Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce, author of Trans, and the most eloquent critical speaker around on the subject of gender ideology, is sick and tired of being cancelled. Here at The Critic she lists the number of times she's been approached to speak or lined up for an interview and then at the last minute informed that for some reason or another they've decided not to go ahead.

And then there's Woman's Hour:

I’ve no such striking story for BBC Woman’s Hour, because it’s never got as far as recording anything with me that it could then drop. The nearest I have to proof that this is deliberate rather than an oversight is something that happened in early 2022. 

Grace Lavery, a trans-identified man whose book Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis was about to come out, had claimed that none of the feminist critics of trans ideology were willing to debate him. I sighed heavily and decided to take one for the team. UnHerd agreed to host a debate between him and me, booked a venue and started selling tickets — at which point Lavery pulled out, insinuating that I, UnHerd and anyone on my side were fascists.

And who did Woman’s Hour invite on after this performance: the best-selling campaigner for women’s rights or the bloke who had written a book about his penis, and who insults and demeans women’s-rights campaigners? It’s not like the show’s producers and presenters can possibly think this is what its audience wants. Every August they tweet requests for topics and interviewees for “listeners’ week”; let’s just say I’m mentioned a lot in the replies and Lavery isn’t.

I’m such a contaminant that even people who write about me or quote me get into trouble. I recently met a well-known journalist who told me that in several decades she had had precisely one column spiked: the one she wrote about my book. 

And then there’s Kelvin Wright, an army surgeon who shared a quote from me on his personal Facebook page: “If women cannot stand in a public place and say ‘men cannot be women’, then we do not have women’s rights at all.” He was reported by a junior colleague for misconduct, and though he’s recently been cleared of wrongdoing he found the investigation so “hellish” that he has left the service. 

Why all this matters isn’t because it’s unfair to me, although it is. It’s because what I’m trying to shout from the rooftops is that women’s rights are being destroyed in the name of a parody of social justice; that politics and policymaking are turning towards ideology and away from evidence; and above all that a socio-medical scandal is being played out on the bodies of children….

Well, I’ve decided I’m no longer playing this game. I’m not the one who should be ashamed — that emotion is a better fit for the cowards who would rather turn a blind eye to the harms being done to children than risk social media blow-back. And playing nice has got me nowhere. Even when I keep quiet about being cancelled, the censors don’t invite me back. So I might as well tell the truth about that too. 

Good for her.

Grace Lavery, you may remember, is the assistant professor in the English Department at Berkeley who encourgaed his Twitter (X) followers to steal copies of Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and burn them. He also claimed Mary Ann Evans – who wrote under the pen name George Eliot to get published at a time when women were not expected or encouraged to write serious novels – as a trans pioneer. Not perhaps your usual Woman's Hour guest, but clearly more welcome that Helen Joyce.