Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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I'm Jonathan Kay.

And today to Mark Pride Month,

we're going to be talking about the gender wars,

not the old-fashioned kind between men and women, but the new kind involving basic questions

like what is a woman?

Is it an adult human female or is it as many progressives have come to fervently insist in recent years,

anyone who simply announces to the world that I'm a woman.

And with me to discuss the issue is a real live woman,

and someone who literally wrote the book on the subject

British journalist Helen Joyce author of the 2021 bestseller Trans when ideology

meets reality.

And as the title of that book suggests, Joyce, whose day job has been editor at The Economist magazine,

sees this as a matter of belief versus fact.

Specifically, she describes her preferred biologically rooted definition of who's a man and

who's a woman as sex realism, while using the term sex denialism to describe the other side, which insist that what's important is self-declared gender identity, not biological reality.

But we'll also be talking about all the other terms that get thrown around by both sides, like turf, that's T-E-R-F or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a term of abuse often hurled at women by

...