What it will take to reach liberal Americans

Plus: some reflections on my recent appearance alongside Debbie Hayton

One thing I still struggle with is having my clearly stated views misrepresented, not by bad-faith opponents, but by people who agree with me on the main issues. It’s happened twice in the past week, and Lord it is tiresome. I know I should be used to it, but I wonder if I ever will be.

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The first concerned my interview with Yascha Mounk for his podcast, “The Good Fight”, which came out on Saturday (audio-only). Getting gender-identity issues covered by people like Yascha – centrist-ish but Democrat-leaning, concerned about polarisation – is essential to making things better, in America and therefore globally. I felt the interview went very well – and yet I am apparently a Very Bad Person for something I said in it.

Yascha was, as people always are when relatively new to this topic, absolutely desperate for a solution that doesn’t just involve saying “you can’t change sex, trans women are men and trans men are women, men however they identify should never, ever be in women-only spaces.” They may understand that sex is real and immutable; they may understand that women need single-sex spaces and sports; they may agree that children are too young to do anything irreversible; they may suspect that the huge increase in trans identification among teenage girls is a social contagion; they may be certain that self-ID will mean bad men gaining unfettered access to places they shouldn’t be – but even they they simply can’t imagine saying that gender identity isn’t a thing and nobody, not a single person ever, should count as a member of the sex they aren’t. 

And so they try to find dividing lines – objective criteria to distinguish between “real” trans people and others who are misguided, confused, caught up in a trend or faking for malicious reasons. They say: If they’ve got a diagnosis. Or: If they’ve had the operation. Or: if they pass. They may not put it so clearly – I’ve heard people say “once they’ve had the change”, or “once they’ve done the full transition”, when quite clearly they wouldn’t be able to give you any details on what they mean. But what they want is to imagine that they can say yes to some men who identify as women while excluding bad actors.

Sometimes these views are summarised as “true trans” – believing that there is some (probably tiny) group who have some genuine condition that requires them to undergo serious medical intervention, at the end of which they should count as the opposite sex for some purposes, even if not for everything (I think most people know that a person “born female” will never get someone else pregnant, and one “born male” will never carry a baby). 

The first thing I say to such people is that any such dividing line is impossible. We can’t ask people for their medical records before they use ordinary single-sex facilities. Still less can we ask a man if he’s been castrated. Judging on the basis of passing isn’t possible either: a trans-identifying person may believe they pass as the opposite sex but not do so. And anyway “passing” is context-specific – someone may pass at a quick glance when you walk by them in the supermarket but not if they are undressed in a changing-room. 

Apart from specialist single-sex spaces (elite sporting competitions) or those with restricted access (in workplaces that require entry cards), access to single-sex spaces can be “policed” only by perception and social norms. It has to be widely understood to be unacceptable to use a space you’re not entitled to, and also acceptable to complain about someone who breaks the rules.

But the second thing I say about the “true trans” dividing lines is more important: it’s that they’re unnecessary. We don’t need windows into people’s souls. We don’t need to try to work out which trans-identifying people are “trans enough” or “genuine”. We can just accept that people believe different things about themselves and about the world around them, and that in a modern, secular, pluralistic democracy, those beliefs should be accommodated to the greatest extent possible without imposing outsize costs on other people, and without requiring other people to pretend they believe things they do not.

This is the general framework for accommodating religious beliefs in UK law, and the situation is roughly similar in other Western democracies, though I’m not as familiar with their legal systems. (Some countries are less accommodating – France, for example, is stricter about religious symbols and dress codes in public places.) But in general, in a secular, liberal democracy you can believe what you want, you can profess your beliefs and you can act according to those beliefs – as long as you aren’t harming others. 

Civic society will even budge up for you a bit when it is very important to you and it’s not a big deal for others – the go-to example in discussions of UK law is that Sikh men are exempt from wearing a helmet when riding a motorbike because of the religious requirement to wear a turban. This does impose a cost on other people – it increases the risk of head injuries, and in a country with a nationalised health-care system free at the point of use, the treatment costs fall on the taxpayer. But it’s a diffuse cost, and the benefits for Sikh men are judged to be worth it. Without this accommodation, no observant Sikh man would be able to ride a motorbike at all – or indeed do any job where the uniform specified a head covering that couldn’t be a turban, as used to be the case in for police officers. 

In UK law, a facially neutral rule (one that applies to everyone equally) is indirect discrimination if obeying it is harder for people from some groups than others. That’s acceptable if the rule is a “proportionate means to a legitimate aim”. Making Sikh men wear helmets was judged to be disproportionate. But civil society won’t budge up when doing so imposes unacceptable costs on other people, or when it destroys other people’s rights. It won’t force others to pay even lip service to your beliefs. 

At least that’s the idea: obviously, when it comes to gender-identity ideology, lots of legal systems have been getting this wrong for years. And so what I said to Yascha is that we need to understand this novel belief system as precisely that – a belief system. Then we know exactly how to handle it. Accommodate to the maximum possible without imposing outsize costs on others, and without requiring others to believe it, or pretend to believe it. 

This section of what I said was tweeted approvingly by Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute – and attracted a ton of criticism.

This statement by ⁦@HJoyceGender⁩ on what liberal accommodation can/should look like is exactly right. pic.twitter.com/L0MZ0rW7li

— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) May 12, 2024

One objection was that this sort of accommodation isn’t what trans ideologues want. I agree! We are where we are because they are proselytising for an intolerant, totalising, evangelical neo-religion, and have managed to present that neo-religion as something quite different, namely a civil right. But it’s hardly the first time a group has come up with an awful theory of everything and then sought to make adherence compulsory. What the people who push this belief system need to hear is the same as those who seek to mandate a state religion need to hear: No, and a thousand times No.

I don’t just think that this is the right way to think about transgender ideology; I also think it’s the only way that has a chance of convincing ordinary, leftish Americans. They’ve been fed a pack of lies by the media they watch and read for so many years now, and central to those lies have been several false analogies. “Trans rights” – meaning the right to insist everyone treats you as the sex you are not – have been presented as feminism, the next civil-rights battle and gay rights 2.0. 

All these analogies are false, but it’s not enough just to debunk them. We need to give people a better analogy, one that elucidates rather than confuses, and one that allows them to think of themselves as liberal, tolerant and “good” rather than absolutist and conservative. I think that analogy is religious freedom. You’re very welcome to believe something odd and counterfactual about yourself, and you’re welcome to manifest that belief through your clothing, behaviour and speech – as long as doing so doesn’t infringe other people’s rights. And you’re absolutely not entitled to expect others to profess your faith. They’re perfectly entitled to declare themselves “gender atheists”.

This analogy is helpful in part because it’s not really an analogy at all – it’s just a new application of a carefully thought-out set of arguments and laws that were honed over many years. It displaces the false analogies – gender identity is like a belief system implies that it’s not like race or sexuality, because those things aren’t like beliefs. And lastly, it isn’t absolutist. The people who are so desperate to find a way to say something other than a flat No to claims about gender identity naturally default to thinking that the solution is to accept some people’s trans claims and not others’. Instead you’re saying that we don’t have to worry about why people believe what they believe. And the right way to be non-absolutist is to break down the claims, the rights, the needs and the demands, look at each one on its merits and then say: you can do this because it’s within your purview but not that because it would trample on others.

Lots of the demands of the current crop of transadvocates would clearly fail the sift of such an approach. You could call yourself what you want, wear what you want (within the constraints of common decency and, where relevant, professionalism) and ask others to use counter-factual words when referring to you (but not complain when they refuse). You would never be allowed to use anything designated solely for the opposite sex. Of course that’s not what they want, because they want to impose their beliefs on everyone, and their belief is that people are the sex they say they are*. But if they are thought of as advocates of a belief system, then that’s their problem, not ours. It’s a feature, not a bug.

The main “accommodation” I think we would end up with is quite a lot more alternative gender-neutral, single-user facilities alongside mixed-sex ones. I know some people feel too bitter about the whole thing to countenance that – but if you are okay with exemptions from helmet-wearing for Sikh men, or – a closer analogy – with designated parking spots for disabled people, then you already understand the general principle.

I’ll have more to say in a future issue on a more serious criticism of accepting “genderism” as a new religion: that it’s an inherently harmful belief and we should be seeking to stamp it out and in particular resist teaching it to children. But this issue will be too long if I keep going on with this, and so instead I’m going to talk a little about the response to my 20-minute segment on Spectator TV with transwoman Debbie Hayton, which got a lot of great responses but also some pushback.

In the interview, we discuss an article Hayton had written criticising a purported change in recent weeks in J.K. Rowling’s tone on trans issues. Rowling had tweeted sarcastically about the praise doled out to Lucy Clark, a man who identifies as a woman who has been refereeing women’s football (soccer) games, and is now managing a women’s side. 

When I was young all the football managers were straight, white, middle-aged blokes, so it's fantastic to see how much things have changed. https://t.co/jx9zp0hRyU

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 11, 2024

I don’t often say “just watch to the interview,” but I really did say everything I wanted to say in it, I think it’s really good and it’s only 16 minutes long. So please do watch.

I got plenty of good feedback on it, but also a variety of people complaining that I am a hypocrite, enabler and all-round disappointment. Apparently I shouldn’t have used Hayton’s post-transition first name – why? A boy can be named Sue, after all, and still be a boy. Yet again, critics claim I have argued in favour of preferred pronouns and am now changing my tune – in fact, I said I won’t use people’s preferred pronouns except in some specific circumstances but won’t harangue other people who do, and wish other people would stop such haranguing because it’s incredibly counterproductive. 

I’m also an enabler for having spoken to Hayden at all, apparently. This argument is especially rich, given that he’d already been commissioned to write an article, which was already published – I obviously had no influence over that. And nor do I want to have any! I’m heartily sick of other people managing to get me no-platformed by refusing to appear alongside me. It would be real hypocrisy if I tried to do the same in reverse. It also wouldn’t work! Trans people are platformed all over the place with no balance. It’s my side that can’t get listened to unless a trans person is also invited on.

More generally about the criticisms, I think people underestimate how difficult it is to do an interview like that (I know this sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet – sorry). It’s extremely hard to push through your sense of discomfort at saying something to someone’s face that you know they really don’t want to hear, and which has been coded as exceptionally impolite, even bigoted, while avoiding losing your train of thought, sounding angry or emotional, or tripping up and giving ammunition to those who want to misrepresent you. You really have to psych yourself up to do it and then do something that is quite incompatible with being psyched up: sound like you’re not wound up at all, because it’s essential to come across as utterly calm and reasonable.

I’m not saying this to complain; I choose to do this work and by now I’ve had a lot of practice. I’m doing it to make two points that I think link with the criticisms of the interview with Yascha.

The first is that it’s depressing just how illiberal (in the old-fashioned sense), indeed authoritarian, so many people on the right side of the Gender Wars are. They have no problem with repression as long as it’s their ideas that come out on top. Which is just extraordinary when you think that it’s our ideas that have been suppressed over the past ten years. You’d think people on our side would understand the merits of free speech and platforming a wide variety of viewpoints, if not on principle at least pragmatically. But apparently not.

The second is that the authoritarian mindset is distinctly unstrategic. We don’t win this without persuading people who disagree with us, and we don’t win it by demanding the repeal or passage of laws without laying any groundwork for it (actually, we probably don’t do it by changing anything large in the way of laws at all).

I have received a lot of messages, both in tweet replies and direct messages, in the past few days, saying some version of #RepealTheGRA (Gender Recognition Act). To which my answer is – don’t let me stop you, if you think you can do it. In the meantime I’ll be continuing to patiently explain, over and over again, how thinking of trans ideology as a belief system allows us to slot it into the pre-existing legal, ethical and intellectual framework for protecting human rights. I’ll be doing that because I think it  is far more likely to be persuasive to people from the parts of the political spectrum that have been most hostile to us, and has the best chance of getting us to where we need to be.

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*Correction: Thanks to the reader who noticed there were a couple of words missing in the original version of this article, which changed my meaning to the opposite of what I intended! This sentence is now fixed.