, his editorials go:

‘could the radical lesbians just talk a bit more loudly and everyone else listen to them a bit more’.

So everybody can change. And everybody has different ways of bringing their own voice to this space. If they're willing to speak.

Sara: That brings me to a question that I had about freedom of speech, but also women's rights. The two quotes that you chose to open your book with one of them from Audre Lorde and the other one from George Orwell. And I wondered a little bit why those and also how we now would find ourselves in this space, particularly with this gender identity theory, but also otherwise where there seems to be a little bit of an issue with women's rights and traditional kind of like enlightenment values, shall we say, but we're in an era where there's a lot of people who might call themselves ‘liberal feminists’ who will paint these arguments at the centre on the sex-based rights of women as being horribly restrictive of freedoms and hateful and downright murderous. So like, how do you even speak of this in terms of using language that makes sense?

Helen Joyce: So that's sort of two questions rolled up. I'll answer the one about the two quotes I chose. So one of them is about Audre Lorde saying when you dare to use your voice in service of what you care about, it no longer matters whether you’re afraid, and that was very meaningful to me because it resonated with what happened at that de-transitioners advocacy conference, because just become calm and it doesn't actually matter anymore, whether you're on the winning side or the losing side or what you might lose or what you might gain. You know what you have to do.

And so that's what that was meant to speak to. The other one is there's the two plus two equals four. If you can't just say the plain simple facts that you see in front of you, you have no freedoms. But if you can do that, then everything else can follow. So they were meant to speak to, to the dilemma that women find themselves in now where everything that you've tried to say, everything, every word is taken away from you.

I used to think that maybe you could give the words, man, and woman over to some sort of social role. I don't think I thought about that very carefully, but anyway, say we could, if you could keep the words, male and female, but of course they came after the words, male and female. So then you find yourself in a position that you cannot make any arguments to give you a very concrete example.

Maya Forstater’s case against the Centre for Global Development, which is her former employer in the initial employment tribunal. In essence, the judge said that, yes, she was free to think that sex was binary. But what she wasn't free to do was to express that in any sense of a language. He seems to think that under no circumstance, could Maya ever say the male person who didn't want to be seen as male, that they were male. Maya didn't want to go around the place shouting male, male, male to non-existent trans colleagues or anything like that.

She wanted to reserve the right to be able to say in a situation, for example, when a male colleague transitions and then starts to use the female changing rooms that this isn't okay. And the reason it isn't okay, is because this person is male. And if you can't say male, then the only way that you can express this argument is to say that this woman, this female can’t use the woman's the female changing room because this woman this female is trans. And that makes you into a transphobe that you're somebody who, the only reason you don't want this person using the space is because they're trans. But that's not why you don't want this person using the space. You don't care if they’re trans identified, it’s because they're male. So you need to be able to say those things.

And we have hit bedrock with male and female. We have to be able to keep using words to mean what they actually mean, and just remind people that those are words aren't just used for humans. They used for animals and lots of plants too, and body parts, not just to humans, animals, plants, Holly bushes are male and female, and you need two of them to make berries. And this is really, really deep stuff that we can't just redefine like that. We have to keep using these words and we have to do it in as clear and measured and temperate away as we can. But we can't give in on this.

Along with that. I would say something often said to my children when they were smaller, when some other kid was mean to them and they'd hit that kid or something like that, I'd say, you know, do you admire that person? Do you think well of that child? And they would say, no, I can't stand him. He's nasty or whatever. And I'd say, well, why are you letting that person shape the way you behave then? So I'm not willing to let these people that I think so lowly of shaped the way that I behave. If there are people who are shouting ‘rape the TERF’ or ‘fuck off and die’ or whatever went on. I'm not willing to let those people shape the way that I speak and the way I behave.

I am just going to state facts and logical arguments clearly, and simply in words that people understand giving definitions that are based on material reality, and I'm not going to stop doing that. I'm also not going to escalate just because there were people who were trying to stop me. So that's, I suppose, in a nutshell, what I was trying to get at with those two quotes.

Sara: Thank you. And just as a general question, what do you think about this ‘liberal feminism’?

Helen Joyce: I wouldn't define myself exactly as a rad fem because I feel that as radical feminism is mostly articulated, I don't think it gives enough importance to evolutionary biology and to differences between the sexes.

But these are very minor questions compared to the foolishness of liberal feminism, basically men's rights activism. I do think that there's a resurgence in feminism at the moment. And I really do feel there's intellectual work to be done, then some synthesis to be created. But you know, anyone who can’t see that you shouldn't have rapists in women's jails, in my opinion, does not deserve the word feminist at all. It doesn't matter if they call themselves lib fems or whatever, as far as I'm concerned, they’re men's rights activists. If you can't just clearly state that no male rapist, no male, frankly, but like, let's just, let's just stick to the easy case. Male rapists. No male rapists should be in women's jails. If you can't say that, you can’t say that you’re a feminist, and I don't care what you say, you are not, you aren't.

I do care about some of the things that so-called lib fems care about. Like I do care about like girl boss or glass ceiling feminism. I do work in a male dominated until very recently and still is quite male dominated. And I do care about whether women can make it to the top and so on.

Yes. It's relatively minor compared to the ongoing horrors of female genital mutilation and the rest. But frankly, I do care. So yeah, there's not nothing to liberal feminism, but the sort of person who says this lovely male rapist deserves to be in a women's jail because they feel like a woman. They can just go and take a running jump.

Sara: How is it even possible that we've recently had that court ruling, that it is actually lawful for the UK law to give priority to the feelings of a convicted male criminal to be housed with vulnerable women in prison. To what degree do you think that people who are championing these gender identity policies that allow for this to happen? Do you think they're actually proud of this?

Helen Joyce: Well, I mean, it does them a lot of good in their own circles. Doesn't it? It's so tempting to think that people who believe things you regard as an inimical don't really believe them, but that's not actually true. People really often do believe the things that you think they can't possibly believe.

I think that the way that you get to the point where you think it's obviously the right thing to do, to allow rapists to identify into women's jails, like it's, step-by-step, isn't it. And it's also by the perversion of language. Like if you call these people women, and you regard them as the most vulnerable women, because you've gone through some weird re-education process inside your own head. And yes, they do deserve to be in women's jails. And, you know, there are dangerous people in women's jails and we just have to risk mitigate, blah, blah, blah. Because you stepped away from material reality. And once you do that, anything is possible. You can believe anything. You can say anything.

But I also believe that a lot of these people don't actually believe what they say they believe in a certain sense. So I'll give you an example. A couple of months ago, I watched a couple of particularly unpleasant male journalists who are well-known gender activists, having a happy discussion about how they wanted to have babies and one of them said, we must find ourselves some broody lesbians.

And I just thought you don't actually believe all the gender stuff then, because if you truly, really believed it, then you will be looking for a trans man, because you're the people who think that what makes somebody a lesbian isn't the fact that they've got a reproductive capacity of uterus and ovaries.

You're the person who believes in identity. And you complain that women, lesbian, who say that they couldn't possibly find a male body with a penis attractive, you complain that they're bigots. You just proved when it comes to your life and what you want, that you know perfectly well, when you want to exploit a woman's reproductive capacity, you know, very well what a woman is. So that's called a crony belief. Crony beliefs are the beliefs that you hold because they, it's nothing to do with reality, it's nothing to do with concrete reality and helping you to navigate the world it's to do with being with an in-group. And getting plaudits and so on. So it can be completely harmless. They can just be things like, you know, what team you support in football, which gives you may give you a great deal of joy and pleasure, and gets you in with the group of people that you spend all your time with. And that's just completely fine. But when you say, you know, oh, Liverpool are the best team there has ever been, and Liverpool's manager is the best manager that's ever been. You're not saying that because you actually believe it and you wouldn't change your mind or someone proved you were wrong. You believe that because it's a badge of belonging and its part of the pleasure of a group activity.

Well, I think that all this ‘trans women are women’ stuff in particular from certain men is similar.

It's a chance to belong to a group. And that group has some really big benefits for them. It allows you to pretend that you're progressive while being incredibly misogynistic, which is a very appealing combination for some men, in particular these two guys, it's really very obvious how very much they hate women.

And here they are, you know, they have a large number of followers and able to pretend to themselves that they're the righteous.

Sara: I've heard of something called like a luxury belief that seems to function in a slightly similar way, but without the in-group.

Helen Joyce: Yes, that's right. That's another interesting concept that I couldn't fit everything I wanted in, and I could have discussed that too.

So luxury beliefs are beliefs that you can't hold when you're on the sharp end of things. They're their beliefs that you can only hold and very nice circumstance. So, for example, if you were very highly educated and you have loving parents who looked after you and they were great together, and they sent you to a nice school and a nice university, and you're there, it's very easy to hold the luxury belief that anybody can make it if they try.

And I think you just can't believe that when you've been at the rough end of things. So there's some element of battling isn't there, it's only really in a, sort of a late capitalist society where the most material needs are way over supplied. And we can all just sit around the place, thinking mad things like that lesbians can have penises. It's a luxury belief in that sense. And it's also a status symbol. only really well educated people could possibly be so stupid as to think that lesbians can have penises.

When I was a correspondent in Brazil between 2010 and 2013. And this is, give me a moment to explain this analogy because it's an odd one.

So while I was there. I had to write about absolutely everything, including the economy. And Brazil has always had a problem with very high inflation. And there was this entire school of economics in Brazil, which held that if you try to bring interest rates higher, which is normally the way that you control inflation, that you would actually increase inflation.

And that the way that you lowered inflation was to bring your interest rates down. And that's completely the opposite to the facts, but they had these extraordinary arguments, you know, really long ones that were meant to show that this is the case. And I used to think to myself, how much education did it get teach you that stuff? Because it's, self-evident nonsense. It has to take years to teach you this.

And then I came up against all this, you know, there aren’t 2 sexes and sex is a spectrum and sex is assigned at birth and lesbians can have penises and so on. And I just said, God, how long did it take you to learn all that shit?

Sara: It’s a really good question, because I do find that it's one of those things that you have to almost get trained into it in a way, but then also it's a bit like what you said in the beginning. You kind of feel like I'm sure everyone else got the memo for how this makes sense and forgot to send it to me. And then you, you look into it and then you realise like, hang on a second. This doesn't work.

Helen Joyce: It is like religion in that sense. And I don't mean to dump on religious people because I think there's plenty of people who are religious who take what they’re taught and turn it into something beautiful. That is a way in which they do good in this world. And it's a way that they make sense out of the world around them, which is a very nonsensical thing. In theory, there could be people who believe that there are things that are manly and womanly, essences, and so on. And they too could make some beautiful meaning out of that.

But the sort who say you’re a bigot, if you don’t agree that's the witch burners. That's not a beautiful religion. That's just the witch finders at it again.

Sara: On that note. I thought it was interesting how you anchored the history and the early 20th century sexology in terms of medical developments and early stories of people who underwent various, shall we say experiments for ‘sex changes’ et cetera. And obviously the context for that sort of theorising and those sorts of very, very early conceptualisation of transsexualism as a medical phenomenon, shall we say, Like, it was obviously a really different time when, you know, women didn't really have any the same sorts of rights and the homosexuality was criminalised.

How do you think about, whether or not, there's a possibility that the medical thinking and the medical approach to this as sort of crystallised, maybe some really old misogyny and homophobia, and it just keeps getting carried over? To what extent do you think, is it a feature or a bug of gender identity activism that there are these two things that we see keeping coming up?

Helen Joyce: Yeah, that's really well put, it is a feature it isn’t a bug. So to give a sort of very potted history to people. I start the book in the 1920s, and you can watch a sort of reasonably accurate, but slightly bad rise version in Danish girl, the film with Eddie Redmayne in it from 2015, I think. So that was like a Danish artist. And you had a woman inside. He had a woman persona that he called Lili Elbe. He was one of the very first people, possibly the first male person to undergo having his penis and his testicle removed and the vaginal cavity created. It didn't go very well because this was before they understood anything about blood transfusions and before they had antibiotics and so on.

So actually he died 14 months afterwards, but he lived for 14 months as Lili Elbe. He felt that, she felt, whichever you prefer, that this was worth it. So the doctor was an early campaigner for gay rights. But at the time, he was a gay man himself actually, at the time they believed that gay people were women's brains trapped to men's bodies and they regarded them as psychic hermaphrodites was the expression. And as far as this doctor was concerned, the desire to appear as a woman, as completely as possible was a similar sort of psychic intersex condition.

And that kind of crystallised this feeling that sex was a spectrum. This doctor even said that many times that he regarded everybody is what he called bisexual, not meaning a desire for both sexes, that they were a mixture of both sexes. Nobody was one sex or the other, everybody was a bit male and a bit female.

That's all just absolute nonsense. And he should have known better because Darwin many decades earlier had explained what the sexes were. But anyway, that was what he thought. And he thought that gay people and what he called transvestites, later called transsexuals, were psychic hermaphrodites. There were people who were unusually far from the two ends of the sex spectrum.

And if you believe that, then the things that you think move people along that spectrum can be physical. They can be behavioural. They can be to do with your dress. They can be to do with your interests or your desires, so desiring someone of the same sex would move you along the sex spectrum.

There's a lot of stuff I didn't get to put in the book for space reasons, but he believes that the women who led the suffrage movement were psychic hermaphrodites. So they were very manly women. So they had moved themselves by the desire for the vote along the sex spectrum. So all these things moved to, and that got kind of carried forward into quite quackish treatments that were offered later.

Like Harry Benjamin, who was a real out and out quack. And he treated Christine Jorgensen when she was in America and ended up creating the foundation that now is known as WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

So they were quite quackish in their style and they really did believe this thing, that two sexes were roles, or they were a mixture of things.

Harry Benjamin write this book, The Transsexual Phenomenon. He lives in like different places, like completely different definitions of what it would mean to be transsexual and not at all coherent, but they are all sexist.

They're all that sex is a mixture of the social role that you want to live in. And whether you are outgoing or like to stay in the home, or whether you like to be decorative and subservient to whether you are ordinary active and so on. So right from the beginning, it's partly been that gay people aren't fully of their sex. And it's partly been that, what makes you fully own your sex is that you embrace all the stereotypes to deal with that. And if you hold the previous also very sexist idea that the two sexes are really separate, but men are superior. Women were inferior, at least that can be disproved. Like at least if a woman comes along, she's actually the best artist you've ever seen. She disproves the idea that women can't be artists, whereas with the new conception of the sex spectrum, that that woman just doesn't very womanly anymore. She's just moved herself along the spectrum. And that's really visible still today. Like all those stupid ideas.

You know, the wrong brain pink brains and blue bodies born in the wrong body, this whole idea that you could even take on a sex role. Like am I in my sex role? I don't know a PhD in mathematics. It's just enraging, really, it's just quackery and it's been quackery since the beginning.

Sara: It will come as very little surprised that I agree wholeheartedly. And I don't think the quality of the medical studies has been getting any better. And it's sometimes a little bit strange to think about the fact that there's still such poor evidence for any of these treatments.

Helen Joyce: Anyone who tries to do good studies, can't get them published. And if people would try, it's been studied and turned down by a dozen journalists that are really good because they don't go with the narrative. And then you look at some of the things that did get published. And I mean, they would shame first year undergraduates doing medical statistics. They use self-selecting samples. They use surveys that, that we know produce nonsensical results. They twist the definitions that they're using. After all that they'll then write op-eds. In newspapers that misrepresent even the rubbish that they produced by going further than what it says.

And then when people try to debunk these papers, they can't get them published in the same journal. They can't get these papers withdrawn and they can't get them published in the right place. They end up having to publish them somewhere else. Or even when they're on a website, it's absolute perversion.

I really am shocked by how badly the medical profession are, with people with gender dysphoria, letting them down.

Now it's not like we haven't seen this sort of thing before the medical profession goes through these horrendous mistakes again and again, like lobotomies and recovered memory syndrome. And if you go back further to creation of hysteria and shock those patients, you know, it's often women and its often women's reproductive systems that suffer.

Sara: Yes. There's a lot of violence, particularly towards women's bodies.

The question that I was really interested about is about this kind of backlash because you write about it in your book. And it's definitely something that people are worried about. And I don't think it's an unfounded fear to think that we could be at risk of a really strong pendulum swing if we're not really careful.

Helen Joyce: Well, I think we're bound to be. That's the way that cultural movements go. There are necessary corrections and they tend to overreach.

But on this one, I'm more worried than I am for many, because I don't think I can think of any movement for decades that's been so unfounded in any material reality. And that's been so harmful to so many minority groups and I’m counting women among that, even though we're not a minority.

It's going to take a long time to get everybody aware, but you know, you just have to imagine you're your solid salt of the earth bloke. Absolutely not a feminist, thinks all the talk of patriarchy is nonsense, good man cares about his family, cares about his kids. And his daughter comes home, crying and says, there's a boy in my changing room, he’s getting his dick out and he has an erection honestly, it's completely weird and I am going to have to leave. I can't be in my club anymore. That man is going to be enraged. And there's no way that you can shame him out of his rage, but no way you can say, oh, well, you're not a feminist ally, trans women are women. He's just going to go bollix to this. He has got his dick out in my daughter's changing rooms.

 So it'll get that far. And then those people are not going to stop at the material reality of it. They're going to say, this is feminism's fault. This is gay rights fault. This is perversion. This is those left-winger lunatics. The liberals gone too far. They're going to push back against everybody. And I don't want any of that. And by the way, that's not going to be good for trans people either. Like if you were trans identified person right now, your activists want children sterilised, men in women's sports, rapists in women's prisons and men able to get their dicks out in women's changing rooms.

That's their four big causes. Is that really, really what you want to be associated with? Because if you don't, you really are going to have to tell them to stop because you're going to get taken down with them. I don't want that. I’m your best friend at the moment. I'm the person who's trying to stop that before it brings you down as well.

Sara:  The other thing that's obviously has been another worry is whether or not the violence from the gender identity activists will concurrently be escalating towards the women who are speaking out.

Helen Joyce: I saw this in Northern Ireland when I was a child and in my early adulthood, a lot of the people who force and rioted in Northern Ireland, weren't actually in any way committed to either the union with the United Kingdom or a United Ireland, they just liked agro. There's somewhere that you can go to get agro so they go to get agro. And right now the best place to get agro especially if you dislike women a lot is the gender identity movement. You can turn up and you can shout TERF. You’re not allowed to say bitch or say cunt but you can say TERF which has the same meaning. And off you go, it's now a magnet for all the really nastiest, most reactionary, hideous sort of people. And again, this isn't who you want to be associated with. I, by the way, I sound like I'm blaming trans people here. I'm not, I'm really not. I'm saying that if you just stay silent because these people are so horrible and scary, this is who's going to define your movement. I wish it wasn't. I'm just saying it is.

Sara: I think that was the key message in terms of more people need to be speaking about this and more people need to be saying what they think.

Helen Joyce: That's what Maya always says when she speaks, you know, they can’t sack us all.

I would just like to say thank you to FiLiA actually. There's been a horrible abdication by the established groups, women's groups and gay rights groups on this. Like they, a mixture of abdication actually gone full on working against the people that they were meant to represent. But when you look at people like the Fawcett Society, who could have done some good by speaking out earlier or speaking out at all, they haven't, and they've left women, individual women to carry the weight of it and FiLiA and a few other groups like Nia, and then the newer groups like Women's Place UK and Fairplay for Women, Safe Schools Alliance, have had to come out, with unpaid volunteers who were having to do this work around looking after kids and looking after jobs and at risk of their jobs. These people who work in the charity sector, who are well-paid and get government grants and slap each other’s backs and just move from one charity to another congratulating each other on doing f-all. So, yeah, thanks to FiLiA and thanks to those other groups. That's something that really wants to be sure to say.

Sara: Thank you. I mean, you've taken on this responsibility yourself. I don't think that this organically would have come up on your beat as it were.

Helen Joyce: It absolutely wouldn’t. I was a finance editor. But then that said what journalists want is a great story. I think what I was most afraid of was that somebody else would get there first. I was really afraid I was going to get scooped. Sucks to the rest of them.

Sara: And this is just such an impeccable book that it will be very difficult to follow for whoever else wants to do the thing. I wondered if you had any messages apart from what you've already said to any women who might be listening and kind of wondering how to feel about this or what they should be doing?

Helen Joyce: So Maya is always very good on these things. She's very good pragmatist and a very good strategist. So she has an organisation she's founded called Sex Matters and there are other organisations too, but one of the nice things she often says is ‘level up’ whatever it is that you have felt brave enough to do. Just do the next thing. So if you'd just felt brave enough to follow a few accounts, but you haven't dare ‘like’ a tweet. And if you've liked, maybe you could retweet. And if you've retweeted, maybe you would retweet with your own comments. And maybe you can make taken to real life. Like maybe you could say to somebody, do you see that thing about rapists and women's prisons? Like, I really don't think that's okay. Or did you hear that thing about Laurel Hubbard? Whenever, because the fact is the huge majority of people agree with us entirely on this, but one of the clever tricks of the gender identity movement has been to present the idea that there are two sexes as some bizarre radical theory that needs to be defended in court. And it has to be balanced in print.

Whereas actually the huge, huge majority of everyone who's ever lived and who is alive now and everyone in this country completely agrees with us. And so if everybody said that, the whole argument would be over. The only reason this argument is able to go on is because people don't say it.

So every person who is able to just speak a bit more, brings the end closer, and the end, the reason we're doing all this in case people forget why we're doing this, we're doing this because right now there are women who were locked up with rapists in their prisons. Can you imagine what that must feel like that has been ruled as a human rights, abuse at the most grotesque sort under international law. And we're doing it right now because we're pretending those men are women. Right now they are sterilising children. And there are sterilising children who say that they think they are members of the opposite sex, those children think that they can be turned into the opposite sex. They can't be, they're being put on a path to sterility that's happening right now. It's a grotesque human rights abuse. I can't stop it out right. But I can hopefully bring the end of those things earlier. And you can too.

Sara: And finally, where can we get your book and how can women follow you?

Helen Joyce: Right, I’m at HJoyceGender@Twitter.

You can find my book and all the usual good bookshops, as they say Waterstones are stocking it, but Blackwell's, I'm particularly fond of, because Blackwell's own Heffers and Heffers invited me in to sign a bunch of them. So you can get a signed copy at Blackwell's. They will post it free and that's including abroad if you're abroad and you don't want to wait until September to get this, which is when it comes out. And most of the rest of the world. You can order it from Blackwell's website and you can maybe go to your own local bookshop and say, are you stocking this book.

I've received letters from women who did that and were told. No, because it was a book of hate and that there was a trans identified member of staff who would feel uncomfortable and they pushed back. And in the end the bookshop realised that they should be in the business of selling books, not in the business of censoring ideas.

You can do any of those things, but I'd like you to read it because I do think that I said some sensible things in it that might actually help people. So would like those ideas to get out there.

Sara: Absolutely. And I would just second that I think it was just crystal clear, so easy to read and follow an exemplar of what really good communication, proper research and just cool logic can bring to the table. The only one tiny niggle that I had about the book was that I thought it was a bit unfortunate that you put how many Twitter followers you have on the dust jacket. I was like, that's going to go up that's already inaccurate.

Helen Joyce: A number of things that have happened since it went to press, you know, like Maya’s second hearing, but that's fine.

There'll be a new edition.