Helen Joyce

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 Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality in 2021.

Early life and education

She was born in 1968 in Dublin, Ireland, and moved to Bray, County Wicklow at age 8. She is the oldest of nine children of James "Jimmy" and Maureen Joyce, five boys and four girls. Five of her younger siblings — Gus, Ed, Dominick, Isobel, and Cecelia Joyce — have played international cricket for Ireland, while Ed has also played for the England test side. Brothers Johnny and Damian played club cricket. Johnny is an international chess player.

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.

Career

In 2000 Joyce joined the Millennium Mathematics Project (MMP), an organisation set up to advocate for mathematics education in schools and other venues, at the University of Cambridge. She primarily worked on telecommunication and video education projects with schools. In 2002 she was named editor of the project's online Plus Magazine, a position she held for three years. In 2004 she also became founding editor for the Royal Statistical Society's quarterly magazine Significance.

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.

Views on transgender topics

In July 2018, Joyce curated a series of articles on transgender identity in The Economist.

GLAAD shared a report with The Daily Dot in March 2019 which analysed 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 board member] 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 social] 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 "most children feeling gender distress or convinced of an opposite-sex identity will grow out of this during puberty".

In 2024, the Australian Federal court refused to let Joyce testify as an expert 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".