Mick Hartley

From an interview with Helen Joyce – author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality – at Spiked:

I have a huge problem with the truth claims of transgender activism, namely that our biological sex either doesn’t matter or isn’t real, and that it is something that we should be allowed to overwrite. I have been bothered by that for a long time. If you abandon the material reality of sexed bodies, particularly women’s sexed bodies, you have no basis on which to argue for women-only spaces.

That issue got me interested, but it didn’t get me over the edge to writing a book. What pushed me towards that was meeting de-transitioners. These are people who were fooled by this ideology into thinking that they needed to transition in order to be happy. They were told that they had this weird inner soul, an opposite-sex soul, that explained everything that was bad about their lives. It happens a lot to teenage girls these days, because it is quite hard being a teenage girl. Somebody comes along and tells them that the reason they find it so hard is that they are really a boy. They take testosterone, they may get a mastectomy and maybe even a hysterectomy. And then they realise it was all a chimera. That strikes me as a grotesque medical scandal and an example of child abuse. That’s what made me write this book.