The rise of gender ideology and the erasure of biological sex has become one of the most contested and consequential issues in public life.
Over the past decade, the idea that gender is self-declared and disconnected from biology has reshaped our laws, schools, medical systems, and public discourse. But there’s growing pushback: in the United Kingdom, there’s been a remarkable reversal against this institutional capture. The shift has come through court challenges, investigative journalism, and public inquiry.
To unpack this, Helen Joyce – journalist, editor, and author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality – joins this episode of Inside Policy Talks. Joyce currently serves as the director of advocacy for Sex Matters, a UK-based organization that promotes clarity about sex in law and policy. She has been at the forefront of efforts in the UK to reinstate biological reality in public policy, and has helped shape the international conversation on this topic.
In this podcast, Joyce tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that in many Western countries, equality laws were not well equipped to deal with the claim that “men could be women and women could be men.” Specifically, many equality laws treated the two sexes as “formally symmetric,” says Joyce. She emphasizes that while men and women are, of course, of equal worth, many laws failed to recognize the fundamental differences between the sexes. Joyce says this “foundational error in the law” paved the way for the erosion of boundaries between the sexes which immediately came at a very high cost for women.