Trans critic Helen Joyce: A visitor from Terf Island

Saturday, 15 November 2025

Are the transgender wars over? Philip Matthews asks Helen Joyce, author of the best-seller Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

It was a dark day, and two words bring it all back: Albert Park.

Irish writer Helen Joyce was in the UK when she saw what happened to her friend Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, better known as Posie Parker. A poorly managed speaking appearance in Auckland in 2023 culminated in violent protests. Keen-Minshull was doused in tomato juice and humiliated.

Joyce and Keen-Minshull are both high-profile exponents of “gender critical” thinking, which is a backlash against transgender activism. Their movement has become so prominent in the UK that the country has been dubbed “Terf Island”, after the phrase Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

While “it was very shocking to see the footage” from Albert Park, it did not make Joyce afraid to come to New Zealand. She opts for indoor, supervised venues and thinks about her security.

We are sitting outside a cafe near the Avon River in Christchurch on a sunny Friday afternoon. One day remains of Joyce’s month-long speaking tour of New Zealand and Australia. Her last appearance is as keynote speaker at the Free Speech Union’s (FSU) annual general meeting at the Christchurch Town Hall.

The tour was organised by the FSU and the Women’s Rights Party.

There was a protest two nights earlier outside Parliament, when Joyce and FSU chief executive Jillaine Heather met Associate Health Minister Casey Costello to talk about women in sport and women’s bathrooms. The protest was orderly, Joyce recalls, and she could not hear what they were shouting.

Nothing to be afraid of, then? “Nothing at all.”

Only in Australia was there a moment reminiscent of the Keen-Minshull debacle. The City of Melbourne cancelled a booking, meaning a new venue had to be found. Joyce later said Melbourne was one of the “most radical” cities in the world and had some of the most “authoritarian” gender laws.

Compared to the bolshier Keen-Minshull and TV comedy writer turned trans critic Graham Linehan, Joyce is the respectable face of gender criticism. Yet her opponents think her rhetoric is just as insidious, despite its presentation of scientific neutrality.

As she said in one of her New Zealand interviews, “My persona is relentlessly reasonable”.

Compare that with how Linehan mocks and abuses trans people. Does Joyce think he is a good advertisement for the anti-trans cause?

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask me a question about a friend like that,” Joyce says. “I’d rather talk about what I have to say and what I’m doing. I like Graham.”

This meeting with The Press is her only mainstream media interview. Not that it matters too much to her supporters, as it is possible to arrange a national tour with a network of new media outlets, many run by journalists who have quit the mainstream. They all praised Joyce. None challenged her or included a view that countered hers.

She talked with former National MP Simon O’Connor on Reality Check Radio, Sean Plunket and Leah Panapa on the Platform, Andrew Urquhart on Rhema, podcasters Duncan Garner and Damien Grant, Christchurch journalist Chris Lynch and Let Kids Be Kids founder Penny Marie.

In some of these interviews, Joyce called the trans movement childish and narcissistic, and said she speaks to them as one would speak to a toddler. At other times, she saw it as akin to religious thinking.

For her, everything flows from an idea that people who call themselves trans women are and will always be men. It is that simple.

“I don’t think any man has ever become a woman or any woman has ever become a man,” she says. “Or even can.”

Joyce was a mathematician first and comes at the issue as a matter of proof and logic, not philosophies and feelings. The strictly science-based approach is reminiscent of the new atheist movement, and it is not surprising to see God Delusion author Richard Dawkins is a fan.

A book about an idea

Joyce was a journalist at The Economist when she was asked to write about trans issues in 2017. Like many on either side of the debate, she was soon captured by it, even obsessed. She published her book Trans in 2021 and a year later quit journalism to work as advocacy director for the UK charity Sex Matters.

Her book has been praised by some but called a polemic by others. It is a consistently negative account of what she calls trans “ideology”, and it lacks compassion about the trans experience.

Yes, she has heard it is one-sided. In response, she quotes the first sentence: “This is a book about an idea.” That means it was not intended to be a book about trans people and she did not try to balance stories of failure with stories of happiness and success.

One wonders what trans people think of it. Does she talk to them?

“I talk to trans people all the time,” she says. “I talk to people who have many different opinions.”

But she says the UK’s pro-trans charities Stonewall and Mermaids have never been willing to speak to her, “including before I wrote the book”.

Critics in New Zealand are largely reluctant to engage, but Jennifer Shields, managing director of advocacy, social change and support service Qtopia, says Joyce “has no qualifications relating to gender diversity or medicine, and has come to the other side of the world to try to push for the changes the UK has made that have undoubtedly caused massive harm to a generation of transgender children”.

She says Joyce and her UK colleagues advocate for “gender exploratory therapy”, which would be illegal under New Zealand’s laws against conversion therapy.

“She is totally irrelevant to a New Zealand context and highlighting her views as one of an ‘expert’ only does harm to trans people here,” Shields says.

Critics also point to the Tickle v Giggle case in Australia in 2024, about gender discrimination on social media. Justice Robert Bromwich dismissed Joyce’s expert evidence by saying she “has no recognised expertise in any of the areas in which she expresses an opinion”.

On the other side, Suzanne Levy, spokesperson for New Zealand advocacy group Speak Up for Women, believes Joyce “provides a logical and evidence-based approach to dealing with the conflict between the sex-based rights of women and the ideological wants of men who say the magic words”.

Levy emphasises the word “wants”, and always calls trans women men.

Although a massive divide exists, Joyce claims “a lot” of trans people agree with her. She says they refuse to defend the medicalising of children or trans women playing women’s sports.

But surely they cannot agree with all of it. Joyce’s book goes further and suggests trans identities do not exist, that it is all a delusion.

“No, that’s not correct, and I never used the word delusion,” she says.

That is only partially accurate. After I talked to Joyce, I found an interview about trans issues from 2023 with US philosopher Peter Boghossian, in which Joyce said “we are experiencing a mass delusion moment in human society”.

In the same interview, she said, “I don’t believe there’s any actual instance of trans”. Even Boghossian looked shocked.

And now?

“I think there has always been a tiny number of people who have landed independently and spontaneously on the idea that they were meant to be members of the opposite sex,” she says.

It might sound like her view has softened, but not really. She still does not believe them.

So if a friend who was biologically male, a cis man, told her he feels like a woman, what would her answer be?

“I’d say you can think what you like about it and so can I. And I don’t think you’re a woman because I don’t.”

She compares it to religion. She is an atheist but would not deny someone’s identity as a Catholic.

“I don’t spend my time thinking about why somebody’s Catholic or somebody’s Muslim or whatever,” she says. “I just don’t think there is a God.”

Eliminating trans people?

If transgenderism is a problem, it is a relatively minor one. In the 2023 census, just 0.7% of the New Zealand adult population identified as transgender. Other countries are roughly in line with that.

But in 2022, Joyce said trans people are “a huge problem to a sane world” and she wanted to reduce the number of trans people. Three years later, she says that remains her most quoted statement. In other words, her most notorious statement.

She says she meant reducing the number of trans people would mean reducing distress and medical interventions. And also, “every person who gets the idea in their heads that they’re really a member of the opposite sex” intrudes on the rights and privacy of others. She agrees that claim is controversial.

Her quote has been called eliminationist, even genocidal. But she argues it is “no more eliminationist than saying you want to reduce the number of anorexic people. If an experience is an unhappy one, you want as few people as possible to have it.”

But not all trans people have an unhappy experience.

“We’re talking about gender dysphoria, and dysphoria means distress.”

Yes, but one could argue that on the other side of gender dysphoria there is the happiness or self-fulfillment that comes from recognising your true identity. The way to stop being distressed might be to transition.

“But you are still at war with reality,” Joyce says. “The fact is you remain male, and say you’re female, or you remain female and say you’re male. That is a mismatch between identity or belief and reality.”

But if we use her religion analogy, a born-again Christian who is happier than when he was an atheist is also at war with reality.

“Have you got any evidence it makes anyone happy? Because I don’t.”

She says there is nothing to back up the idea that transitioning is a route to happiness. But that is highly debatable.

A US Trans Survey of 92,000 trans people in 2022 found 98% satisfaction among those who transitioned. While self-selecting, it is a huge number of respondents. Auckland psychotherapist Paul Wilson says “gender critical types tie themselves up in knots finding new ways to ignore this survey”.

There are other bold statements. In Trans, Joyce writes that “gender ideology harms all children”. Not some, all.

That sounds hard to justify but she says she means gender ideology relies on sexist stereotypes of men and women. She could as easily have said sexism harms all children.

And while it is not actually a trans issue, Joyce is sceptical about drag queens reading to children because they also present a “parodic” version of women.

“I dislike the lazy use of a drag queen as a symbol of diversity.”

One theme throughout Joyce’s book is that transgenderism seems at least partly to be a sinister conspiracy to enable men to assault or prey on women.

“It’s not a conspiracy and I do not say that,” she says.

She claims some men pretend to be women to go into women’s prisons.

“I don’t say that either.”

Actually, in Trans she writes it is “probable” that “gender self-identification provides sexual predators with a marvellous loophole” to access women’s prisons. In her interview with O’Connor she said trans women in women’s spaces “quite like the feeling of power it gives them”.

If it seems she has contradicted herself, she moves past it.

“The thing is it doesn’t matter what the man’s beliefs are, he’s still a man,” she says. “So the man can be pretending, the man can be lying, the man can be totally sincere. He’s still a man. So if he comes into a women’s space, he’s a man in a women’s space. I’m not very interested in the reasons men do that. I just want them to stay out.”

There is no reliable data about assaults by trans women in women’s spaces in New Zealand.

Speak Up for Women’s Suzanne Levy argues it is ridiculous to ask for proof of danger, as “we have centuries of proof that women benefit from and require spaces where there are no males”.

But surveys have found trans or non-binary people are subject to sexual violence and threats at greater than average rates. They show trans women are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

Who’s winning the war?

Two years after Albert Park, has the heat gone from the transgender debate? Does it seem less urgent?

Much has changed since 2023. Local gender critics have found a champion in NZ First, which introduced a bill defining men and women.

The UK Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex, following a case brought by For Women Scotland. Also in the UK, the Cass Review of gender healthcare led to restrictions in the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria in young people.

Anti-trans battles have been won in sport, both at the national level and internationally.

In the US, a push against trans healthcare has been a feature of the second Trump administration.

Back on “Terf Island”, the BBC’s coverage of trans issues has been challenged, within wider scrutiny of its reporting.

“I don’t think the heat has gone out of it as such,” Joyce says. “A lot of the things I would decry continue to happen. In fact, probably all of them.

“I think it’s not correct to say the heat has gone out of it until people are no longer being disciplined at work and fired for expressing very ordinary, majority views on the importance of biological sex. They certainly are here.”

She told O’Connor that she met a woman in New Zealand who was disciplined at work for misgendering a corpse.

But how many such cases are there?

Suzanne Levy says “we do not have specific data on workplace disputes involving sex realist opinions”.

“We have heard of a few cases and there have been several reported in the media. What we do know is there are many, many people who will not speak out at work due to fear of the consequences.”

The Free Speech Union does not have data either, and a spokesperson said Joyce is “likely drawing from conversations she’s had with event attendees along the way”.

Another way the heat remains in New Zealand, as far as Joyce is concerned, is the relatively high use of puberty blockers. A 2024 study found prescription rates were above comparable countries, but were declining. A release of new transgender healthcare guidelines is said to be long overdue.

Overall, if there was a war, is it now over?.

According to reports, it was very quiet outside the Christchurch Town Hall for the FSU’s meeting. There was just one protester, wrapped up in a Palestinian flag, a rainbow flag and a trans flag. But his target was the day’s most high-profile speaker, Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.