"Keeping Down the Number"
Sharing the world in the face of a 'subtle' genocide.
Those who have spent any considerable amount of time monitoring the continuing rise of anti-LGBT, and specifically anti-trans, sentiment within contemporary UK politics will already be somewhat familiar with the figure of Helen Joyce. Joyce is journalist and executive editor for events business at The Economist, and has inserted herself into the pantheon of anti-trans ‘pundits’ with her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.
Since her ascension into the upper echelons of the ‘gender critical’ movement, Joyce has followed the script of her colleagues straightforwardly: demonising trans people, attempting to exert political pressure to make trans lives less liveable, and making empty invocations of free speech whenever they encounter even the slightest criticism.
Most recently, Joyce made an appearance on the social media of Helen Staniland, where the following was said as part of their conversation:
For those who would prefer not to watch the conversation directly, and for the purposes of clarity (given Joyce’s proclivity for conflating criticism of what she has said with smearing, slander, or libel), here is the particular segment of this conversation for today’s focus:
Helen Joyce: “In the meantime while we try to get through to the decision-makers we have to limit the harm. And that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition, and that’s for two reasons: one of them is that every one of those people is a person who’s been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem in a sane world. Like if you’ve got people that — and whether they’ve transitioned, whether they’re happily transitioned, whether they’re unhappily transitioned, whether they’re detransitioned — if you’ve got people who’ve dissociated from their sex in some way, every one of those people is someone who needs special accommodation in a sane world where we re-acknowledge the truth of sex. And I mean the people who’ve been damaged by it, the children who’ve been put through it, those people deserve every accommodation we can possibly make. But every one is a difficulty.”
Helen Staniland: “Yes.”
Joyce: “I mean I know that sounds heartless. I’m trying to say exactly the opposite of sounding heartless. I’m saying every one of those people for 50, 60, 70 years is going to need things that the rest of us just don’t need because the rest of us are just our sex. So the fewer of those people there are, the better, in the sane world that I hope we will reach.”
Without a doubt, there is a lot to unpack within this exchange.
We could linger specifically on the way trans people or, more abstractly, trans lives, are treated as a problem that needs to be managed, much like one might seek to control the population of a pest. We could further linger on the comments about getting through to decision-makers, displaying a rather telling willingness to weaponise political and legal structures against marginalised populations. We could also linger on the presentation of trans existence as opposed to the ‘sane’ world in which Joyce wishes us to live, with sanity here being an absolute and inviolable link between the sexed body and one’s permissible gender expression.
All of these are elements worthy of dissection and exploration, not because we should be overly focused upon the reactionary and empty acts of the gender critical movement — which, as I have said before and shall continue to say, lacks even the most basic elements of critical thought — but because they are pressing questions for those who seek to understand gender as a system of domination, or who wish to articulate how transphobia operates as a structure of oppression.
But the central element I wish to focus on today is Joyce’s intention to, through whatever means she deems necessary, reduce the number of people who transition. Of course, Joyce — detached as she and her fellows are from the lived realities of trans people — is able to present this as a compassionate position that simply wishes for people to integrate into the world as it is. This is, of course, rhetorical bait and switch, wrapping itself in a thin veneer of kindness whilst also furthering the marginalisation of the very lives she claims to wish to protect. There is no space within Joyce’s analysis for how trans people feel or what trans people want beyond presenting them as victims of a pernicious ‘ideology’ (not that Joyce displays any awareness as to the history and complexity of this particular term).
The numerous links between ‘gender critical’ feminism and fascistic politics have been widely noted by a variety of commentators, but what Joyce’s project makes explicit is a shared element of the political projects of trans-exclusionary ‘feminism’ and that of the Third Reich: the desire to determine with whom we share the world.
This expression derives from the work of Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy stresses plurality as a fundamental element of our human condition.1 We do not exist alone, but share the world with others and political power lies within our ability to act together, in concert, with those who share our world with us. Plurality is both a precondition for our human world and, as discussed by Sophie Loidolt, something that must be pursued, something that can be undermined and broken.2
Precisely this undermining of plurality is what underpinned the Nazi race project. Arendt herself presents the Nazi concentration camps (themselves an iteration of similar camps used by the British in the Second Boer War)3 as a crystallisation of “the rational process of eliminating those deemed unworthy of sharing the world with others”.4
Though an extreme, perhaps the most extreme, example — the Nazi concentration camps are on a spectrum with other social and political practices of division and exclusion, practices that undermine the shared quality of our world, that threaten our ability to live in a world in common with others. The totalitarian nature of the Third Reich was marked by an absolute isolation, an atomisation of people into completely divided individuals. Totalitarianism is predicated on the loneliness that is produced through being alienated from the world,5 with this alienation resulting from the undermining of our plurality.
Plurality is predicated on our openness to our fellow human beings and is specifically contrasted to a notion of unity or a togetherness rooted in amalgamation. Our commonness relies upon our capacity to be together, to share the world, but also upon our ability to exist alongside those who are other to us. Lines of difference cannot be erased. To exist together in the plural is to preserve our ability to disagree, our capacity to differ.
Though there are degrees of difference between the genocidal violence of the Nazis and the kinds of statement made by Joyce and her fellow ‘gender criticals’, it is important to stress that these are differences of degree and not by type. Whilst we should not straightforwardly conflate these into an identical politics — this would, of course, ignore the historical circumstances of Nazism as well as those developments specific to our current context — but we must not ignore their similarities.
When Joyce appeals to the “sane world” she wishes to live in, it is clear that her vision is of a world without a certain sort of person. It is a world wherein trans lives are, simply, unliveable — where structures of power (be these legal, political, or cultural) are mobilised to make trans existence so difficult that those who would seek it are discouraged. It is a world wherein sex essentialism becomes a widespread disciplinary structure.6 It is an identical logic to those that would see other ‘undesirable’ categories of people eliminated, that would seek to see a reduction in the number of non-white people, of gay people, of disabled people — all because they do not fit with their particular vision of what the world should be like.
Of course, Arendt’s position does not exempt others from criticism — in her view an opinion must exist in a state where it can be discussed and challenged for it to be meaningful — and she contends that violence cannot be tolerated. This is to suggest that the rhetorical gambits made by the ‘gender critical’ crowd — whereby they engage in the performative contradiction7 whereby they scream about their alleged silence across the headlines of major national newspapers or within their book deals — misconstrue or outright manipulate the pro-democratic position advocated by Arendt.
These people have convinced themselves that they are the victims of those who do not wish to share the world with them. But what they shall not admit — to themselves or to others — is that they are the aggressors. They are merely the latest combatants in a battle that has been waged over gender, sex, and sexuality across history. Notably, their politics are simply a more recent resurfacing of the same fascistic impulses that led to the destruction of the Institute of Sexology (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft), when its library and archives were publicly burned on the streets of the Opernplatz.8 There is nothing new, nothing creative here. It is merely another repetition.
The sin of attempting to determine in advance with whom one shares the world is present in the extensive attempts to litigate trans lives out of existence. It is not present in those who are resisting this harassment and violence, nor is it present when one asserts one’s right to disagree with and dissent to the imposition of Joyce’s “sane world”.
To attempt to determine in advance with whom we share the world is a violation of our fundamental human condition, it is to undermine our plurality, our commonness, and to transgress against our fundamental ethics. It is to subject the political to a violence that is its undoing.
Perhaps the language used by Joyce and her fellows is wrapped in a blanket of compassion, dressed up to sound like kindness and covered with a thin façade of respectability. And yet, what it calls for, as overtly as those historical projects whose footsteps it follows, is profoundly harmful to trans lives and, by extension, to queer lives of all kinds.
It may summon a subtler genocide than those that often seize our political imaginations, but it is a call for genocide and elimination nonetheless.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1st edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Sophie Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity, 2018 <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351804035> [accessed 26 November 2019].
André Wessels, A Century of Postgraduate Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) Studies: Masters’ and Doctoral Studies Completed at Universities in South Africa, in English-Speaking Countries and on the European Continent, 1908-2008, 1st ed (Bloemfontein, South Africa: Sun Press, 2010).
Siobahn Kattago, ‘Hannah Arendt on the World’, in Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts, ed. by Patrick Hayden, Key Concepts (London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014). p. 56
Samantha Rose Hill, ‘Where Loneliness Can Lead’, Aeon, 16 October 2020 <https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness> [accessed 6 May 2022].
In the sense used by Michel Foucault, see: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991).
As this term is used by Sara Ahmed, see: Ahmed, Sara, ‘You Are Oppressing Us!’, Feministkilljoys, 2015 <https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/02/15/you-are-oppressing-us/> [accessed 15 February 2015].
See: Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933-45, ed. by Günter Grau and Claudia Schoppmann (New York: Routledge, 2012) <https://ezproxy.aub.edu.lb/login?url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781134260980> [accessed 5 June 2022].