#135 – Helen Joyce on Her Book ‘Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality’

Better Thinking

In this episode of Better Thinking, Nesh Nikolic speaks with Helen Joyce about the complexities society faces with trying to support and understand transgender people’s experiences while also trying to preserve commonly held societal rules.

Helen Joyce is an Irish journalist and critic of the transgender rights movement. 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 section in 2005 and has since held several senior positions, including finance editor and international editor.

She is the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, which was named as one of the books of the year in 2021 by the Observer, Spectator and Times. It analyses the recent trend towards sidelining biological sex in favour of self-declared “gender identity”. The Sunday Times praised it as a “searing and at times devastating analysis”, and the New York Times as an “intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight”.

Episode link at https://neshnikolic.com/podcast/helen-joyce

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