Helen Joyce

In June 2022 PinkNews reported that Joyce had spoken in favour of "reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition" and 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".

In March 2022 Joyce was due to appear in a panel to discuss her book and views on gender theory. This panel would have been part of an event for an expected 100 to 150 trainee child psychiatrists organised by Great Ormond Street Hospital and Health Education England. Before the event the organisers received allegations against Joyce and were warned "There is no possible way in which this event can possibly be a 'safe environment’ for LGBTQ+ and especially trans participants". Joyce was disinvited days before the event, which was later postponed. Joyce said, "It's outrageous that a journalist who has written a best-selling book spelling out the harms of this bizarre, evidence-free ideology is no-platformed and subjected to a smear campaign."

In October 2022, Joyce participated in an interview with economist Partha Dasgupta at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Philosopher Arif Ahmed hosted the event, titled "Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced". Protestors chanted "trans rights are human rights" and banged drums outside the event. The college master Pippa Rogerson and senior tutor Andrew Spencer boycotted the event and described Joyce's views as "polemics". In response, Joyce published an open letter entitled "Has Cambridge abandoned debate?" in The Spectator.

In July 2021 Joyce's book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, was published by Oneworld Publications. The book sold well, debuting within a week of its publication at number 7 on The Sunday Times list of bestselling general hardbacks and remaining in the top 10 for a second week. It was named as one of the year's best books by The Times. The book received other positive reviews in the Evening Standard, New Statesman, and The Scotsman.

Kathleen Stock, then a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex and author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021), gave Trans a 5-star review at The Telegraph, calling it a "superlative critical analysis of trans activism" and that "Joyce shows an impressive capacity to handle complex statistics, legal statutes, and other bits of evidence without losing clarity or narrative drive."

In March 2019 The Daily Dot reported that Joyce "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'".

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

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 they have "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".

Helen Joyce is an Irish journalist, currently on sabbatical from her role as executive editor for events business at The Economist becoming director of advocacy for campaign group Sex Matters. She studied as a mathematician and worked in academia before switching to journalism. 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.

In 2005 Joyce became 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, she took an unpaid sabbatical from The Economist and became director of advocacy for Sex Matters, a campaign group whose executive director is Maya Forstater, and which has been described as an anti-trans group, a human rights organisation, and a women's rights organisation.

In 2000 she joined the newly launched Millennium Mathematics Project (MMP) at the University of Cambridge promoting mathematics education in schools and other venues. For two years she worked on an MMP project which enabled mathematicians to interact directly with schools using video. 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, with the aim to demonstrate in an entertaining and thought-provoking way the practical use of statistics and to show how they are of benefit to people in all walks of life.

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 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.

She was born in 1968 in Dublin, Ireland, and moved to Bray, County Wicklow at age 8. She's the oldest of nine children of James "Jimmy" and Maureen Joyce, five boys and four girls. Five of her younger siblings, Ed Joyce, Gus Joyce, Dominick Joyce, Isobel Joyce 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.