What We Can Learn About Helen Joyce in Two Sentences

That second paragraph on the book jacket of ‘Trans’

When Helen Joyce’s Trans—a deeply anti-transgender book—was published in September 2021, it made the UK’s Sunday Times bestseller list.

This is not a review of the book.

(Anticipating trolling: Yes, I read and review a lot of books. I’ve read this one, too. I’m qualified to write my thoughts about it, and I’ll probably do so. That article, whenever I write it, will be long. This brief article you’re looking at now isn’t an attempt to engage with all of the book’s main arguments.)

Books are not only the hundreds of pages they contain nor the hours we may spend reading them. Books have life, too, as cultural objects — in part because because of the promotional copy that circulates. Thus, here, I’m telling you very quickly what we can learn about Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality from two sentences of its promo copy. If you were to handle the hardcover in a bookstore or library, this is what you’d see.

There are three paragraphs on the inside flap of the dustjacket. They’re all bad. The middle paragraph is the worst.

What can we learn from these two sentences? Let’s look at them separately.

Sentence 1

Joyce complains that transgender people and their allies — the people who, in her view, are “redefining ‘man’ and ‘woman’” — are engaging in their political project “according to feelings rather than facts.” And yet, in the very same sentence, she complains that “people” — cisgender people, of course, that is, non-transgender people — “are being shamed and silenced” for interrogating transgender people’s existence, perspectives, and social and political needs.

Have a good look at this. She’s taking us on a loop.

In her story: (1) Cisgender people complain that transgender people are focused on their own feelings when they should be thinking or relating in some other way; (2) Transgender people counter-criticize because they disagree with whatever exactly…