I don't say unpopular things for fun, but I have to speak up on gender ideology

SIX years ago, I was working as a journalist at The Economist. One fateful day, the editor-inchief asked me: “Why do kids keep coming home and saying ‘such and such is trans’?” I replied that I didn’t know, but would look into it. That conversation changed the course of my life

- Helen Joyce

The first sign that this topic was unlike any other was the way interviewees responded to straightforward questions as if simply asking them made me a bigot or fascist. Questions like: what does “transition” mean? Do people feel better afterwards? And the million-dollar one: should those feelings give them access to facilities for that sex? The second sign was the total lack of rigorous academic research on trans identification. Questioning the core mantra that “trans women are women” was verboten.

I became seriously concerned that grave harms were being caused by the emerging idea that when classifying humans as men or women, what matters is how people self-describe, not their biology. Men who identified as women were gaining entry to supposedly single-sex spaces and sports. Children were being taught that what made them boys or girls wasn’t their bodies but their adherence to regressive stereotypes.

I’d already been considering writing a book about what I was discovering, but had hesitated because of the grief it would bring. My doubts vanished. As a journalist you’re supposed to run towards the story, not away from it.