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Helen Janeith Joyce (born 1968) is an Irish journalist and gender critical activist. 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 published her book in 2021.
Joyce moved to England at age 16 to attend musical theatre college, but dropped out after two years. In 1987, she enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where she was elected a Scholar in 1989, and received a BA in mathematics in 1991. She next completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos for a Master of Advanced Studies with distinction at the University of Cambridge, earning a scholarship from the British Council and a PhD place at University College London. She got a PhD in geometric measure theory at University College London (1995) with the dissertation "Packing measures, packing dimensions, and the existence of sets of positive finite measure" under David Preiss. She then took a postdoctoral position in Cardiff, and spent two years at Finland's University of Jyväskylä on a Marie Curie research fellowship funded by the European Union.
In 2005 Joyce became an education correspondent for The Economist. Four years later she transferred to the newspaper's project exploring how to best present statistics to readers. In August 2010 she moved to São Paulo to become The Economist′s Brazil bureau chief, a position she held through 2013. Returning to London she served as The Economist′s finance editor and international editor and in March 2020 became its executive editor for events business.
In 2022, Joyce took a one-year unpaid sabbatical from The Economist to join the gender-critical campaign group Sex Matters as a director, which she made permanent at the end of the sabbatical year.
GLAAD shared a report with The Daily Dot in March 2019 which analyzed Joyce's tweets. The magazine stated the tweets "claimed, among other things, that the trans rights movement is enabling sexual predators... referred to puberty blockers or other treatments that affirm a trans child’s sense of self as 'sickening'... and also called these procedures 'child abuse,' 'unethical medicine,' 'mass experimentation,' and a 'global scandal'". When the Economist was asked if they would continue to stand by Joyce following the report, they described her as an "outstanding journalist in whom we have complete confidence" and did not elaborate.
GLAAD described Joyce's December 2018 article "The New Patriarchy: How Trans Radicalism Hurts Women, Children—and Trans People Themselves" for Quillette as 'alarming' stating that Joyce had "no place in a newsroom". Joyce responded that the organization had been "co-opted by GLAAD Anthony Watson to continue his unprovoked attacks against me". ThinkProgress's LGBTQ editor Zack Ford stated that in Joyce's collection "the guise of ‘debate’ justified publishing numerous anti-trans essays that included junk science and scaremongering".
In April 2022, Joyce took a leave of absence from the Economist to become the director of advocacy for Sex Matters. She wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian arguing that gender identity change efforts should not be included in a bill banning conversion therapy.
In June 2022, PinkNews reported that Joyce had spoken in favour of "reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition" and said that "every one of those people is a person who's been damaged" and "every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world". Her interviewer described this as not "heartless", but motivated by compassionate desire "to try to limit the broader harm" trans people cause and suffer. Several different scholars have variously described the statement as publicly expressing "explicitly eugenic and genocidal attitudes toward trans people", indicative of a desire that trans people "be forced back into a state of repression and self-denial", and voicing the implications of "toxifying ideas about transness as an infiltrating, contagious, corrupting threat to vulnerable girls" advanced by figures such as Janice Raymond and Abigail Shrier.
In June 2024, she applauded the Conservative Government's decision not to pursue a ban on conversion therapy and claimed Desistance myth.
In 2024, the Australian Federal court refused her testimony in Tickle v Giggle, stating her views were opinions and that "she even lacked sufficient expertise for the exception to the opinion rule to apply".
Joyce has argued that gender critical feminists turn to Christian Right news outlets because they feel frozen out by mainstream media. Alex Sharpe argued that gender critical feminists in the UK had been given significant platforms by right-wing media and that Joyce "has been given numerous platforms to articulate and circulate her ‘gender critical’ views despite lacking any expertise concerning the issues she discusses".
The Times regular columnist David Aaronovitch wrote that "Joyce examines a new ideology about gender. This holds that biological sex is as much a 'social construct' as the idea of gender is. One benefit of Joyce's book is its intellectual clarity and its refusal to compromise. So she takes apart this ideology of gender with a cold rigour."
Kathleen Stock, then a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex and author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021), gave Trans a 5-star review at The Telegraph, calling it a "superlative critical analysis of trans activism" and that "Joyce shows an impressive capacity to handle complex statistics, legal statutes, and other bits of evidence without losing clarity or narrative drive."
The Guardian gave it a mixed review saying "there are some curious holes in this book" and calling it "an exasperated polemic." A review at Publishers Weekly criticized the book as "alarmist" and a "one-sided takedown" that "comes up short." It compared the book's mentions of billionaires, academics and healthcare companies to conspiracy thinking.
Aaron Rabinowitz, writing for The Skeptic, criticised Joyce for her repeating activist Jennifer Bilek's claims that a cabal of Jewish billionaires fund the transgender rights movement through contributions to organisations such as Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. Joyce published a rebuttal to these allegations, in which Joyce denied plagiarism and antisemitism, denounced Bilek's antisemitism and reiterated the thesis of her book. She also corrected a claim about a donation made by the Open Society Foundation; the donation was to a similarly named group which also advocated for gender self-identification.
The book was shortlisted for the 2023 John Maddox Prize.
In October 2022, Joyce participated in an interview with economist Partha Dasgupta at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Philosopher Arif Ahmed hosted the event, titled "Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced". Protestors chanted "trans rights are human rights" and banged drums outside the event. The college master Pippa Rogerson and senior tutor Andrew Spencer boycotted the event and described Joyce's views as "polemics". In response, Joyce published an open letter entitled "Has Cambridge abandoned debate?" in The Spectator, in which she argued that "The academic commitment to fair-minded debate is over."
In February 2025, at an event at Balliol College, Oxford, Joyce discussed her views on transgender issues, sex and gender, with host John Maier of The Times. A walkout by pro-trans protesters left Joyce and Maier briefly dumbfounded. A petition "protesting transphobia" at the university had been signed by over 600 people. Joyce said she was a "sex realist" and described being transgender as a "rights-destroying belief".
Joyce was raised Irish Catholic, but is now an atheist. She says of her atheism, "It wasn't because I was unhappy... My convent school was actually quite a nice place, and I loved our RE religious lessons... I just don't think it's true."
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