Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce was shorlisted for this year's Maddox Prize, which is awarded to "individuals who stand up for science and evidence, advancing public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility". In the Times today she profiles a number of the other candidates, including eventual winner Nancy Olivieri.

As for herself….

The worst threats I’ve suffered have been to my physical safety. I’ve had to be escorted from meetings by the police through crowds of protesters, and a few weeks ago, after speaking at an event on equality law in Manchester, I was followed down the street by a crowd baying “F*** Helen Joyce”. A trans-identified man with a conviction for violence is being investigated for threats against me and another women’s rights campaigner. He tweeted that he wanted to rip my eyes out, cut my hands off and carve up my face.

Like the other nominees I spoke to, the loss that makes me saddest is of my faith in institutions. [Chelsea] Polis told me of her shock at how hard it was to get a journal to retract an obviously shoddy paper, and her gratitude to Arnold & Porter, the law firm that represented her pro bono when no organisation in her field of reproductive health offered any help. “You start to see all these systemic failures, editorial failures, peer review failures, employers not backing up their people,” she says. “How can we do this work if we don’t have organisations able and willing to back us?”

For me, the revelation has been that when an institution enshrines a lie at its heart, that destroys its integrity and subverts its mission. Before I became a journalist I was a post-doctoral researcher in a subfield of geometry, and the analogy I draw is with accepting a false equation as true. If you insist that 1=0, you can use simple arithmetic to “prove” that anything equals anything. You bring down the entire mathematical edifice.

The lie that now concerns me is that people can change sex, which destroys all the accommodations women need to play a full part in public life, from female toilets, changing rooms and sports to rape crisis centres and domestic-violence shelters. I’ve watched in horror as becoming “trans inclusive” has turned women’s organisations through 180 degrees, so that instead of standing up for women they campaign for the rights of men who cross-dress, sometimes for erotic purposes, to come into women’s spaces.

Organisations that should have child safeguarding at their heart, such as the NSPCC and Girlguiding, now allow men who identify as women to oversee girls’ private spaces and intimate care. Gay rights campaigners press for children confused about their gender to be put on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that turn them into sterile facsimiles of the opposite sex. Since these children are statistically more likely than others to grow up gay, this is a form of gay conversion therapy.

I don’t know how much of this my fellow nominees agree with, and I don’t need to. I am totally against the idea that people should have to hold the right political positions to join in public discourse. When moral virtue becomes a condition of doing science or journalism, ideas are judged, not by their merits, but according to who holds them and which side they’re on. It becomes impossible for people with different world views to seek points of agreement and work together to make progress….

As for me, I never thought I’d have to spend my days patiently explaining that humans are mammals and can’t change sex; that tautologically you can’t have single-sex spaces if people of the other sex are allowed to use them; and that denying this harms women and children more than adult men. And I too lost a tribe: the conformists of journalism, drained of courage as their industry is ravaged by the loss of advertising revenues to social media and search engines. But I gained another: a lively bunch of feminists, gay rights advocates and free-speech campaigners who have broken through the fear barrier, told the truth and embraced the consequences. I like my new tribe better.