Over the past few years we’ve seen the rise and rise of the email newsletter. Personally I’d prefer that more of these were blogs that had RSS feeds but I understand the economics. They’ve become a way of talented people earning some income through people paying for a subscription for their work. I have a mix of free & paid newsletters that I subscribe to that provides me with a steady flow of thought provoking comment, expertise, wisdom & insights into a whole host of topics.

I regularly subscribe and unsubscribe. If I find myself not really reading a particular newsletter on a regular basis I’ll unsubscribe, if I find there are things worth saving or I want to come back I’ll keep it going. I’m always interesting in hearing about well-written newsletters that offer value to the reader, so if you have any suggestions let me know.

So I thought I’d take the time to introduce them, why I subscribe, what value there is and who knows maybe you’ll find something there for you too.

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The next newsletter I subscribe to deals with the hot topic of transgender and it comes from a critic of this gender ideology, Helen Joyce. She’s an incredible journalist, on leave from The Economist the author of Trans and a feminist campaigner and part of JK Rowling’s gang of gender rebels. Her analysis & regular destruction of transgender ideology is sharp, clear, detailed, passionate so if this issue is a key one for you then her newsletter, Joyce Activated is a must. Helen isn’t a Christian, occasionally swears with vigour and seems just as likely to call evangelicals bigots as anyone else but she’s still at the forefront of fighting for the incredibly obvious truth that humanity is made up of male and female and those sides are essentially fixed.

Here’s a flavour from her very first issue:

My interest in the notion of “gender identity” dates from 2017, when I was asked to write about the rapid rise in the number of young people identifying as trans. It took me a while to think through the consequences of regarding this ineffable essence, something like a sexed soul, as the primary characteristic that determined whether someone was a man or woman—or indeed something else, such as non-binary, gender-neutral or pangender. But I was immediately, let us say, suspicious. Since we humans are mammals, we come in two and only two types, namely male and female. And those categories have deep evolutionary significance, having arisen on Earth more than a billion years ago. They didn’t seem like something we could ignore or redefine without consequence.

I had so many questions, and when I started to search for answers, I was only left with more questions. Where did the idea of gender identity come from? When did people first start to claim that being a woman didn’t simply mean being an adult human female? How did the distinction between the notions of “sex” and “gender” evolve? When did some people decide that everyone has an innate gender identity, and that it is your gender identity that makes you a man or a woman, no matter which of the two sorts of body you have? How on Earth does anyone think that sex is a spectrum, or a social construct?

And, above all, why was asking this sort of thing so verboten? Until what seemed like half a minute ago, everyone knew what men and women are, and no one pretended not to. The very idea that someone who actually was, in material reality, either male or female could in some sense really be the other would have seemed nuts. So why wasn’t I allowed to talk or write about this new idea that had come from seemingly nowhere?

I had been a journalist at that point for well over a decade, covering plenty of tricky topics, from political corruption to paedophilia, in various tricky places, including South America. And yet I had never received anything remotely like the response I got when I asked standard journalistic questions of the sort that any reporter worth their salt would naturally ask about any such a fast-moving social change or sudden ideological shift.

Questions such as: what does it mean for women if women-only spaces start admitting male people who identify as women? What does it mean for gay people if sexual orientation is now defined as depending on the gender identity—not the sex—of the people you regard as members of your dating pool? And what does it mean for children if we tell them that they are boys or girls according to which category they think fits them best, and when the only objective information they are given about the two categories is suffused with sex stereotypes?

I told you she was good. And so she has since then proceeded to address many of those questions and each time knocks it out of the park.

There is a free version but you don’t get every issue. For that you need to pay £5 per month or £50 a year. I’m currently on the free plan but I wouldn’t hesitate to sign up any time I needed to get back up to speed with the fight against this crazy ideology that has spread in our anchor-less western civilization.