Try and find Helen Joyce’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality in the next bookshop you walk into. It’s often quite an adventure, leading you to sections of the shop you never knew existed. 

Unusually for a best seller, many are reporting that it is always a bit of a struggle locating a copy, something which couldn’t be said for Shon Fae’s The Transgender Issue. 

Joyce’s book is a deeply researched, compassionate and insightful look at the transgender issue. Fae’s book, in contrast, calls for the police to be disbanded on page one. 

They hide her book away like it was a copy of the Necromonicon

Kellie Jay Keen’s experience of locating a copy in Foyles played out like a scene from The Third Man, with whispers and much mysterious to-ing and fro-ing before a copy magically appeared. A subscriber to my Substack informs me that Dubray Books in Dun Laoghaire are engaged in the same kind of soft-censorship. Dubray would normally feature a local author (as Joyce is) with pride, but in her case they hide her book away like it was a copy of the Necromonicon. 

Hearing these stories have given me something of a nostalgic rush as they brought to mind the singular tale of Pat O’Connor which I first discovered in Dublin journalist Damian Corless’s enormously enjoyable book Party Nation, a history of the dirty tricks employed at Ireland’s general elections.

On the morning of Ireland’s 1982 election, sitting Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s close friend and solicitor, Pat O’Connor:

…was sensationally charged with attempting to vote at two polling stations in the extremely tight constituency of Dublin North. O’Connor had been allocated ballot papers at two polling stations and had opted to use his full allocation. By lunchtime the damaging news was splashed across the front of the Evening Herald. Fianna Fail activists mobilised, and drove around the district’s newsagents trying to snap up every copy in bulk. After the polling booths shut that night, a car pulled up outside the Fine Gael headquarters in Malahide and one of the occupants hurled a bundle of Heralds through the front door.

The audacity of it never failed to amuse me. They bought all the newspapers. And now bookshop employees are hiding books.

Using these and many other “gombeen” tactics, the faithful of the gender cult are always working to ensure that the scientific and ethical underpinnings of trans rights activism are kept vague and unknowable.

When trans activists couldn’t find fault with the book, they smeared her as an antisemite

Joyce’s book is not being hidden because her research is faulty — it’s impeccable. So when trans activists couldn’t find anything wrong in the book, they tried to dishonestly smear her as an antisemite. 

Not to minimise that disgusting abuse, but Joyce got off relatively lightly. Alice Dreger, in her book Galileo’s Middle Finger, recounts in horrific detail how psychology professor Michael Bailey, a man who devoted his entire working life to helping trans people, was ruthlessly targeted by a group of trans rights activists after he wrote his book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Later one of the activists was invited to speak at her college, and she outlined her objections in a letter:

Ms. James was one of many transgender women who were deeply offended by Michael Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. But Ms. James was notable for the way she decided to go after Bailey’s children to extract revenge. She posted on the internet photographs of Bailey’s daughter and labeled her a “cock-starved exhibitionist.”

(Confusingly, Dreger uses female pronouns while discussing James, who is, to be clear, a trans-identified male.)

James also claimed in her online publications that there “are two types of children in the Bailey household,” namely “those who have been sodomized by their father [and] those who have not.”

Bailey’s crime was that he discussed autogynephilia. Trans rights activists don’t want you to know about autogynephilia. They also don’t want you to know detransition statistics, they don’t want you to know what “self ID” really means, or the real effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. 

This is an information-suppressing movement: it can only survive in the dark

This is an information-suppressing movement. It can only survive in the dark, and every day there are a million digital versions of a group of political gangsters driving around Dublin, buying all the newspapers. 

There is some good news at the end of all this, though. Haughey lost.