The chapter entitled “We just need to pee” provides a shocking exposé on the mess that is the Canadian prison system. Although you could be forgiven for thinking that it might be heavy going, it isn’t at all this book is a page-turner and, in many ways, it reads like a gripping thriller. Joyce is witty, erudite and she wears her considerable scholarship lightly but she also manages to present all the issues clearly. Describing mothers who happily share crochet patterns of ‘packers’ (soft prosthetic penises that give a bulge in the crotch) for young girls who wish to present as boys, she says, “Reading as an outsider, these parents seem to have collectively lost their minds.” And yet she also has sympathy and points out that these parents are following the approach recommended by many purported experts in the field.
The author makes no apologies for her view that gender ideology has completely lost its way. Joyce also explores the roots of gender identity belief with an analysis of quacks like the endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, who first made his money by selling ‘“turtle treatment’, a fake tuberculosis vaccine”, and who then went on to sell testosterone supplements and vasectomies as anti-aging treatments before he finally became the leading pioneer of the transsexual movement in the 1960s and 1970s. However, according to Lili, it was all worthwhile, as before she died, she wrote, “It may be said that fourteen months is not much, but they seem to me like a whole and happy human life.” These operations were risky and dangerous Lili Elbe, the Danish girl of the eponymous 2015 film, was damaged so much by her genital surgery that she died of heart failure soon after the surgical procedure. The book begins by travelling back to the early twentieth century and to the first documented accounts of sex reassignment surgery. The comprehensive nature of this book is the first aspect that jumped out at me, followed quickly by a recognition of the extraordinary breadth of the research involved. She goes through every issue related to trans activism and, painstakingly, piece by piece, she takes a scalpel to it. Mixing revealing anecdotes with hard science and forensic detail, Joyce leaves no stone unturned.
“This is not a book about trans people…This is, rather, a book about trans activism.” And so Helen Joyce sets out her stall in her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.
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