Helen Lewis is a British author and anti-transgender activist who launders gender critical extremism into mainstream media. Lewis is a sex segregationist who claims to be writing from a feminist/leftist viewpoint. Lewis demonstrates that anti-trans sentiment extends into every political point of view and movement.
Lewis’ anti-trans views center around:
Challenging legal recognition of trans people in systems developed on the basis of sex, particularly opposing the UK’s Gender Recognition Act
Maintaining systems of sex segregation, particularly in matters of law, public accommodation, prisons, sports, and other sex-segregated institutions
Maintaining the strict gatekeeping of trans healthcare via government control, developed under nationalized heath systems (so-called “gender clinics”) in the 20th century
Maintaining medico-juridical control over trans and gender diverse people though disease models and medical requirements for legal recognition (sterilization requirements, etc.)
Maintaining non-affirming models of care for gender diverse youth, developed last century for “the prevention of transsexualism” and now widely outlawed
Background
Lewis was born in 1983, grew up Catholic in Worcester, and attended St Mary’s School there. Lewis then read English at St Peter’s College, Oxford, followed by a journalism degree from City University London. Lewis no longer identifies as Catholic.
After graduating, Lewis worked at the Daily Mail, then joined the New Statesman in 2010. Lewis married designer and creative director Matthew “Matt” Hasteley in 2010 and wrote professionally as Helen Lewis-Hasteley from 2010 until their divorce in 2013. During the marriage, Lewis met and got involved with someone else, eventually leaving the marriage. Like many gender-critical public figures, this starter marriage seems to have had a significant impact on Lewis’ views about sex and gender.
Lewis married Guardian digital editor Jonathan Haynes in 2015. In 2019 Lewis joined the staff of The Atlantic, which has never had an out trans person listed on their masthead in its 160+ years of existence. In 2020 game developer Ubisoft removed Lewis’ voice from in-game audio in Watch Dogs: Legion due to transphobic views.
2017 Times op-ed
Lewis has been critical of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act, claiming that what used to be called the “real life test” that lasts for two years should be required for anyone to be legally recognized as their gender. In a piece titled “A man canât just say he has turned into a woman,” Lewis wrote:
What the government proposes is a radical rewriting of our understanding of identity: now itâs a question of an internal essence â a soul, if you will. Being a woman or a man is now entirely in your head. In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a womenâs changing room? Thatâs why feminists have raised the alarm over the move to self-identification, along with some older trans people who fear that âtrendstersâ will erode the goodwill they have worked hard to acquire.
2018 New Statesman op-ed
Lewis was accused of laundering transphobic talking points into a major media outlet around the topics of sex segregation and trans healthcare for youth.
Want to talk about how letting people self-define their gender might affect female-only spaces such as prisons and changing rooms? Then youâre a bigot, cloaking your bigotry in the language of âlegitimate concernsâ. Want to discuss whether we are rushing to medicalise gender non-conforming children because they and their desperate parents have been sold the idea there is a universal âfixâ for their profound, genuine unhappiness? These are yet more âlegitimate concernsâ that can be dismissed, even as medical professionals warn that not every gender non-conforming child will benefit from puberty blockers and (later) medical transition.
We should all be in favour of the right of transgender people to live their lives free of discrimination, harassment and abuse. […] But the right of someone who has been through male puberty, with the consequences for skeleton and muscle development that brings, to compete in womenâs sports that depend on raw strength? Thatâs more difficult. […]
Our ideas about gender are undergoing a profound shift. I hope that they will end up in a place where a boy can wear a princess dress without people assuming he is âreallyâ a girl.Â
2018 GQ interview of Jordan Peterson
In September 2018, Lewis interviewed fellow anti-trans activist Jordan Peterson for GQ. It quickly turned into a tense but civil debate that went viral. One of the few times they agree in the 90-minute conversation is on what Lewis calls “transgender issues.” At about 1:09.45, Lewis’s views overlap significantly with Peterson’s anti-trans viewpoints. Lewis repeats the unsupported generalization that “transgender activists” believe they have a “female soul.” Lewis also believes “We are very quick to diagnose and treat children in a way that I find â and not waiting for the research â and that I find concerning.”
Lewis, Helen (July 2020). Why Millennial Harry Potter Fans Reject JK Rowling. [stealth edited to How J. K. Rowling Became Voldemort] The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/why-millennial-harry-potter-fans-reject-jk-rowling/613870/
Lewis, Helen (April 2021). What Happened to Jordan Peterson?The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/what-happened-to-jordan-peterson/618082/
Lewis, Helen (26 October 2021). In Defense of Saying âPregnant Women.âThe Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/pregnant-women-people-feminism-language/620468/ [headline stealth edited to Why Iâll Keep Saying âPregnant Womenâ]
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Benjamin Boyce is an American YouTuber who promotes alt-right and intellectual dark web viewpoints, with a special focus on gender critical anti-transgender movements. Boyce is a key promoter of the ex-transgender movement.
Note: For the British musical artist born in 1968, see benjamin-boyce.com
Background
Benjamin Arthur Boyce was born on July 7, 1976 in Ukiah, California to Dan and Teresa Boyce. Boyce grew up in a religious household. Boyce’s family moved frequently around California, living in Milpitas, San Jose, Loomis, and Rocklin. Boyce’s parents met in Bible college and reportedly came under the influence of a charismatic minister named Gordon, who had been paralyzed after being shot. The families under Gordon’s control were split up. Teresa was given to another family, and Dan inherited two “spiritual children” from the minors who were part of other families. At 14 Boyce reportedly became “intensely sexual.”
Boyce’s family eventually left the group, and they were shunned. Dan went to a seminary school in Chicago while Benjamin remained behind in Rockland to complete high school, staying with a family that was part of their church.
Boyce attended Covenant Bible College in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a vocational Bible college which has since closed. Boyce then moved to Chicago in 1995. Boyce’s parents then took over a church in Fresno, California, and Boyce remained in Chicago until age 24. Boyce moved many times looking for a church, eventually moving to Portland. Boyce has been involved in Subud, “a direct spiritual experience of the soul being reawakened by the power of God.”
Boyce got a job at a preschool and would write at night. Boyce is also an aspiring children’s entertainer who has recorded and performed under the names Benjamin, Benzo, Benjamin Arthur, and Benjamin Ampersand.
In 2010 Boyce released the album Scariously, which includes songs like “(I Have Had An) Accident,” about a young child accidentally defecating and then removing soiled clothes.
In 2011, Boyce released the album Wildling under the name Benjamin Arthur. In 2012, Boyce released the EP Combustible Sundress, and in 2013 released the EP confessions of a headless man under the name Eo Ipso. In 2013, Boyce self-published the book Iconogasms under the banner of Critically Othersuch Press.
Boyce attended Evergreen State College from 2013 to 2017 and witnessed a major conflict involving the school’s progressive faction that led to the resignations of professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, members of the so-called intellectual dark web. Boyce began commenting about conservative politics following those experiences.
Boyce was an elementary school bus driver for the Griffin School District in Washington State from 2017 to 2020. During that time Boyce founded Othersuch Constructs LLC, which lasted from 2017 to 2018.
Anti-trans activism
In 2018, Boyce started a YouTube channel and podcast called Calmversations, alternately titled The Boyce of Reason. Despite the show’s relaxed tone, Boyce’s guests are often strident critics of progressive aspects of the trans rights movement.
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Pamela Paul is an American writer and anti-transgender activist who laundered anti-trans extremism into the New York Times until 2025.
While editor of The New York Times Book Review, Paul hired anti-trans activist Jesse Singal to write a glowing review of anti-trans activist Helen Joyce’s book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, helping spark a newsroom crisis about anti-trans coverage that culminated in 2023. The day after the crisis reached its peak, Paul published a piece defending anti-trans activist J.K. Rowling.
Paul has published many opinion columns for the Times repeating anti-trans talking points and defending other anti-trans activists.
Background
Pamela Lindsey Paul was born on March 2, 1971. Paul graduated from Brown University, then was an editor at American Demographics. Paul’s first marriage to conservative Times columnist Bret Stephens ended in 1998. Paul married hedge fund manager Michael Stern in 2004.
Paul has authored several books.
New York Times
Paul was named children’s book editor of The New York Times Book Review in 2011 and editor in 2013. Paul became an opinion columnist at the Times in 2022.
Patrick Ness says the original line said âThe culture wars have come for your transgender children.â The Times made Ness change it to something “less political.” A Times spokesperson later said Paul was not involved.
I think that weâre entering a period when the most meaningful political distinction will be fascist and anti-fascist. Itâs really important to understand that transphobia is one of the most potent entry points to fascism today – and act accordingly.
The novel The Men by Sandra Newman is one of many sci-fi works in which all men or all women suddenly disappear. The concept can easily steer toward anti-trans sentiments, and some objected to Newman’s book. Paul defended Newman with a lot of anti-trans dogwhistles:
But apparently Newman got too creative â or too real â for some. That a fictional world would assert the salience of biological sex, however fanciful the context, was enough to upset a vocal number of transgender activists online. They would argue that âmenâ is a cultural category to which anyone can choose to belong, as opposed to âmaleness,â which is defined by genetics and biology.
In this case, we can set aside contentious questions around gender identity and transgender politics. Even if you donât believe the sex binary is as fundamental to human beings as it is to all other mammals, a fiction writer ought to be free to imagine her own universe, whether as utopian ideal, dystopian horror or some complicated vision in between.
In another piece, Paul claims these anti-trans views are a middle ground or a centrist political position. Rather than seeing reproductive rights and bodily autonomy as a shared goal of trans people and pro-choice activists, Paul sees trans people as engaging in “erasure” of women by proposing inclusive and value-neutral language around reproduction. Paul describes “female biological function,” meaning reproductive function and reduces women to their reproductive function and organs in order to exclude trans women.
Women, of course, have been accommodating. Theyâve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. Theyâve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair â rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports â is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, itâs assumed women will be the ones to serve other peopleâs agendas rather than promote their own.
Daniel Froomkin notes that Paul builds on the anti-trans work of other Times writers, including Emily Bazelon, Michael Powell, and Anemona Hartocollis.
Both-sidesing would have been a step up for this column, which devoted only 52 words out of 1,300 to the rightâs decades-long campaign to strip women of their rights. The rest was about how âthe fringe leftâ is âjumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda.â
The central thesis of Paulâs argument was an exaggerated summary of a scaremongering news article from last month by Michael Powell, one of the two star reporters the Times has assigned to the woke-panic/cancel-culture beat âthe other being Anemona Hartocollis, who just a few days ago gave us this already infamous piece of soft-focus cancel porn.
Powell, Paul wrote, had concluded that âthe word âwomenâ has become verboten.â
This conspiracy has become known as “Pamela Paul’s great replacement theory,” which Melissa Gira Grant described as “lightly laundered anti-trans propaganda, presented as a sensible centrist argument.”
2024 column on the ex-trans movement
Paul continued promoting anti-trans talking points in 2024 with a piece on the ex-trans movement. Activists cited included:
In defending Paul, Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury defended the disproportionate number of anti-trans articles the section publishes by citing three articles that are purportedly not anti-trans:
Given the state legislative fights over trans Americans and their civil liberties and access to medical and psychological care, we have published many columns and guest essays from health professionals and activists on issues affecting trans people, as well as a focus group last year hearing from trans Americans about their lives.
Since the ex-trans movement is a single-digit minority, the next 90+ articles should be on gender diverse youth who have benefited from the care that is the current US medical consensus.
Fischer, Molly (January 24, 2023). The rules according to Pamela Paul. The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-rules-according-to-pamela-paul
Fedorov, Andrew; Krichevsky, Sophie (August 18, 2022). What Is Pamela Paul Thinking?The Fine Print https://thefineprintnyc.com/article/pamela-paul-biography-career/
Grant, Melissa Gira (July 6, 2022). Pamela Paulâs Great Replacement Theory. The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/166991/pamela-paul-new-york-times-trans-great-replacement-theory
Finnegan, Leah (May 23, 2022). Pamela Paul is the new worst columnist at the New York Times. Gawker https://www.gawker.com/media/pamela-paul-is-the-new-worst-columnist-at-the-new-york-times [archive]
PamelaPaulNYT (closed by Paul and later suspended after it was out of Paul’s control)
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SaidIt is a social media platform created as an alternative to reddit. After many “gender critical” users and groups were banned on reddit for anti-transgender hate speech, some of those banned users moved to SaidIt.
SaidIt claims it has less censorship than reddit and claims to be “one of the safe havens for truth seekers, alt-historians, and conspirophiles in an increasingly globally thoughtpoliced state.” It is a toxic online community and a service of choice for online anti-transgender content.
SaidIt’s 2022 Google results show two anti-transgender subsaidits among the top results.
Background
SaidIt was founded in 2017.
Moderators
magnora7 (Texas)
d3rr (California)
TheAmeliaMay (Arkansas) aka conservative transgender woman Amelia May Johnson [resigned]
In the past, when the saidit.net domain was shut down, the domain would sometimes redirect to the SaidIt subreddit (r/saiditnet). Calculating the Jaccard index of posts, participants on the SaidIt subreddit accrete into five reddit community clusters:
Shrier is author of the 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and has testified against the Equality Act before Congress in 2021.
Background
Abigail Brett Krauser Shrier was born June 21, 1978 and grew up in College Park, Maryland. Shrier’s parents are Sherrie L. Krauser, a judge of the Circuit Court of Maryland, and Peter B. Krauser, a judge of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and former chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party.
Shrier attended Sheridan School and Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School. After earning a bachelorâs degree from Columbia University in 2000, Shrier earned a bachelor’s degree from Oxford in 2002. Shrier then earned a law degree from Yale University in 2005. After clerking for Judith W. Rogers and Chief Justice Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel, Shrier was admitted to the New York Bar in 2006 and the California Bar in 2007. Shrier was an associate attorney at Irell & Manella from 2006 to 2008 before becoming a full-time writer in 2009. Shrier’s California license became inactive in 2009.
Shrier is a registered Republican and married wealth manager Zachary Loren Shrier in 2007.
Their journalism is considered center to center-right, and the editorial page is considered right-wing/conservative. The opinion section frequently promotes and platforms major anti-trans voices, including Gerald Posner, J. Michael Bailey, Abigail Shrier, Leor Sapir, and Colin Wright.
Contributors
In 2023, the WSJ significantly increased its anti-transgender coverage.
Leor Sapir and Colin Wright wrote a piece attacking academic publisher Springer after it retracted an unethical paper by J. Michael Bailey in 2023. The previous year, Wright had invoked the “tomboy erasure” conspiracy theory that claims gender diverse cisgender children are being forced to transition as a form of anti-LGB conversion therapy.
Abigail Shrier was allowed to complain about “The Transgender War on Women.”
Joe Barrett covered state recognition of trans identity documents. Jathon Sapsford and Stephanie Armour quoted anti-trans activist Leor Sapir, and Republican politicians Dan Crenshaw and Chris Christie, with rebuttal by Democrat Frank Pallone Jr. Stephanie Armour also covered Medicaid coverage of trans health services.
Laura Kusisto and Louise Radnofsky covered sex-segregated competitive sports. Ben Chapman and Laine Higgins also covered this.
Mariah Timms covered anti-trans developments in Missouri under AG Andrew Bailey.
Lindsay Wise, Simon J. Levien, and Isaac Yu covered Republican attempts to control the reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy of others.
Elizabeth Findell, Adolfo Flores and Peter Champelli covered the Texas ban on trans healthcare.
Mariah Timms and Laura Kusisto covered Tennessee’s ban on trans healthcare for minors.
Talal Ansari covered Zooey Zephyr’s removal from the Montana House floor.
The editorial board opined about “Transgender Patients vs. Religious Doctors: The Franciscan Alliance might be the new Little Sisters of the Poor.”
2023 Endocrine Society attacks
After Roy Eappen and Ian Kingsbury of anti-trans group Do No Harm attacked the Endocrine Society, President Stephen R. Hammes responded with an outline of the medical consensus behind the Endocrine Society’s guidelines.
Hammes was then attacked by a group of anti-trans clinicians in a subsequent letter. The signatories are:
Clin. Prof. William Malone, M.D. Idaho College of Osteopathic MedicineDirector, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine
Prof. Patrick K. Hunter, M.D. Florida State UniversityPediatrician and bioethicist
Hammes was also criticized by a group of parents that included Kathleen Dooley.
References
Conservative signatories (July 14, 2023). Youth Gender Transition Is Pushed Without Evidence.Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/trans-gender-affirming-care-transition-hormone-surgery-evidence-c1961e27
