Over the weekend, this clip of noted UK transphobe Helen Joyce saying that the number of trans people in the world needed to be kept down went around the internet.

Owen Jones 🌹 @OwenJones84

Beyond chilling. Two prominent anti-trans activists discuss their aims: "keeping down or reducing the number of people who transition" in order to "limit the harm", calling everyone who transitions "damaged" and a "huge problem to a sane world".

9:45 AM ∙ Jun 3, 2022

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The clip comes from a long recent chat between Joyce and her fellow transphobe Helen Staniland. In it, Joyce scoffs at the need to convince most British people that transphobia is great. She says the focus of the anti-trans movement needs to be on the “decision-makers,” and adds (emphasis mine throughout):

While we’re trying to get through to the decision-makers, we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. And that’s for two reasons. One of them is that every one of those people is a person who’s been damaged. But the second one is every one of those people is basically, you know, a huge problem to a sane world. Like, if you’ve got people—whether they’re transitioned, whether they’re happily transitioned, whether they’re unhappily transitioned, whether they’re detransitioned—if you’ve got people who’ve dissociated from their sex in some way, every one of those people is someone who needs special accommodation in a sane world where we re-acknowledge the truth of sex. And, I mean, the people who’ve been damaged by it—the children who’ve been put through this—those people deserve every accommodation we can possibly make, but every one of them is a difficulty. And mean, I know that sounds heartless, I’m trying to say the exact opposite of sounding heartless. I’m saying every one of those people for 50, 60, 70 years is going to need things that the rest of us just don’t need because the rest of us are just our sex. So the fewer of those people there are the better in the sane world that I hope we will reach.

Staniland then hastens to stress that this is all coming from a place of “compassion” for trans people—because “we love you, we just think you are insane and should not exist as you do” is the stuff that empathy is made of.

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If ever there was a mask off moment for the TERF brigade, this is it.