Sex Change Surgery is Unnecessary Mutilation
Listen to me debate 4 trans activists on Radio 4 in 2007. Recovered from the BBC archive, the 45-minute programme features me against Stephen Whittle, Peter Tatchell, Michelle Bridgman, & Kevan Wiley
First broadcast on 1 Aug 2007, this debate shows how far away from tackling contentious issues, and supporting free speech the BBC has come.
(NB I am aware that the term ‘mutilation’ is offensive to some detransitioned individuals. I understand, and do not wish to offend, but this is the language I used back in 2007)
In early 2007, a BBC producer contacted me: she had been tasked with finding topic and potential guests to front a new series of a popular Radio 4 programme called Hecklers.
Hecklers was a series in which an invited guest argued a “provocative thesis” to a studio audience. The format was serious and debate-focused, tackling weighty subjects.
The producer had read my critiques of transsexuality, including the threat to women’s spaces; the misogynistic entitlement of trans-identified men; the growing social contagion; and the danger to children. She asked me to argue my case with four individuals, all of whom vehemently opposed my views.
The format of the programme was brutal: In each episode, a guest presenter would argue a point of view that was considered to be controversial or unorthodox. The studio audience could then “heckle” or challenge the speaker, turning the programme into a structured debate.
One episode had former MP Mark Oaten argue for the abolition of all prisons. Another featured Patrick Clawson making the case for a war against Iran.
Presented by Evan Davis, it became hugely popular. My episode, in which I argued that sex change operations were “unnecessary mutilation”, was aired on 1st August 2007.
Recorded in front of a live audience at the Royal Society of Medicine, the place was heaving with doctors, clinicians, and loads of trans-identified individuals (and their supporters). I was somewhat nervous, and so convinced I would mess up, I had invited hardly any friends to join the audience.
“I suspect one day we will look back on the current era of sex change surgery with the same horror as we look back on the days of aversion therapy treatment for homosexuals.”
Is it really a human right to have a reversible hormone treatment which stops the onset of puberty?
One website aimed at transsexuals offers tips for men wishing to pass as women. This is what it says: ‘Repeat constantly to yourself. Raising your voice at least one octave. Am I going shopping today? Could you tell me the time please? Can I try this blouse on please?’
(Julie Bindel, Hecklers Debate, introduction)
There were drinks afterwards, during which time I was accosted by the vile tranocity Sarah Brown, a Cambridge Councillor and all-round horror story. I made my escape straight into the eyeline of double mastectomy scars: a trans-identified young woman had lifted up her t shirt to proudly show me her ‘new chest’, telling me how happy she was to now be a man.
The requests for surgical reversal are tiny, absolutely tiny.
I absolutely believe in self -diagnosis because how can anybody else tell whether you feel like a man or a woman?
Nobody who is suicidal is ever going to be offered gender reassignment surgery.
Stephen Whittle, trans-identified activist
I personally take offence to the view that a transsexual woman, which I am, couldn’t work as a therapist with other women in something like a rape crisis.
Michelle Bridgman, trans-identified activist
Below is the article I wrote in the Guardian, published the day the programme was aired. I have changed my mind on the first paragraph. This is a movement full of narcissists and bullies, not an ‘oppressed minority’. I suppose I wanted to make it clear I did not think it OK to be cruel and discriminatory towards people who are perceived to be ‘different’. I still don’t. But this lot are as far from ‘oppressed’ as it is possible to be.
I have embedded the audio recording for your listening pleasure (for paid subscribers), which I hope you find interesting and informative.
Evan Davis
In the build-up to the debate, several websites aimed at the transsexual community carried information and views about the event. “The debate is a thinly veiled opportunity to allow the dreadfully transphobic Julie Bindel a platform for her odious views,” posted one blogger. There were calls on another site to hold a picket outside of the venue, and for transsexuals to book their places in the audience in order to add further weight to my four opponents.
During the debate I argued that sex change surgery is modern-day aversion therapy treatment for homosexuals. The highest number of sex change operations take place in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death. Sex change surgery, therefore, renders gays and lesbians “heterosexual”.
Wazzocks at a football stadium, 2024
Did I? No, don't think I did. 'Trans' people do not exist as examples of human beings having changed sex because they cannot change sex. If you can provide one example of a human being who, literally, changed sex, do offer us the opportunity to know that. I do not, personally, know any 'trans' people, although I have seen, up close, a number of them. They do not pass and never would. Everything they do is a performance, not natural at all, like donning a costume - and women and men are not a costume.
That people who believe themselves to be 'trans' exist, or who delude themselves into believing they have changed sex, exist, and there are even those who know perfectly well they have not changed sex, but insist on being called 'trans' exist, I accept is a truism. Changing gender changes nothing biologically or in fact.
Therefore, we should not be accepting that anyone has changed sex based on changing gender, so the law applies as it has always done. Going into court and accepting that someone is 'trans', without any physical evidence is utterly ridiculous, yet that is what happens, and women are left to try and defend their dignity, safety and privacy when they are not the ones challenging biology.
However, the whole aim of 'queer theory' and, to a great extent, the 'trans' movement and lobby, is to overturn societal norms around sexuality in order to introduce all and every deviancy known to mankind - and more that most of us have never heard of outside the realms of extreme pornography - and pass them off as 'normal'. They may well be 'normal' to those people practising them, but they will never be 'normal' to society, nor to most human beings.
I would have said, once, that these men - I would exclude most of the young women and, certainly, the children of both sexes because their distress comes from a very different place to the men's sexuality, and from each other's perspective - should keep their deviancy indoors, but the sheer cruelty and distress caused to their wives and children - oh, yes, they almost always have them - and, we have come to learn, to animals (zoophilia, a paraphilia, is also on the 'trans' spectrum) is insupportable.
So many of the young women are neurodivergent girls and/or lesbian. The children may well be body dysmorphic, a mental ill-health, or it is neurodivergence or a social contagion - or they are fleeing g womanhood itself, and, frankly, there is a lot from which to flee. The adult men are on a plane of their own, rooted mainly, or entirely, in sexuality, but they have used the young women and the children - to their great detriment - as human shields to hide their deviancy.
It is this that needs to be tackled now, and we will get nowhere until we do acknowledge the roots of this, and we cannot do that until we call a spade a shovel. They can change their 'gender identity', sure, but that is not the key, and cannot be, to unlock female spaces, sports, services, prizes, etc. That misogyny also forms a large part of this latest social upheaval goes without saying.
The fact that so many of these cross-dressing men have not the slightest, teeniest, weeniest scoobie about women shows they are men. Their insults and rudeness to females is testament to their larping. They do not care if every right women fought for were to be taken from them, they do not care that young children's puberty was being interrupted and interfered with (not so much now in the UK), they care even less that young women are having unnecessary mastectomies and that young boys are being castrated. Why would that be, apart from the usual narcissism?
Well, because these three categories are entirely separate and different. Adult men led and still lead this movement; young women are seduced into believing that the alteration of their bodies can help them escape the constraints and restrains of femaleness; and the young children, suffering, perhaps, from so-called 'gender dysphoria' (actually a species of body dysmorphia) are not getting the real psychological/psychiatric help they need, rather than unnecessary surgeries and hormone treatments.
We all knew yesterday why these men want to be called 'women' and why nothing will do but full access to ALL female spaces, sports, services, prizes, etc. Part of it, for many of them, is sheer misogyny, but the greater part is actually sexual. This is what distinguishes them from the other two groups. They want full access to females - unwilling and, often, unwitting sexual props in their sexual fantasies that relate to 'womanhood'. This is not womanhood as some wonderful thing they admire and respect, but quite the opposite. It is, for many of them, to get sexual kicks out of taking on the female role, the subservient role, the done-to-er rather than the doer.
These men have always been around, and the women, too, who get some sexual pleasure out of acting out their fantasies, and, once, these activities were kept behind closed doors, but are now out in the public square and the men are becoming more vocal, more demanding, more heedless of the privacy, dignity and safety of others. If they really ARE 'women', as so many claim, then let's have the brain scans and DNA tests, the evidence of miraculous transitions and transformations that would, surely, take place in the body. Or is all of this seated firmly in the brain - the part that incites sexual excitement?
If so, why is that not measured against females', gays and children's rights to exist free from the tyranny of sexually-motivated behaviours of one 'sacred caste' of men? No one heard of Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey or Anne Lawrence? Eye-opening time, even though they support these men larping as 'women'.