Helen Joyce, a British activist best known for penning the anti-trans screed “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality,” suggested on Megyn Kelly’s Sirius Radio show last week that a trans woman, the U. S. Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine, should kill herself. This came in response to a clip Kelly played for Joyce which showed parts of a recent episode of Nightline where Levine defended gender-affirming care as an evidence-based, mainstream medical treatment approach for youth with gender dysphoria. Joyce referred to Levine’s restatement of the mainstream medical position in the U. S. as “child sacrifice.”
“I was brought up Catholic, I am no longer a believer, but I still turn to the words of the Bible when I see things like that,” Joyce told Kelly (2:25 in this clip), “I say ‘better that you tie a millstone around your neck and cast yourself into the sea than that you harm children like this.”
Joyce, whose book was given a positive review by Jesse Singal writing for the New York Times in 2021, seems to be referring to Matthew 18:6, although the quote is botched. Here’s the text of Matthew 18:6 from the most common Catholic bible in English, the New Jerusalem Bible:
(The New Jerusalem Bible was published in 1985, which means that Joyce may be more familiar with the Jerusalem Bible, which translated Matthew 8:16 thus: “But anyone who is an obstacle to bring down one of these little ones who have faith in me would be better drowned in the depths of the sea with a great millstone round his neck.”)
Because the passage is misquoted, it makes it easy to understand that Joyce was saying that Levine should kill herself. However, Joyce is far from the only person to have quoted Matthew 8:16 in a way that suggests they condone violence against trans people or their supporters.
More accurate quotations of the passage seem to have been circulating in both the U. K. and the U. S. far right for quite a while. Over a year ago in, Joyce’s native U. K., a writer associated with the fringe far-right party UKIP, Time Worstall, wrote in support of using the passage as a justification for putting supporters of the WPATH guidelines to death. (The WPATH guidelines provide the standards of care for gender dysphoria and allow for puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for youth with persistent gender dysphoria after they enter adolescence.)
The passage has also been used at anti-trans protests as a means of threatening violence against transgender people by far-right extremists. In states where extremism has made inroads into government, far-right legislators have named bans on gender affirming care Millstone acts, after the passage in Matthew. This happened in Oklahoma, with a bill authored by Republican David Bullard, as well as in South Carolina and Texas. (Texas and Oklahoma eventually passed similar bans, albeit with less inflammatory language.)
References to millstones and Matthew are also used by members of the Christian right in discussions of child sex trafficking. The Matthew 6:18 quote appears in The Sound of Freedom, a movie that dramatizes the rescue of a young girl from sex traffickers in Colombia that has been enthusiastically received by Christian right audiences. The far-right fringe in the U. S. has repeatedly conflated the crime of child sex trafficking, the larger crime of human trafficking which more often involves forced labor, conspiracy theories that the world is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles, and medical treatment for trans youth. For example, in a July 18 post that quoted Matthew 3:16, former Trump official Sebastian Gorka drew a direct connection between The Sound of Freedom, child sex trafficking, and support for transgender people.
This confusion and conflation of supporting trans youth (or any trans person) nonmedically, providing appropriate treatment for those who need it, and heinous sexual abuse is entirely intentional, and quoting Matthew has become a go-to way for conservatives to suggest that violence is warranted against the transgender community in order to protect children. Each time the passage is repeated by a prominent anti-trans figure it further normalizes idea that violence, whether vigilante or state-sanctioned, is the appropriate way to deal with transgender people.
This post has been updated to add the fact that Millstone acts were also introduced in Texas and South Carolina, in addition to Oklahoma.
If we’re going to be picky, Joyce’s native country is the Republic of Ireland, not the UK. But I agree with what you said about her.
Hmm. Looks like she lives in England and all or most of her work seems to have been in the UK, but she was born in Ireland? I’m going to leave this for now, but I greatly appreciate the comment and may still do a correction if it becomes clearer to me which description would be more accurate for someone in her situation.
What’s with Matthew and being the source of all the fashiest Christian Bible quotes? It also introduced one of the oldest antisemitic canards, "His blood be on us and our children!" If that book hadn’t been written, Christianity wouldn’t be as bad as it is.