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herpesma 's review for:
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
by Helen Joyce
So, my mom mailed me this book and asked me to read it with an open-mind. I'd be lying if I said I did, but I did genuinely try to posture myself in that direction. As such, I want to give Joyce credit that she correctly identifies and articulates many of the best arguments against her positions in a way that is quite earnest. I also believe she makes a compelling argument for some spaces, particularly support groups, remaining exclusive to cisgender women; care and support is important and specific, and it seems that things have gone a step too far in their foreclosure. She is clearly writing this book on behalf of others rather than herself, and as such her tone comes across (in the beginning) not as condemnatory, but exploratory. That is about where my nice things to say end.
Joyce, first and foremost, misidentifies her central target of Gender SelfID as the crux of a trans ideology. To attempt to define any overriding message to a movement that's arguably incohesive is perhaps an error in and of itself, but I would be astonished to see any major contingent of trans people agree with her proposal that the movement's thesis is "trans woman = woman = cis woman". No one I know is saying this; biological reality is acknowledged, at times painfully for trans people, but a settled person is well aware of the differences between trans and cis. We just think both are contained within the broader category of 'woman'. As such, much of the book is an explication of the ways in which trans people differ from the 'sex' with which their gender identity more closely aligns, often with a 'gotcha!' tone that falls rather limp in its misreading.
The broader issue, and unfortunately where I think Joyce becomes not only mistaken but actively malicious, is in whom her books seems to target and what it reinforces. This, despite the introduction gesturing towards opening a dialogue with trans people, is distinctly a book for cis women with fear of the minority. I'm not going to claim that fear is inherently transphobic or that these anxieties don't deserve to be addressed with compassion, but Joyce does not offer the same towards the subjects she writes about, seemingly for the sole purpose of demonstrating "yes, your anxieties are not only right, they should be greater!". Her recent radio comments about how trans people are a "threat to any sane world" (shorturl.at/qvyLU) make her feelings more explicit than in the book, but her overall endgame of logically proving people's desires to be not only harmful to themselves, but you, the reader, personally is at best risible and at worst horrifying. She accomplishes this by either cherry-picking trans people who have genuinely done awful things and extending their actions to be a result of common belief among the minority or through flat-out obfuscation, which there is a loooot of in this book.
Joyce frequently does not cite her sources in this book. There are times when she clarifies who she is drawing her quotes and information from, especially when dealing with uncontroversial, factual recounting of certain events, but when things get heated her pull quotes become completely and totally unmoored. There is a Further Reading section in the book, but no bibliography and often no way of telling where she is quoting from. This tactic is perhaps most egregious in her section on British women's prisons, in which she identifies what would be quite a large problem if she had the evidential backing to support her claims of mass abuse of the selfID system. I would like to engage with those statistics if they are there, but where are they! For a mathematician, Joyce seems totally unoccupied with grounding her claims in survey, relying far more on anecdote, and selectively at that.
This book is, ultimately, genuinely hateful. I implore any reader to just read the last paragraph of the book and attempt to decontextualize it from the slow-burn Joyce leads the reader through to get there. Are there concerns about bathrooms? Yes. Are there concerns about sports? Yes. Are there concerns about the relative lack of longitudinal medical data? Yes. But none of these are attacks, these are problems that need to get solved through a dialogue she doesn't seem interested in. The solution is not the foreclosure of trans people from visible public life, nor the abandonment of any and all social/legal steps towards bettering the lives of trans people (which, yes, has actually happened. Please just ask us), but through just not being condemnatory. Which, is exactly what this is.
Joyce, first and foremost, misidentifies her central target of Gender SelfID as the crux of a trans ideology. To attempt to define any overriding message to a movement that's arguably incohesive is perhaps an error in and of itself, but I would be astonished to see any major contingent of trans people agree with her proposal that the movement's thesis is "trans woman = woman = cis woman". No one I know is saying this; biological reality is acknowledged, at times painfully for trans people, but a settled person is well aware of the differences between trans and cis. We just think both are contained within the broader category of 'woman'. As such, much of the book is an explication of the ways in which trans people differ from the 'sex' with which their gender identity more closely aligns, often with a 'gotcha!' tone that falls rather limp in its misreading.
The broader issue, and unfortunately where I think Joyce becomes not only mistaken but actively malicious, is in whom her books seems to target and what it reinforces. This, despite the introduction gesturing towards opening a dialogue with trans people, is distinctly a book for cis women with fear of the minority. I'm not going to claim that fear is inherently transphobic or that these anxieties don't deserve to be addressed with compassion, but Joyce does not offer the same towards the subjects she writes about, seemingly for the sole purpose of demonstrating "yes, your anxieties are not only right, they should be greater!". Her recent radio comments about how trans people are a "threat to any sane world" (shorturl.at/qvyLU) make her feelings more explicit than in the book, but her overall endgame of logically proving people's desires to be not only harmful to themselves, but you, the reader, personally is at best risible and at worst horrifying. She accomplishes this by either cherry-picking trans people who have genuinely done awful things and extending their actions to be a result of common belief among the minority or through flat-out obfuscation, which there is a loooot of in this book.
Joyce frequently does not cite her sources in this book. There are times when she clarifies who she is drawing her quotes and information from, especially when dealing with uncontroversial, factual recounting of certain events, but when things get heated her pull quotes become completely and totally unmoored. There is a Further Reading section in the book, but no bibliography and often no way of telling where she is quoting from. This tactic is perhaps most egregious in her section on British women's prisons, in which she identifies what would be quite a large problem if she had the evidential backing to support her claims of mass abuse of the selfID system. I would like to engage with those statistics if they are there, but where are they! For a mathematician, Joyce seems totally unoccupied with grounding her claims in survey, relying far more on anecdote, and selectively at that.
This book is, ultimately, genuinely hateful. I implore any reader to just read the last paragraph of the book and attempt to decontextualize it from the slow-burn Joyce leads the reader through to get there. Are there concerns about bathrooms? Yes. Are there concerns about sports? Yes. Are there concerns about the relative lack of longitudinal medical data? Yes. But none of these are attacks, these are problems that need to get solved through a dialogue she doesn't seem interested in. The solution is not the foreclosure of trans people from visible public life, nor the abandonment of any and all social/legal steps towards bettering the lives of trans people (which, yes, has actually happened. Please just ask us), but through just not being condemnatory. Which, is exactly what this is.