Jail doctors who perform trans surgery on young people, says feminist activist

Telegraph

02-04-2025

Doctors who have carried out gender reassignment surgery on young people should be jailed for the rest of their lives, a leading feminist campaigner has said.
Helen Joyce, an author and director of advocacy at the charity Sex Matters, said she feared medical professionals who performed such procedures would never face justice.
She made the comments during an event at the Oxford Literary Festival, where she was in conversation with Julie Bindel, the prominent feminist.
Pro-trans activists attempted to disrupt the talk, held in the Sheldonian Theatre, by staging a noisy protest outside.
One demonstrator held up a banner which read: 'Respect trans pride or expect trans wrath.'
Extra security was drafted in for the event and police were stationed outside, although the protest passed off peacefully.
Inside the theatre, Ms Joyce, who authored the 2021 book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, and Ms Bindel were cheered by the audience.
Responding to an audience question about whether doctors who had 'violated their Hippocratic Oath by carrying out these surgical procedures' should be struck off, Ms Joyce said: 'These people are never going to face what they deserve. I'm not even hoping for that, it's so impossible, in my opinion.
'There are people I could name right now whom I would like to see in jail for the rest of their lives but it's not going to happen.'
Ms Joyce cited one young woman who, by 21, had her breasts, ovaries and uterus removed, only to regret the transition a year later.
At the festival, which is sponsored by The Telegraph, Ms Joyce argued that teenage girls declaring themselves to be trans was a form of 'social contagion'.
'If you are a teenage girl who doesn't want to be a girl, that's too boring and straightforward a thing to say. You want to be a special sort of person, you want out, you want to escape from whatever it is you're trying to escape from,' she said.
As for women who become 'allies' to the trans community, Ms Joyce suggested that they might be doing it to escape from the mundaneness of their own lives.
'Why might a middle-aged white woman, who knows that middle-aged white women are the most boring people in the world – mums, the only people never allowed to ask for anything for themselves – why might that woman want to invent themselves as some amazing sort of ally?' she said.
Meanwhile, Ms Joyce said institutions that had been 'captured' by trans ideology were run by 'people in leadership positions who are cowards.'
She added: 'There are mediocre people running universities, regulators, NHS boards, and those people are all getting their high salary for, as far as I can tell, not very much.'