Helen Joyce, The Economist’s Britain editor, discusses her newly released book, TRANS: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021) exposing some of the origins of gender identity and its early accommodation within society when the numbers of transsexuals were quite small. Comparing this early demographic to “witness protection,” Joyce explains the many reasons why society accommodated these individuals from the fact that people tend to accommodate even the most unfounded of ideas—that anyone could possibly be born in the “wrong body”—to the sexism within societies that still accommodate the implausible notion that someone could not only have a “pink brain,” but where such sentiment is received by subjects who themselves hold stereotypical ideas about the opposite sex. Discussing the larger political sphere of women’s physical boundaries, Joyce analyses how the silencing by the current gender identity movement driven by a tiny core of individuals requires that we must go along with a charade. She elucidates the bone-deep interpretability of sex that is missed when the debate takes place virtually, in the absence of the male body where the only way that so many accept men in women’s private spaces is to pretend that there isn’t a “grotesque overstepping of women’s boundaries” as this debate takes place within the purely linguistic realm.

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