Thank you for this, and for all you do to keep these issues before our eyes. I have restacked, and I hope this essay—and your eloquent letter in support of this brave young woman—will be widely read and shared.
As Susan S wrote a couple of hours ago -- "Anna", a brave, forthright young woman and -- oh my, your supportive letter -- clear and careful thinking, eloquent and thorough, yet succinct and focused. You are a powerful voice.
I visited Serena Worley's substack, read her essays there. As a Eugene, OR (USA) resident and with some passing association with the U of Oregon -- it's a shame! Yes, it's a beautiful city. But yes, things have changed for the worse. I'm sorry she had a miserable time there, noted her appreciation of the region. She got out of U of O housing OK but her sorority served her up a nasty situation. Those two Oregon essays are eye-opening.
I agree, they were eye-opening and so hard to read, but I felt very grateful for Serena's going to the trouble to read us in, and I told her so. I think we older adults should collectively find meaningful ways to support university women like Serena and Anna, and the even-younger high school girls who show unbelievable courage in fighting for their sports and private spaces despite obscene personal risks. I wish I could offer them a prestigious job or internship, but failing that, I'd contribute towards an award or scholarship program that elevates and celebrates them. Mainly I want them to feel supported and cheered, and never isolated. They're the heroes of a generation.
So glad you were able to assist "Anna" so eloquently and substantially. I still sometimes find myself shaking my head in sorrowful disbelief that these lies are still being spewed out all around us. Until they cease, it's comforting to know that there are sane voices of influence such as yours.
This is how institutional bullies have worked since time immemorial. When someone steps out of line, drag out an ‘investigation’ to make them suffer as much stress and reputational damage as possible. Use confidentiality to keep everyone else in the dark and make them wary of associating with the target, ensuring the target’s isolation. Hopefully the target will cave but, if not, they can be manoeuvred into a non-disclosure agreement and be forced to leave without anyone knowing what really happened. Power retained by the bullies. This scenario plays out regularly in every sort of organisation and you are right, Helen, that with trans ideology the bullies now have an even bigger and more effective stick to wield. We only ever hear of a fraction of the damage done by trans ideologues.
I also wrote a letter of support for this student. One of the more appalling aspects of this case is that organisations external to the university, claiming to represent the interests of LGBTIQA+ people, attempted to persuade the university to punish this student who, as a woman and lesbian, had exercised her right of free speech in a student publication to defend the common sense proposition that a women is an adult human female and that a lesbian is a woman who is socially, affectionally and sexually attracted to other women.
I worked for an Ivy League university (that shall remain nameless) for more than a decade, and I am continually amazed by their own hypocrisy on these issues. Sure, they'll drop the hammer on people like Anna, but the instant that hammer-dropping costs them in research dollars or federal funding they'll suddenly rediscover the virtues of free expression. Same with DEI concerns, which they will blithely toss aside as their interests dictate.
These universities don't even have the courage of their LACK of convictions.
Isn't it time the adults stepped in to resolve this appalling situation within our universities? If the staff won't do it, then it should be a matter for the Office for Students (OfS), who are supposed to ensure the quality of provision in these institutions, i.e. make sure that all students are being treated fairly. Is anyone aware of the OfS being approached on this matter?
I'm glad I'm not at university now ( I was there in the early 1980s). I think I'd be out on my ear before you could say India Willoughby!
Well done supporting Anna and especially well done to Anna, of course. We'd love to put up a piece from her on our substack ( anonymously if required) if she would be kind enough to write it for us.
Helen, your compassion and intelligence shine through everything you write and say. Words are insufficient to thank you for what you are doing for women everywhere. Thank you, thank you.
However, I think she misunderstands the difference between sex and gender which is something of a common problem. Moot where and how that happens, and who’s to blame for it, but I think this part of her “Summary” gets to the heart of it:
JW: At the level of the individual, this shift [in the meaning of “transgender”] has occurred through the separation of gender from sex, before reclaiming biology through an innate sense of 'gender-identity'.
However, feminism itself is largely responsible for that “separation of gender from sex” – in fact, it goes back at least to 1945. Although the roots of it, and responsibility for that, go back even further according to something of a gold standard, the Oxford English Dictionary. For some details and elaborations, see my “Genspect, Feminism, and the ‘Transcult’”:
But that separation is, in itself, not at all the problem. In fact, there are some – in fact, a great many – very solid biological and philosophical reasons and justifications for that separation. However, the problem resides in the leap or article of faith – mostly by various transgender ideologues – in going from a more or less objective definition for gender to the largely subjective definition for "gender identity".
But some comments by Helen in a tweet several years ago from Sall Grover -- the Aussie media application owner, and of Tickle vs Giggle “fame” -- which both rather neatly illustrates those “biological and philosophical reasons” and which then illustrates where those transgender ideologues and Matt Walsh go off the rails. To wit:
• Helen Joyce: "believing" that "gender stereotypes and gender roles are inherent to what it is to be woman".;
• Yes, sex is real. Yes, sex differences are real.
But those “sex differences” are what is MEANT by the term “gender”, at least by the saner members of the transactivist and transgendered crowd. However, it might be emphasized that that interpretation is endorsed by more than a few quite reputable medical, biological, legal, and philosophical sources and spokespeople, such as the British Medical Journal, and the late great US Justice Anton Scalia.
Still something of a puzzle as to exactly what the term “gender” encompasses, but at least one should try thinking it is analogous to the phrase and term, “visible colours”. There’s a whole spectrum of colours in the latter and an extensive RANGE of various psychological and behavioural traits in the former, some more relevant in some contexts than others.
However, a recent post by US biologist Jerry Coyne [JC] provides a review of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle [SFC] by a pair of transwomen – including the fairly well-regarded evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden [JR] – that makes a decent, if somewhat forced, distinction between sex and gender. In their more or less reasonable view, “sex” denotes, at least to a first approximation, ONLY testicles for males and ONLY ovaries for females, and virtually everything else comes in under the rubric of “gender”.
QUOTE; JC: First, they agree that sex is defined by gamete size, something that Roughgarden, to [his] credit, has always admitted:
SFC: Zoologists, botanists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists generally define sex in this way: males make small gametes (sperm), females make large gametes (eggs) and hermaphrodites, such as most plants and many marine animals, make both.
JC: But they also claim that every trait other than gamete size is not part of sex but is part of gender:
SFC: Beyond gamete size, everything else — including secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles — is gender. UNQUOTE
Somewhat more technically and accurately, it’s not just any physiological or psychological trait that gets to qualify as a gendered one, as a either a feminine or masculine one. For example, our hearts, lungs, kidneys, and other organs don’t qualify as either masculine or feminine – as either of the two gender TYPES – since they’re not any more common to males than to females.
So it is ONLY those traits that are more common to one sex than to the other, and not unique to either, that get to be put in the bins “masculine” and “feminine”. All of those traits that occur more frequently with one sex or the other are called SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC, a rather distinct phenomenon that occurs across literally millions of other species:
As something of a brief example, breasts are a “feminine” trait because, of course, they’re more typical of women (AKA, adult human females (sex)). But they’re not unique to women since transwomen seem rather desperate to “grow their own” – although the milk is probably unfit for human consumption – and some men, those with gynecomastia, also sport those as well. But “breasts” are a “sexually dimorphic” trait, a feminine one. Guys with breasts are “gender non-conforming”, are “feminine males”, at least if one doesn’t look too deep under the hood.
So, “gender” as all of the sexually dimorphic traits and the sexes as simply ovaries or testicles – at least to a first approximation – is a more or less scientifically justified construction, if something of a “social one”. Although the thing there is that ALL of our definitions qualify as such “social constructions” – Moses didn’t bring “The First Dictionary” down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z. So the trick is to find definitions that at least get close, one hopes, to the essence of the phenomena being studied.
However, the sticky wicket, the flies in the ointment, is where various transloonies nutcases, gender ideologues, and scientific illiterates think” that if they acquire enough of the many sexually dimorphic traits more typical of the OTHER sex – guys putting on a dress, turning their dicks inside out into neovaginas, etc. – then they BECOME that other sex!
Presto; Shazam! Medical Miracles if not ones to grace a Catholic shrine or three! Don’t recollect reading – in my Gideon’s Bible – anything to the effect that while Jehovah supposedly created us male and female [Genesis 1.1 if I remember correctly ...], I sure don’t remember seeing anything to the effect that people were going to be able to change themselves from one to the other.
More than a minor puzzle as to just exactly how that happens, how the neurological wiring got scrambled into them “thinking” that way, although I’ve often thought that some “electro-convulsive shock therapy” might do the trick.
However, a couple of cases might provide a few illustrations of how some of those “usual suspects” “think” and of how they might reach the conclusion that it’s possible to “change sex” – a medical and biological impossibility. But another side of that is the view that when some people see they’re “gender non-conforming” they then “think” that that is evidence of actually being of the other sex, even if they haven’t a clue as to what it takes to qualify as either male or female in the first place.
But first, there's the Aussie transwoman Riley Dennis who -- on the ostensibly reputable website "Rational Wiki" -- insisted that becoming a female was simply a best three out of five scenario:
"Rational"-Wiki; Riley Dennis: For example, if someone was assigned male at birth, but took puberty blockers and hormones and had a vaginoplasty, they would have “female” hormones, secondary sex characters, and genitals. So, three of their five ways of determining sex would be “female”... That means three-fifths of the sex criteria point to female, and only one-fifth points to male – and if you believe that sex is an unchanging biological fact, that couldn’t be possible. But it is.
“Scientific illiteracy” doesn’t begin to cover that, but one might fault the educational and biological professions for that ignorance. There is, by definition, only a single trait that determines sex category membership -- a pair of traits for male and female – i.e., producing ova for female, and producing sperm for male. Everything else, all sexually dimorphic traits as noted above, is either of the masculine or feminine gender.
The other case is an article by a transwoman, Dawn Ennis, in Forbes magazine, of all places, that is clearly based on his assumption that because some young “transgirls” – i.e., effeminate juvenile males – exhibited some “gender-non-conforming” traits – i.e., ones typical of actual girls, of juvenile females – then they must have some inner “essence” of female and should therefore “transition” as soon as possible. For some details and elaborations, again, see my "Genspect, Feminism, and the "Transcult"’; The "Rights Revolution, Part Deux"/
So, the upshot in all of that? Arguably, the problem is not entirely with “gender ideology” itself, but with the contradictory and imprecise definitions for both sex and gender. Which you all – Helen, and many of the “gender-critical” crowd – are contributing to. Advancement out of the hole that you all – on both sides – have dug for yourselves would seem to depend on a closer look at them. As Francis Bacon once put it, “Therefore shoddy and inept application of words lays siege to the intellect in wondrous ways.":
Thank you for this, and for all you do to keep these issues before our eyes. I have restacked, and I hope this essay—and your eloquent letter in support of this brave young woman—will be widely read and shared.
As Susan S wrote a couple of hours ago -- "Anna", a brave, forthright young woman and -- oh my, your supportive letter -- clear and careful thinking, eloquent and thorough, yet succinct and focused. You are a powerful voice.
I visited Serena Worley's substack, read her essays there. As a Eugene, OR (USA) resident and with some passing association with the U of Oregon -- it's a shame! Yes, it's a beautiful city. But yes, things have changed for the worse. I'm sorry she had a miserable time there, noted her appreciation of the region. She got out of U of O housing OK but her sorority served her up a nasty situation. Those two Oregon essays are eye-opening.
I agree, they were eye-opening and so hard to read, but I felt very grateful for Serena's going to the trouble to read us in, and I told her so. I think we older adults should collectively find meaningful ways to support university women like Serena and Anna, and the even-younger high school girls who show unbelievable courage in fighting for their sports and private spaces despite obscene personal risks. I wish I could offer them a prestigious job or internship, but failing that, I'd contribute towards an award or scholarship program that elevates and celebrates them. Mainly I want them to feel supported and cheered, and never isolated. They're the heroes of a generation.
I adore you Helen Joyce.
So glad you were able to assist "Anna" so eloquently and substantially. I still sometimes find myself shaking my head in sorrowful disbelief that these lies are still being spewed out all around us. Until they cease, it's comforting to know that there are sane voices of influence such as yours.
This is how institutional bullies have worked since time immemorial. When someone steps out of line, drag out an ‘investigation’ to make them suffer as much stress and reputational damage as possible. Use confidentiality to keep everyone else in the dark and make them wary of associating with the target, ensuring the target’s isolation. Hopefully the target will cave but, if not, they can be manoeuvred into a non-disclosure agreement and be forced to leave without anyone knowing what really happened. Power retained by the bullies. This scenario plays out regularly in every sort of organisation and you are right, Helen, that with trans ideology the bullies now have an even bigger and more effective stick to wield. We only ever hear of a fraction of the damage done by trans ideologues.
I also wrote a letter of support for this student. One of the more appalling aspects of this case is that organisations external to the university, claiming to represent the interests of LGBTIQA+ people, attempted to persuade the university to punish this student who, as a woman and lesbian, had exercised her right of free speech in a student publication to defend the common sense proposition that a women is an adult human female and that a lesbian is a woman who is socially, affectionally and sexually attracted to other women.
I worked for an Ivy League university (that shall remain nameless) for more than a decade, and I am continually amazed by their own hypocrisy on these issues. Sure, they'll drop the hammer on people like Anna, but the instant that hammer-dropping costs them in research dollars or federal funding they'll suddenly rediscover the virtues of free expression. Same with DEI concerns, which they will blithely toss aside as their interests dictate.
These universities don't even have the courage of their LACK of convictions.
Isn't it time the adults stepped in to resolve this appalling situation within our universities? If the staff won't do it, then it should be a matter for the Office for Students (OfS), who are supposed to ensure the quality of provision in these institutions, i.e. make sure that all students are being treated fairly. Is anyone aware of the OfS being approached on this matter?
Thanks, Helen.
I'm glad I'm not at university now ( I was there in the early 1980s). I think I'd be out on my ear before you could say India Willoughby!
Well done supporting Anna and especially well done to Anna, of course. We'd love to put up a piece from her on our substack ( anonymously if required) if she would be kind enough to write it for us.
Have cross posted.
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/jason-and-the-argonauts
Dusty
Helen, your compassion and intelligence shine through everything you write and say. Words are insufficient to thank you for what you are doing for women everywhere. Thank you, thank you.
> “The hidden toll of Genderism; The public victims represent just a tiny fraction of the true cost”.
Amen to that. A case-in-point being a book, “The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology”, by UK columnist Joanna Williams:
https://civitas.org.uk/content/files/2454-A-The-Corrosive-Impact-of-TI-ppi-110-WEB.pdf
However, I think she misunderstands the difference between sex and gender which is something of a common problem. Moot where and how that happens, and who’s to blame for it, but I think this part of her “Summary” gets to the heart of it:
JW: At the level of the individual, this shift [in the meaning of “transgender”] has occurred through the separation of gender from sex, before reclaiming biology through an innate sense of 'gender-identity'.
However, feminism itself is largely responsible for that “separation of gender from sex” – in fact, it goes back at least to 1945. Although the roots of it, and responsibility for that, go back even further according to something of a gold standard, the Oxford English Dictionary. For some details and elaborations, see my “Genspect, Feminism, and the ‘Transcult’”:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/genspect-feminism-and-the-transcult
But that separation is, in itself, not at all the problem. In fact, there are some – in fact, a great many – very solid biological and philosophical reasons and justifications for that separation. However, the problem resides in the leap or article of faith – mostly by various transgender ideologues – in going from a more or less objective definition for gender to the largely subjective definition for "gender identity".
But some comments by Helen in a tweet several years ago from Sall Grover -- the Aussie media application owner, and of Tickle vs Giggle “fame” -- which both rather neatly illustrates those “biological and philosophical reasons” and which then illustrates where those transgender ideologues and Matt Walsh go off the rails. To wit:
• Helen Joyce: "believing" that "gender stereotypes and gender roles are inherent to what it is to be woman".;
• Yes, sex is real. Yes, sex differences are real.
https://x.com/salltweets/status/1683685088939343873
But those “sex differences” are what is MEANT by the term “gender”, at least by the saner members of the transactivist and transgendered crowd. However, it might be emphasized that that interpretation is endorsed by more than a few quite reputable medical, biological, legal, and philosophical sources and spokespeople, such as the British Medical Journal, and the late great US Justice Anton Scalia.
Still something of a puzzle as to exactly what the term “gender” encompasses, but at least one should try thinking it is analogous to the phrase and term, “visible colours”. There’s a whole spectrum of colours in the latter and an extensive RANGE of various psychological and behavioural traits in the former, some more relevant in some contexts than others.
However, a recent post by US biologist Jerry Coyne [JC] provides a review of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle [SFC] by a pair of transwomen – including the fairly well-regarded evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden [JR] – that makes a decent, if somewhat forced, distinction between sex and gender. In their more or less reasonable view, “sex” denotes, at least to a first approximation, ONLY testicles for males and ONLY ovaries for females, and virtually everything else comes in under the rubric of “gender”.
QUOTE; JC: First, they agree that sex is defined by gamete size, something that Roughgarden, to [his] credit, has always admitted:
SFC: Zoologists, botanists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists generally define sex in this way: males make small gametes (sperm), females make large gametes (eggs) and hermaphrodites, such as most plants and many marine animals, make both.
JC: But they also claim that every trait other than gamete size is not part of sex but is part of gender:
SFC: Beyond gamete size, everything else — including secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles — is gender. UNQUOTE
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/11/20/joan-roughgarden-and-jaimie-veale-on-sex-and-gender/
SFC: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/trans-gender-sex-female-male-21125145.php (paywalled);
SFC; Archive link: https://archive.ph/KluWD
Somewhat more technically and accurately, it’s not just any physiological or psychological trait that gets to qualify as a gendered one, as a either a feminine or masculine one. For example, our hearts, lungs, kidneys, and other organs don’t qualify as either masculine or feminine – as either of the two gender TYPES – since they’re not any more common to males than to females.
So it is ONLY those traits that are more common to one sex than to the other, and not unique to either, that get to be put in the bins “masculine” and “feminine”. All of those traits that occur more frequently with one sex or the other are called SEXUALLY DIMORPHIC, a rather distinct phenomenon that occurs across literally millions of other species:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
As something of a brief example, breasts are a “feminine” trait because, of course, they’re more typical of women (AKA, adult human females (sex)). But they’re not unique to women since transwomen seem rather desperate to “grow their own” – although the milk is probably unfit for human consumption – and some men, those with gynecomastia, also sport those as well. But “breasts” are a “sexually dimorphic” trait, a feminine one. Guys with breasts are “gender non-conforming”, are “feminine males”, at least if one doesn’t look too deep under the hood.
So, “gender” as all of the sexually dimorphic traits and the sexes as simply ovaries or testicles – at least to a first approximation – is a more or less scientifically justified construction, if something of a “social one”. Although the thing there is that ALL of our definitions qualify as such “social constructions” – Moses didn’t bring “The First Dictionary” down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z. So the trick is to find definitions that at least get close, one hopes, to the essence of the phenomena being studied.
However, the sticky wicket, the flies in the ointment, is where various transloonies nutcases, gender ideologues, and scientific illiterates think” that if they acquire enough of the many sexually dimorphic traits more typical of the OTHER sex – guys putting on a dress, turning their dicks inside out into neovaginas, etc. – then they BECOME that other sex!
Presto; Shazam! Medical Miracles if not ones to grace a Catholic shrine or three! Don’t recollect reading – in my Gideon’s Bible – anything to the effect that while Jehovah supposedly created us male and female [Genesis 1.1 if I remember correctly ...], I sure don’t remember seeing anything to the effect that people were going to be able to change themselves from one to the other.
More than a minor puzzle as to just exactly how that happens, how the neurological wiring got scrambled into them “thinking” that way, although I’ve often thought that some “electro-convulsive shock therapy” might do the trick.
However, a couple of cases might provide a few illustrations of how some of those “usual suspects” “think” and of how they might reach the conclusion that it’s possible to “change sex” – a medical and biological impossibility. But another side of that is the view that when some people see they’re “gender non-conforming” they then “think” that that is evidence of actually being of the other sex, even if they haven’t a clue as to what it takes to qualify as either male or female in the first place.
But first, there's the Aussie transwoman Riley Dennis who -- on the ostensibly reputable website "Rational Wiki" -- insisted that becoming a female was simply a best three out of five scenario:
"Rational"-Wiki; Riley Dennis: For example, if someone was assigned male at birth, but took puberty blockers and hormones and had a vaginoplasty, they would have “female” hormones, secondary sex characters, and genitals. So, three of their five ways of determining sex would be “female”... That means three-fifths of the sex criteria point to female, and only one-fifth points to male – and if you believe that sex is an unchanging biological fact, that couldn’t be possible. But it is.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Riley_Dennis
Archive link: https://archive.ph/h911h
“Scientific illiteracy” doesn’t begin to cover that, but one might fault the educational and biological professions for that ignorance. There is, by definition, only a single trait that determines sex category membership -- a pair of traits for male and female – i.e., producing ova for female, and producing sperm for male. Everything else, all sexually dimorphic traits as noted above, is either of the masculine or feminine gender.
The other case is an article by a transwoman, Dawn Ennis, in Forbes magazine, of all places, that is clearly based on his assumption that because some young “transgirls” – i.e., effeminate juvenile males – exhibited some “gender-non-conforming” traits – i.e., ones typical of actual girls, of juvenile females – then they must have some inner “essence” of female and should therefore “transition” as soon as possible. For some details and elaborations, again, see my "Genspect, Feminism, and the "Transcult"’; The "Rights Revolution, Part Deux"/
So, the upshot in all of that? Arguably, the problem is not entirely with “gender ideology” itself, but with the contradictory and imprecise definitions for both sex and gender. Which you all – Helen, and many of the “gender-critical” crowd – are contributing to. Advancement out of the hole that you all – on both sides – have dug for yourselves would seem to depend on a closer look at them. As Francis Bacon once put it, “Therefore shoddy and inept application of words lays siege to the intellect in wondrous ways.":