Helen Joyce

Helen Joyce in 2018

Helen Joyce (born 1968) is an Irish journalist and Gender-critical feminist. She studied as a mathematician and worked in academia before becoming a journalist. Joyce began working for The Economist as education correspondent for its Britain edition in 2005 and has since held several senior positions, including finance editor and international editor. Her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality in 2021. Since 2022, she has been the director of the Sex Matters pressure group.

Quotes

• "It is possible to feel differently about things," I wrote to myself the day I came back from my trip. "You don't have to be who you've always been. More things are choices than you imagined. Ordinary things are very beautiful if you've the eyes to see."
  • "My Adventures in Psychedelia", The New York Review of Books (11 October 2019)
  • On a visit to a countryside retreat in the Netherlands organised by the British Psychedelic Society.

• [T]he fastest time ever run by Allyson Felix, the women’s 400 metre Olympics champion, is beaten more than 15,000 times each year by men and boys.
  • From Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, London: Oneworld, 2021 [2022], as cited in "Trans by Helen Joyce review — Women exist! The facts of biology trump ideology", The Times (16 July 2021)
  • On the issue of transwomen competing with natal women in female-participating sports. Allyson Felix won seven Gold medals competing in the Summer Olympics 4 × 400 metres relay from 2008 to 2021 (the 2020 event was postponed).

• As an atheist, I do not have to pay even lip service to any religion – in return for which I gladly accept the right of religious people to discuss their faith, wear its symbols, worship freely and proclaim positions I oppose, such as the immorality of same-sex marriage or the importance of wifely obedience. I demand the same freedom to reject and oppose gender-identity ideology, and in return gladly accept that others have the right to preach it and live by it.
  • From Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, London: Oneworld, 2021 [2022], Conclusion

• It’s a very strange experience to be called "hateful" when all you’re doing is trying to protect human rights. I know what "hate" feels like. I recently had to report a threat made against me by a man who identifies as a woman. He tweeted saying that he would cut up my face and tear out my eyes.
• When we can't speak freely, we can't expose scandals.
  • "I don’t say unpopular things for fun, but I have to speak up on gender-identity ideology", Evening Standard (1 November 2023)

About Helen Joyce

• [H]er target is the political focus of modern trans activism: “gender identity”. This is the idea that your perceptually invisible inner feelings about whether you are really a man, a woman, or neither, should trump any facts about your actual sex, wherever those feelings may differ. Joyce deals with the philosophical contradictions of gender identity ideology briskly but efficiently. If, as the “thought-terminating” mantra goes, trans women are women, what then is a woman?
  • Kathleen Stock "Toddlers transitioning, male rapists in women's prisons: this is the book you need to read about trans activism", The Telegraph (18 July 2021)
  • From a review of Trans.