Julie Bindel’s interview with Claudia McClean, read carefully

A close reading of the conversation at the launch of Rejected, and the first in a new series on the long-form interviews shaping public understanding of trans healthcare.

Julie Bindel’s interview with Claudia McClean at the launch of Claudia’s memoir, Rejected, is being shared as evidence that gender-affirming medicine is broken. Read the transcript carefully and that is not what Claudia is saying. What she is describing is something far more particular, a young, traumatised, gay person in 1980s Britain routed to surgery in a coercive relationship without the kind of care she needed. The wider argument Bindel layers on top is Bindel’s, and not Claudia’s.

This is the first piece in a new series. I am going to take the long-form interviews shaping public understanding of trans healthcare, sit with them properly, transcript open, and ask what is actually being said, what is being layered on top, and what the listener is being led to conclude.

A note on Claudia, before any of this

Claudia’s life has held more pain than most people could carry in several lifetimes. Childhood violence. The loss of her father in dreadful circumstances. Decades of homophobic abuse. Surgery she has come to deeply regret. The loss of the great love of her life. Repeated near-fatal assaults. Her testimony is a human document, and the criticism in this piece is not of her. It is of how her account is being used.

What Claudia actually says

Listen to her, in her own words, set apart from the narration around them. She describes being a feminine, gender-non-conforming child in 1960s Glasgow, in a Catholic family with an extremely violent father. She describes saving her mother’s life at the age of eight by running through the ghetto to fetch the police. She describes years of homophobic mob attacks at school, a year in hospital after being kicked nearly to death at the age of ten, an abscess at the base of her spine that she hid for three years out of fear, and the partner she loved deeply, Richard, who told her she would lose him to a woman if she did not transition.

She tells us that Richard was unfaithful, that he loved the changes hormones produced in her body, and that, in her own words, he kept coming back because he liked it. She names the violence she lived through with extraordinary precision, a man on a train who tried to kill her once he realised her ticket said Mr, a man at a nightclub with a tear gas canister, a defence barrister at her own attempted-murder trial who called her a whore in open court.

She also tells us, very gently, this. For everyone here who is trans and happy, I say Brava, God bless you all. She is not asking anyone to follow her out of medicine, she is telling her own story, and she is telling it with grace.

What gets layered on top

Listen to how Bindel sets the conversation up before Claudia speaks for herself. Claudia is positioned as a pioneer against transgender ideology, as a witness against self-identification, as someone railing against men in single sex spaces. None of that language is Claudia’s. Read the transcript carefully and you will not find the words self-identification, single sex spaces, or transgender ideology anywhere in her own speech. She does not discuss contemporary trans politics at all. She talks about her own life.

This is the move I want this series to keep returning to. A person tells the story of their own life. The interviewer takes that story and uses it to argue for a position the person did not actually argue for. The reader, who hears the framing first and then hears the interviewee’s words sitting inside that framing, comes away believing the interviewee has confirmed something she has not actually said. That is not really interviewing, and it does not really serve Claudia.

The medical care she received, and what should have happened

This is the part that matters most to me. I have spent over a decade standing alongside trans people in healthcare and in society, and I know what good gender care looks like. I also know what it looks like when it is not done.

Claudia describes being assessed, signed off, and routed to surgery while she was in a coercive relationship. Her partner had told her he would leave her if she did not transition. She had been through extreme childhood abuse. She had been through years of life-threatening homophobic violence. She had a serious back injury and an unhealed abscess. She was using prescribed sleeping medication. She was, by her own description, broken. She was paying privately, which always creates pressures of its own. She was assessed once, and then she was on the operating table.

What does good gender care look like in a situation like that? It slows everything down. It sits with the whole person. It asks who else is in the room. It asks whether transition is being chosen by the person in front of you, or whether it is being asked of them by someone who has made it the price of love. It looks at the trauma, the violence, the relationship, the body, and the future, and it does not move towards an irreversible step until the person can choose freely. None of that happened for Claudia, and a young, gay, traumatised twenty-something deserved very much better than she got.

What does that actually mean? Claudia’s care was a real failure that deserves to be named for what it was. It does not tell us anything about the millions of trans people for whom transition has been the right path. The published rates of regret after gender-affirming care are consistently very low, somewhere around one to three per cent depending on how it is measured, far lower than the regret rates for many other procedures we accept without controversy. Detransition stories deserve respect. They should not be used to deny care to the much larger group who do not regret. What Claudia’s story tells us is that gender care needs to be done with time, with skill, and with attention, not that it should not be done at all.

Richard, and the story that does not quite get told

Bindel sets up Richard as the man who pressured Claudia into surgery on the logic that if he was straight, she must be a woman. That is part of the picture, although it is not the whole picture, and Claudia herself draws something more complicated.

Claudia describes confronting Richard directly. She tells him, darling, you are here because you like it, and Richard, in her words, looks as though she has slapped him. She describes him loving the changes in her body at every stage. She names what was happening between them, in her own words, as a kind of sexual interest he could not admit to in himself.

What is Claudia actually describing? A man who was attracted to a feminine, gender-non-conforming young person from the night they met, who liked her becoming more feminised, and who used the threat of leaving as a coercive tool to push her towards a body he found more appealing. That is a story about a partner’s coercion and a partner’s hidden desire. It is not a story about trans medicine creating a delusion in someone who would otherwise have been fine. Bindel uses it as the latter, and Claudia, listened to closely, is describing the former.

When the interviewee is asked to defend the interviewer

Here is a moment in the conversation worth pausing on, for anyone thinking about the ethics of this kind of work. Mid-interview, with the recording running, Bindel turns to Claudia and asks her to vouch for Bindel’s own reputation. People think Julie is transphobic, she says, so why would she and Harriet have me in their home. Claudia, kindly, gives her the answer she is being asked for.

That is the moment the interview stops being about Claudia. A woman in her sixties, in considerable pain, sitting at a launch event organised through Bindel’s own networks, is being asked on the record to defend her interviewer’s politics on a contested public question. Whatever anyone thinks of Bindel’s positions, an interviewee is there to be listened to, not to be recruited.

What good interviewing looks like with someone in this much pain

There is a real craft to interviewing someone who has lived through deep trauma, and the principles are not complicated, even if they are demanding in practice.

You let the person lead. You do not place words in their mouth before they have spoken. You do not narrate their life before they have told it. You do not arrive with a frame already built and try to fit them into it. You stay alert to the moments when they say something you were not expecting, and you follow that thread rather than steering them back to your story. You do not ask them to validate you. You let them say things you disagree with, and you do not edit those things away.

You also remember that someone who has been hurt as much as Claudia has been hurt is not a witness for anyone’s argument. Her account belongs to her, and the job of the interviewer is to make a careful, attentive space for that account, rather than to put it to work.

Why this matters

When a regret story is conscripted into a general argument against trans healthcare, every trans person who is doing well, every parent of a happy trans child, every clinician trying to deliver careful gender-affirming care, has to push back against the implication that their story is the lie and the regret story is the truth. That implication is doing a lot of damage right now, in policy, in clinical practice, and in family conversations up and down the country.

Claudia herself does not make that argument. She wishes the happy trans people Brava. The wider argument is being made on top of her account, by an interviewer with her own long-settled views, using Claudia’s pain as evidence for a conclusion that Claudia has not drawn.

This is the pattern I want to keep watching across this series. Not because individual interviewees are villains. Very often they are not, and Claudia is not, and her account deserves to be read with full seriousness. The format itself is being put to a particular use at a particular moment, and the people most harmed by that use are trans people who never get to speak in these rooms at all.

What does a woman look like?

Picture this. An alien lands in the United Kingdom tomorrow and is shown four British women: Julie Bindel, me, Claudia McClean, and Kemi Badenoch. The alien is asked what makes these four people the same kind of thing.

Where would the alien start? Different ages, different ethnicities, different builds, different voices, different ways of dressing, different ways of moving through the world. Different jobs. Different politics. Different religions. Different beliefs about who counts as a woman, and very different beliefs about what should follow from that.

What does a woman look like? On the evidence in front of the alien, there is very little that is shared, and that is exactly the point of the exercise. There is no visible characteristic that captures what a woman is. There is no body shape, no haircut, no voice, no walk, no item of clothing that all women share and no men do. There is no single biological measure that does the work either. Try to define woman by chromosome pattern and a long list of women drop out, intersex women among them. Try by reproductive system, by anatomy, by hormone levels, by the sex assigned at birth, and the same thing happens. The category of woman is held together by something other than what can be seen from the outside, and it always has been.

Two of the alien’s four women, Bindel and Claudia, have spent decades inside the public argument about who counts as a woman. They would not agree with each other on the answer. They are, both of them, plainly, women.

What I would say to the alien is what I would say to anyone. Ask the women who they are, and listen to what they tell you. That is the only honest way to find out.

Listen for yourself

Bindel’s interview with Claudia is published as a podcast episode on Bindel’s Substack.