Why are transactivist commentators so rubbish?

In which I have a good moan about the poor quality of gender-identity ideologues willing to make their case in public

I’m sorry to have missed an edition last week – I returned from the FiLiA conference in Glasgow with a horrific lurgy and was out of action for a week. However, I’m almost completely better now, with only a lingering cough and hoarseness.

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Which I hope will quickly fade, because tomorrow (Wednesday 25th) I am appearing at a live event at the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), and I’d quite like to have my voice back for it. It’s a panel discussion of a recent paper written by Marc Glendening, the IEA’s head of cultural affairs, entitled “Transgender ideology: a new threat to liberal values” – and two of my least favourite people are involved, Peter Tatchell and Freda Wallace. As the moderator is also a man, I’m the only woman on the panel, and both Tatchell and Wallace are inveterate talkers-over and shouters-downer of women. It would be bad enough if my voice was as strong as it normally is; given that I’m recovering from a lost voice, I’m not much looking forward to it.

Tatchell won’t need an introduction to anyone in the UK, but for foreigners, he’s a long-time gay-rights campaigner who was one of the founders of Outrage!, a gay-rights group that focused on direct action and lawbreaking as a means of raising public awareness. It was particularly controversial because some of its members used “outing” as a way of highlighting the hypocrisy of closeted gay people who publicly espoused homophobic positions. Nowadays, Tatchell faces more criticism for his position on the age of consent (he says it should be reduced to 14 but has on several occasions made it clear he doesn’t think “consensual” intergenerational sex is a problem, and has referred to children as young as nine having enjoyable, consensual sex that did them no harm). This article by James Esses in the Critic has the relevant links.

None of this endears him to feminist campaigners, who tend to be rather hot on the evils of child-abuse and cool on male sexual entitlement. But it is his latest irritating reinvention as a trans-rights advocate that has got him platformed at the IEA for this event: unlike almost anyone else who thinks men can be women, he is willing to say so in the company of people who disagree. From the point of view of someone trying to put together a “balanced” panel or media segment, this makes him immensely useful.

I find him an immensely irritating media voice on the topic. He accepts that there are indeed two sexes, male and female. Pleasingly, this gets him berated as transphobic by the lunatic fringe of transactivism, like India Willoughby. 

Two things: Peter Tatchell - great campaigner for gay rights that he is - does NOT speak for the trans community. He’s not an emissary or ambassador for us.
And secondly, you don’t qualify as a ‘biological woman’ by having a baby. Or big gannets teeth, or whatever it is you say.

— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) September 9, 2023

Tatchell thinks, however, that man and woman refer to “gender identities” or “gender roles”, and that “brain scans” have “proved” that trans people have brains that are typical of their identities. 

I address this myth specifically in my book, but he seems to be impervious to evidence on this. To quote:

“Once the activists are done with demoting sex from an objective characteristic of individuals to a social fiction, it is time for step two: to ‘reify’ gender identity – that is, to turn it from an abstract idea into something concrete. The main argument put forward is that neuroscientists have found a brain structure that is different in trans people, or shown that trans people’s brains look like those of the sex with which they identify.

“This is an odd claim to make if you also insist that biological sex is not binary, since you have to know which bodies are male and female before you can group brain scans into male and female and look for the differences. It is equally strange to claim that differences between brains could be a solid basis for classifying people as men and women, but those between genitals could not. Machine-learning algorithms can be taught to classify brain scans as male or female with around ninety-five percent accuracy. But that is far worse than the human eye can do with faces, and worse still than it can do with genitals.

“Perhaps the oddest thing about this argument is the way a few small, inconclusive studies have been interpreted as showing that gender identity, rather than gender dysphoria, is ‘in the brain’. The neuroscientists who study trans identification are not (usually) claiming to show that trans people have brains of the opposite sex. That is a misrepresentation by activists. Rather, they are attempting to discover the physical correlates of an unusual mental state. And it would hardly be surprising if feelings of dissociation from one’s bodily sex are linked with detectable differences in brain scans.”

Reading this again, I’m surprised I didn’t mention two other problems with the scant literature on brain differences between trans and non-trans people: confounding with sexual orientation and failure to control for hormone use. Some studies have found (again small and on-average) differences between gay men’s and straight men’s brains, and same-sex attracted people are over-represented among the trans-identified. I would also not be surprised if long-term use of cross-sex hormones shows up in brain scans. I’m also surprised I didn’t mention that nobody is doing brain scans to decide who’s trans! If you really believe that “brain differences” make people trans then you can’t believe in the principle of self-ID, because you think there’s an objective marker for transness, albeit one that nobody is checking.

But anyway, I doubt I’ll manage to get to say any of this. One of the features of the “debate” on this topic, such as it is, is that the trans-rights falsehoods are snappy and appealing, and debunking them takes ages. Debating people like Tatchell is like trying to take on the “firehose of falsehood” – a propaganda technique beloved of the Russian government in which nonsense is spewed as fast as possible on multiple platforms with no regard for logic or internal consistency. The aim is to pump out nonsense much faster than it can be debunked, and to undermine respect for truth in general.

Some of the nonsense isn’t merely straightforwardly false; it’s not even simply based on false premises. It makes no sense. What could it even mean to say that your “brain” is what classifies you as man or woman, when the only reason we know there are (small, on-average) differences between men’s and women’s brains is because we already know who’s a man and who’s a woman in order that we can divide the scans into the two groups? And we know who’s a man and who’s a woman because their bodies are categorically distinct – so why on Earth would we ignore this, and reclassify people according to tiny, on-average differences in brains that you can’t even see without specialist medical equipment?

But Tatchell isn’t the main problem with the event: Wallace is. He’s a Twitter troll I long ago blocked because of his extreme nastiness. He blogs about the “TERF Reich” (I’m not linking to his output, you can search for it yourself if you like). He uses casual sexist and demeaning slurs for women. He particularly dislikes Henrietta Freeman, a woman with profound disabilities who campaigns for single-sex care; in fact he seems obsessed by her. Whenever she tweets he replies confusingly and aggressively. 

In one reply he implied that his job driving patients to and from NHS appointments meant he had access to Henrietta’s medical records, and that to protect NHS workers he would be justified in adding a note claiming that, in case of an emergency, she would be unwilling to be looked after by a gender non-conforming, masculine-looking or lesbian woman. Another reply to a perfectly anodyne tweet by Henrietta consisted of a photograph of what appears to be a transwoman being given a blow job, captioned “Dads worship female penis”. This delightful tweet has since been deleted, but I’ve been sent the screenshot.

Wallace has also pirated copies of my book and those of several other gender-critical authors. He has put full PDFs of the books on a Dropbox, the link to which he has shared on both Medium and Substack. I and other authors have put in copyright infringement notices, which got those particular articles taken down. But he continues to have accounts on both platforms – unlike, for example, Maya Forstater, who lost her Medium account some months ago without warning for unspecified transgressions and with no right of appeal.

Wallace’s latest article about me, published over the weekend, is entitled “Helen Joyce & Everything She Gets Wrong”. (Again, I’m not linking; search if you can be bothered.) You’d think that if you’re writing an article about how someone else gets so much wrong you’d do a bit of fact-checking yourself – but no. 

To give just two indicative examples, apparently I was a personal-finance writer at The Economist (The Economist doesn’t cover personal finance). And apparently Sean Plunket, a New Zealand-based journalist I spoke to recently, is surrounded by a “network” that is funded by Toby Young, a British journalist and founder of the (UK) Free Speech Union. As far as I can tell, the link is that Plunket broadcasts on The Platform, an independent media outlet which has interviewed Jonathan Ayling of the NZ Free Speech Union – which may or may not have connections with the UK organisation, but which I highly doubt gets money from it. The hyperlink on the claim about Toby Young funding Plunket just brings you to the NZ FSU homepage, which proves precisely nothing. But if you don’t bother to click through you will get the impression that there is evidence of the claim.

Once again, this is firehose of falsehood stuff. It’s irrelevant what I used to write about at The Economist, and likewise the precise details of the links, if any, between Toby Young, FSU UK and FSU NZ. It’s just noise. But it gives the impression that Wallace knows shady secrets about people, and debunking it takes up time that could be better spent, and it – I presume – makes him feel important.

It really shouldn’t be nobodies like Tatchell and Wallace defending trans ideology at the IEA tomorrow. They’re not the people running charities that incentivise businesses to replace single-sex toilets with gender-neutral ones, and all the other tedious rights-destroying demands of the trans lobby. They’re not leading big-budget national campaigns to bring in gender self-ID or to “ban conversion therapy” – that is, ban ethical, exploratory care for gender distress in favour of an ideological approach underpinned by a belief in gendered souls. They’re not schmoozing with politicians at award dinners, or circulating in and out of cushy advisory jobs (Iain Anderson, the short-lived chair of Stonewall, has just been appointed as an advisor on business to the Labour Party), or getting seats in the House of Lords (Ruth Hunt, the woman who turned Stonewall into a trans lobby group, is now a Baroness). 

Those are the people who should be defending their ideas and policy demands in public. But of course they won’t, in part because they’re allowed to get away with not doing so, and perhaps also because they know their ideas are indefensible. And so space is left for rent-a-gobs like Tatchell and cartoonish trolls like Wallace, who in any just world would never be platformed. And saps like me waste our evenings paying them the undeserved compliment of rational opposition. To quote the transactivists: I’m tired, y’all.

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(PS: the event at the IEA is being filmed. I’ll share the YouTube link as soon as it’s available, so you too can feel my pain!)