Some doctors who have provided gender-affirming care to trans youngsters should be jailed for life, a gender-critical activist has said.
Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at Sex Matters, and the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, made the comments during an event at the Oxford Literary Festival on Wednesday (2 April).
During the hour-long event, entitled Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights’, Joyce spoke with fellow gender-critical campaigner Julie Bindel, the co-founder and co-director of trans-exclusionary organisation The Lesbian Project.
Responding to a question about whether doctors had violated their Hippocratic Oath by carrying out gender-affirming care and should be struck off Joyce said: “These people are never going to face what they deserve. There are people I could name right now whom I would like to see in jail for the rest of their lives but it’s not going to happen.”
She went on talk about one patient who allegedly had their breasts, ovaries and uterus removed but regretted the procedures a year later.
It’s a myth that there are high rates of regret among transgender men and women who transitioned. Research has shown that the numbers are lower than for many other commonplace procedures such as knee or bariatric weight-loss surgery.
Figures suggest that one per cent of people who received gender-affirming care later regretted it. By comparison, 19.5 per cent of patients weren’t happy after bariatric weight-loss surgery and it is believed that about seven per cent of people who have children also experience some kind of regret.
Joyce, who was once spotted reading explicit Harry Potter fanfic on a train, went on to describe being trans as a social contagion.
“If you are a teenage girl who doesn’t want to be a girl, that’s too boring and straightforward a thing to say. You want to be a special sort of person, you want out, you want to escape from whatever it is you’re trying to escape from,” she claimed.
She also suggested cis allies only spoke up for trans rights because it gave them a hobby outside otherwise dull lives, not because they actually cared about human rights.
“Why might a middle-aged white woman, who knows that middle-aged white women are the most boring people in the world – mums, the only people never allowed to ask for anything for themselves – why might that woman want to invent themselves as some amazing sort of ally?” she asked.
Even before it began, the festival was criticised for featuring Joyce, who is heterosexual and cisgender, as part of its LGBTQ+ line-up, with some people even calling for a boycott, and protesters staged a demonstration outside the Sheldonian Theatre where it was being held.
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