Helen Joyce > Quotes

“Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Sexes’ are classes of organisms defined by the developmental pathways that evolved to produce gametes: eggs and sperm. As with any part of the body, reproductive organs may develop in anomalous ways, just as some people are born with extra fingers or toes, or missing eyes or legs, but humans are still ten-fingered and ten-toed, binocular and bipedal. For there to be even three sexes there would have to be a third gamete, and there is not.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“TERF, which stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’. The first part does not refer to excluding trans people from jobs, housing or other goods: it simply means denying that identifying as a woman makes you one. ‘Radical feminism’ is feminism understood as a liberation movement to free females from the patriarchy – a man cannot be a radical feminist, only an ally. Only females, therefore, can be TERFs. There is no equivalent insult for males who deny that sex can be changed by self-declaration.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“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.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“It is a feeble form of dualism, to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ replaced by ‘they/them’ on a pronoun badge.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“It beggars belief that clinicians somehow learned to predict exactly which children would persist, exactly when they started using puberty blockers. Far more plausible is that puberty blockers, as well as blocking the physical changes that puberty brings, also blocked the developmental process whereby gender dysphoria often resolves”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“puberty blockers have never been put through clinical trials for use in gender medicine, and are not licensed by their manufacturers for this purpose. Their main uses are to treat hormone-related conditions in adulthood, in particular endometriosis and prostate cancer, and to ‘chemically castrate’ sex offenders. The two studies that looked at what happened when they were used to delay puberty in animals suggested this caused defects in spatial memory and increased behaviours thought to be analogous to depression in humans.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

“Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and ‘troubling’ or ‘queering’ the definitions of oppressed groups.”
― Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality