Statement Regarding Oxford Literacy Festival Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel
TransLucent are very disappointed that the Oxford Literacy Festival are platforming Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel on April 2nd 2025. We wrote to Sally Dunsmore (Oxford Literacy Festival Director) about this issue on four occasions, but she never ever replied.
Helen Joyce, a gender-critical activist, released a video in which she spoke of “keeping down the number of people who transition… every one of those people is… a huge problem to a sane world.” She has been photographed holding an LGBT+ Progress Flag, with the section representing the trans community torn out and being trodden underfoot – she wrote a book about the trans community, which has been heavily criticised as being biased and inaccurate.
Both Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel are members of the gender-critical movement, which many have suggested as being akin to a hate movement. The human rights organisation the Lemkin Institute said this about the gender-critical movement:
“The gender critical movement simultaneously denies that transgender identity is real and seeks to eradicate it completely from society. Many gender critical ideologues identify themselves as feminists and believe themselves to be protecting women from men.
The movement, a centrepiece of right-wing ascendancy in the Western world, calls for discrimination against and harassment of transgender individuals and the transgender community through laws and policies that criminalise trans identity and trans life”.
Other human rights organisations, including the Council of Europe and UN Women, have also called out the gender-critical movement, which American evangelical organisations heavily finance. These organisations are the same ones which advocated for the social genocide of trans people in America, which President Trump is currently playing out.
Whilst TransLucent fully accepts that freedom of speech is a democratic right, the bias of Oxford Literacy Festival to platform gender-critical people while not platforming trans people to counteract Joyce and Bindel’s opinions is both discriminatory and transphobic.
