“TERF Nazis Must Die!”:
A British Feminist Opposes Translunacy & Unwittingly Supports Patriarchy

2,992 words

Helen Joyce
Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality
London: OneWorld Publications, 2021

Helen Joyce has something that not many other people have: moral courage. As the author of this critique of what I call translunacy, she’s facing a lot of social disapproval and displaying a lot of moral courage. She’s a TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, and she doesn’t believe that men can become women or that men who identify as women should be allowed to enter female-only spaces and compete against female athletes. This simple adherence to biological reality means that she and other TERFs are vilified by large sections of the mainstream Left.

They face physical attacks, too. As Joyce points out, trans-activists have said that TERFs “are no better than fash” and that punching TERFs is like “punching Nazis.”[1] Like fash, TERFs get censored, harassed, and banned from social media. Unlike fash, they’re not saying anything despicable or wicked. Indeed, TERFs’ views are those of the overwhelming majority of people: first, that biological men cannot become genuine women, and particularly not simply by declaring that they are so; and second, that “transwomen” can legitimately be excluded from female toilets and women’s sports.

Lunatics, not ladies

How has a small but noisy minority imposed translunacy so successfully on academia, law, and the media? Joyce tries to answer that question, but is handicapped by her own Leftism and rejection of biological realities like race. She writes that “[t]he first duty of journalists is reporting: describing the world as it is.”[2] And yes, she’s honest about the autogynephilia that motivates the most aggressive and unpleasant trans-activists.[3] These male translunatics have a sexual fetish about seeing themselves — and being seen — as full and authentic women.

But they don’t want to admit their fetish and their real motives, which is why they are so unpleasant and spiteful to those who, like Joyce, draw attention to their autogynephilia. Joyce isn’t honest about some other aspects of translunacy, however, such as the disproportionate role of Jews in its creation and promotion. Then again, even if she does recognize that, if she’d been honest about it her book would never have been published at all.

Proud of abortion and same-sex marriage

She would be in even more trouble on the Left if she had admitted Leftism’s essential role in creating the lunacies and evils of transgenderism. She couldn’t have done that, however, because she’s still a Leftist herself. For example, she says that the successful referendums in Ireland for same-sex marriage and legal abortion “made me proud to be Irish.”[4] But she isn’t proud about another momentous change in Irish law: the introduction of easy self-identification for those who wish to change their legal sex. She rightly complains that no public consultation or referendum was held about self-identification and that it was introduced by stealth.[5] She then describes how violent male criminals in Ireland are now identifying as women to be placed in women’s prisons, placing vulnerable women at risk.

All three changes in Irish law were justified by central Leftist dogmas of “equality” and “justice.” And the opening of Ireland’s borders to the Third World, which has been far worse for Irish women than translunacy, also happened by stealth and without a referendum. Joyce would never criticize Third-World immigration, but all the arguments she uses to justify female-only spaces apply a fortiori to white-only spaces as well. As Steve Sailer has pointed out, the gap between blacks and whites in violent crime is even greater than the gap between men and women. Just as men pose a far greater threat to women than women to men, so blacks pose a far greater threat to whites, and to white women in particular. But Joyce depicts blacks only as victims of white racism:

Males entering women’s spaces are nothing like black people claiming their place in society; they are like white people denying black people spaces where they can shelter from the minority of white people who wish them harm.[6]

Bodies and brains

In fact, blacks are far safer among whites than they are among other blacks, as is plain to see everywhere from Chicago to Johannesburg to London. Joyce’s arguments about the biological reality of sex also apply to the biological reality of race, despite her attempts to deny this:

[B]iological sex has an objective basis lacked by other socially salient categories, such as race and nationality. Sexual dimorphism — the two sexes, male and female — first appeared on Earth 1.2 billion years ago. Mammals — animals like humans that grow their young inside them, rather than laying eggs — date back 210 million years. In all that time, no mammal has ever changed sex (some non-mammals can, for example crocodiles and clownfish). Men and women have therefore evolved under differing evolutionary pressures for an extremely long time, and these have shaped male and female bodies and psyches in ways that matter profoundly for health and happiness. The distinction between the sexes is not likely to be at all amenable to social engineering, no matter how much some people want it to be.[7]

Note Joyce’s linguistic sleight-of-hand in the phrase “bodies and psyches.” The natural pairing is “bodies and brains,” but Joyce is still attached to the Leftist dogma of humans as blank slates whose characteristics and abilities are influenced solely by environment and culture, not by genetics. Contra Joyce, evolution does not directly shape “psyches”: it shapes the material brain, which is subject to “differing evolutionary pressures” not only in men and women, but also in different races occupying different physical and cultural environments. Just as men are more violent and criminally inclined than women for genetic reasons, so blacks are more violent and criminally-inclined than whites.

The distinction between the races is “not amenable to social engineering,” either, and any argument for the protection of women from men also applies to the protection of whites from blacks. In fact, it applies more strongly. More whites are murdered and otherwise harmed by blacks in the United States than white women are murdered by white men, even though blacks are far fewer in number than whites. The horrifically high rates of black-on-white rape should be a major concern to feminists like Joyce — but TERFs lose their moral courage on racial matters and refuse to face the Left’s social disapproval.

Indeed, I’m cynical about TERFs’ real motives in opposing translunacy. I find it hard to believe that, as Leftists, they care very strongly about biological reality and “describing the world as it is.” Instead, I’d explain the TERF-tranny conflict as a matter of competing narcissisms. The traditional schools of feminism teach their adherents to worship themselves as women — that is, as biological entities. Translunacy denies the biological basis of womanhood, which is why TERFs oppose translunacy and the autogynephiles who want to invade female territory. But the younger, trans-friendly schools of feminism teach their adherents to worship themselves in a more general way, as moral entities who must support and “affirm” the “vulnerable” transgender community. I would therefore suggest that, at least in part, Joyce and her trans-critical sisters oppose translunacy not because it denies biological reality, but because it threatens their self-worship as women. TERFs are Leftists and narcissists first, and realists second.

Female histrionics and hysteria

But Joyce certainly commits blasphemy against some of Leftism’s central dogmas. As we saw above, she admits that evolution has shaped men and women in different ways. That’s “sexist” and “biologically deterministic” from a standard Leftist perspective. Joyce also — albeit unwittingly — offers comfort to sexist men who think that women are more conformist and more prone to histrionics and hysteria. When she’s discussing the sharp rise in translunacy among younger women, she writes:

The history of medicine is scattered with psychosomatic diseases that appeared, spread like wildfire and died away as medical thinking changed again. One sign a new condition may fall into this category is that it mainly affects teenage girls and young women. They are more likely than other demographics to indulge in “co-rumination”: repetitive discussion and speculation within a peer group. That can lead to internalising problems, and hence to anxiety, depression and self-harm. Girls are also often more empathetic than boys, and better at reading moods, which means emotions spread faster in a female peer group than in a male one. This is why self-harm and eating disorders can run through female friends, and why historical episodes of mass hysteria, such as fainting fits, uncontrollable laughter or crying, and outbreaks of paralysis or tremors, have so often occurred in convents and girls’ schools.[8]

In effect, Joyce is accepting a highly sexist stereotype of young women not just as being conformist, histrionic, and hysterical, but also as needing male control and influence to protect them from their own toxic emotionality. “Convents and girls’ schools” are key spaces of female autonomy, and look at what women have “so often” done with that autonomy: they’ve surrendered to “mass hysteria.” Later in the book, Joyce notes that “young women” are “the demographic keenest on gender self-ID,”[9] despite the threat it poses to them and to female-only spaces. Again, she’s effectively arguing for patriarchy and the need to protect women from their own emotionality and conformism.

Circumlocuting real women out of existence

If you’re a nasty Right-winger like me, these pro-patriarchy passages will add to the already high entertainment value of Joyce’s book. Transgenderism is sick, perverted, and harmful, but it’s also undeniably comic, both as a spectacle and as a reductio ad absurdum of Leftist dogma. It’s funny to see a Leftist like Joyce forced to deny such dogma and admit certain uncomfortable truths about human evolution and female psychology. And perhaps she herself would like to have gone further in exploiting the comic potential of “transwomen” and their “outie vaginas” (better known as penises), but she’s trying to persuade her fellow Leftists out of translunacy and has to respect their sensitivities.

Nevertheless, she does allow herself some dry humor when contrasting the translunatic “erasure” of women with their non-erasure of men. As she points out in Chapter 7, “She Who Must Not Be Named,” ridiculous circumlocutions around the simple word “woman” are now common in trans-friendly Leftist texts. Women are called “people with vaginas,” “vagina-owners,” “ovary-havers,” “people who menstruate,” “people who bleed,” “birthing bodies,” “abortion-seekers,” and so on.[10] After all, translunacy insists that some true women don’t have vaginas and don’t ever menstruate.

But this translunatic rewriting of English applies overwhelmingly to women and their anatomy, not to men and theirs. As Joyce drily notes, “If you google ‘testicle havers’, you will be asked if you mean ‘testicle shavers’.”[11] She then goes on to discuss why Leftism accepts and supports men who identify as women, but not whites who identify as black. She claims that this difference arose because “sex, gender, and sexuality categories” are “theorised” in “queer theory, where liberation means category-busting.”[12] But “race categories” are theorized in “critical race theory” (CRT), which (in my paraphrase) indicts whites as racist oppressors of blacks and forbids them to flee their hereditary taint by identifying as black.

Higher status in Leftism

I think Joyce is wrong in her analysis. It doesn’t explain why “queer theory” has trumped the old-school feminism of TERFs, which, à la CRT, seeks to forbid women-oppressing men to flee their hereditary taint of sexism and misogyny. As I’ve described in articles like “Power to the Perverts!”, I have a simpler and more comprehensive explanation of Leftists’ differing treatment of transgenderism and transracialism. Why do they celebrate the former and anathematize the latter? I think it’s the relative status of a group within Leftism that determines whether that group can adopt the identity of another group and invade its territory. Within Leftism, biological men have lower status than biological women, but translunatics have cleverly cast themselves as an oppressed minority akin to homosexuals, who have higher status than biological women. Therefore “transwomen” — biological men who claim to be women — have higher status than genuine women, who cannot legitimately refuse these men entry to womanhood. But blacks have higher status than whites within Leftism, therefore blacks can legitimately refuse whites entry to blackness.

But there’s another factor in the triumph of “queer theory” over old-school feminism: the translunatic activism of Jews. If you want to describe translunacy “as it is,” you have to note the disproportionate role of Jews in its creation and promotion. Kenneth Vinther does that in his excellent article “Oppression by Orgasm.” Helen Joyce doesn’t do that in her book, although translunatic Jews disproportionately appear there. On the second page of her introduction, she describes the academic charlatan Judith Butler as “the doyenne of gender studies and queer theory.”[13] In Chapter 3, she says Butler is “the most influential gender theorist of all” and “closely associated” with the “social-justice orthodoxy,” stating “that sex and gender are not distinct things, and that sex/gender is socially constructed”[14] — but Joyce doesn’t mention that Butler is Jewish.

Whips, chains, & torture instruments

She almost certainly doesn’t regard Butler’s Jewishness as important in Butler’s promotion of “queer theory” and translunacy. I think she’s wrong both there and elsewhere. In Chapter 1, she describes the central role of the transvestite homosexual Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) in laying the foundations for translunacy before the Second World War. Hirschfeld ran the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin, which “combined research with practical services, such as treatment for venereal disease,” campaigned for the legalization of homosexuality, and boasted an “archive” of “whips, chains, and torture instruments.”[15] As a Leftist, Joyce has no quarrel with any of that, and says that Hirschfeld was “remarkably brave and forward-thinking.”[16] But she is disappointed by his denial of biological reality:

. . . for Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the Institute, it was as if Darwin had never existed. Not only did they ignore the origin of the sexes, they did not even regard them as distinct categories.[17]

Again, Joyce does not mention that Hirschfeld was Jewish. After all, what significance could it have in the story of translunatic subversion in Western societies? In fact, a lot. It’s significant that Jews are vastly over-represented in all aspects of translunacy. After Butler and Hirschfeld, Joyce criticizes “the French philosopher Derrida,” whose guides to the “deconstruction of binaries” have proved so helpful in the translunatic assault on the “binary” of man and woman, male and female.[18] Derrida, too, was Jewish. So are the “American transwoman billionaire Jennifer (James) Pritzker” and the “billionaire funder of transactivism” George Soros, who Joyce criticizes in Chapter 11 for their central role in “transactivism’s long march through the institutions.” Once again, Joyce doesn’t mention their Jewishness or connect it with their “transactivism,” and so she isn’t “describing the world as it is.”

Of course, Jews are not wholly responsible for translunacy, but one can make a very good case that they have been necessary, if not sufficient, for the triumphs of translunacy to date.

Jews as predators & perverts

It would not be a coincidence if one of the most egregious of all translunatics turns out to be Jewish. “Egregious” is Joyce’s own description of Jonathan Yaniv,[19] the Canada-based “trans-lesbian” who stars in Chapter 8, “We Just Need to Pee: why female-only spaces matter so much for women.” Joyce describes how Yaniv sued female beauticians in Canada for declining to wax his testicles, which are “female” by translunatic doctrine, and how he asked genuine women online “whether, when you see a naked ten-year-old with a tampon string hanging down, it would be okay to ask to borrow a tampon.”[20]

In my article “Power to the Perverts!,” I looked at evidence that Yaniv and his doting mother are Israeli Jews. Helen Joyce and other TERF critics of Yaniv don’t care about his race. I think they should care, because if Yaniv is indeed Jewish, he would join a long list of “egregious” Jewish sex-predators like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. “Egregious” is from the Latin phrase e grege, which means “(standing) out from the herd.” But why do the small minority of Jews stand out from the herd of humanity so often in both positive and negative ways? Leftists like Joyce aren’t interested in questions like that, but I would claim that Yaniv is another example of the more common Jewish tendency towards sexual predation and depravity.

Seeing the blight

What are the odds that a translunatic paedophile and menstruation-fetishist like Yaniv is also Jewish? Very small, according to mainstream ideas on race. It would be like throwing three dice three times and getting nothing but sixes. It would be true if Jews were no more likely than whites to have such sexual deviations. In fact, Jews are more likely than whites to have them, just as blacks are more likely to commit rape and other sex crimes than whites are. There are also genetic explanations for these racial differences. Helen Joyce doesn’t accept either of these, because she’s still a Leftist and still unwilling to fully “describe the world as it is.”

But she’s moving in the right direction, as her book proves on page after page. Indeed, she and her fellow TERFs should ponder the implications of a review like this at a dedicated hate-site like Counter-Currents. If her book gets a much warmer response among far-Right haters than it does on the mainstream Left, what does that say about the Left and reality? And about the Left and women’s welfare? Nothing good.

Trans isn’t a particularly well-written or well-argued book, but Joyce is to be congratulated for having the courage to stand up to translunacy. She and her trans-critical sisters haven’t yet rejected the disease of Leftism in its entirety, but they’ve started to see the blight.

*  *  *

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Notes

[1] Helen Joyce, Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality (London: OneWorld Publications, 2021), p. 272.

[2] Ibid., p. 252.

[3] Ibid., Chapter 2: Sissy Boys and the Woman Inside.

[4] Ibid., p. 240.

[5] Ibid., pp. 240-241.

[6] Ibid., p. 158.

[7] Ibid., p. 4.

[8] Ibid., pp. 106-107.

[9] Ibid., p. 225.

[10] Ibid., pp. 137-138.

[11] Ibid., p. 139.

[12] Ibid., p. 140.

[13] Ibid., p. 4.

[14] Ibid., p. 65.

[15] Ibid., p. 12.

[16] Ibid., p. 15.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., pp. 68-69.

[19] Ibid., p. 153.

[20] Ibid., p. 151.