Thank you: Debbie Hayton in the Mail

[Needmoresleep]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13011839/I-went-agonising-operation-thought-woman-finally-make-happy-devastating-revelation.html

I wonder what his head is thinking, and other members of the staff room. Science teachers are in short supply, but...

Are there any suggestions for an AGM flag? Something Barbie?

DH is still teaching?!

I do think we have been rubbing along ok with transsexuals

The Twitter thread cited upthread and the history of women and children over the years indicates very differently. It's been fine for the men and people have never had to consider the family perspective or those of anyone else.

https://twitter.com/hatpinwoman/status/1752066291630735476

A Barbican exhibition a while back had lots of materials about Chevalier d'Eon and Casa Susanna with diaries, newsletters, and letters from men expressing their contempt and coercive control of their families. (That's how they read to me.)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4514382/Secret-1950s-cross-dressing-community-revealed-exhibit.html

https://www.messynessychic.com/2020/04/15/found-snapshots-of-a-secret-1960s-catskills-resort-where-men-could-become-women/

Something else bothers me about the article and that is the graphic description of the operation, and he talks about using a dilator once a week and how sexual sensation has returned- he doesn’t have the numbness many people report.

He is monogamously married isn’t he? His wife would have no interest in the cavity he dilates, so what is the cavity for? His sexual sensation must be all about solo activity.

It paints such a depressing picture of a man happy with his solitary, paraphelia-driven self-sex life, while his poor wife has to live a life of celibacy she didn’t choose.

Ffs. What the fucking hell does he think his kids think of all this??

I don't want to minimise the suffering of 1950s TV wives, but I do think it would have been better to enable women and children to recognise and escape from abuse than to change the rules on TV.

We may end up with a generation of public erotic cross-dressers, but I'll still feel we've won if they are known for what they are, kept away from women's spaces and the classroom, and mocked by mainstream comedians.

I do think we have been rubbing along ok with transsexuals, and historically the practice has been tolerated and accepted.

I think you’ll find with lower numbers historically not as many women were being affected, however those women were still being expected to put up and shut up. It’s as it’s affected more women it’s become less tolerated and that’s a good thing.

And they still share a bedroom just not a bed, that sounds quite bleak for his wife.

Yup. From article 3

Debbie teaches physics at a Bristol secondary school; Stephanie — who also used to teach physics — now works for the Church of England overseeing training of the laity in her diocese. Both she and Debbie are church-going Christians.

In the wake of Hayton's articles, I've seen some people expressing sympathy on TwiX and arguing that AGP should be accommodated more, as a compromise between women's rights campaigners and men with AGP. I have loosely paraphrased to protect the anonymity of an absolute daftie.

Argument: the paraphilia causes them distress and dressing as a woman socially alleviates their distress. Allowing them to wear women's clothes and use a female name at work is a reasonable accommodation to avoid discrimination. Focusing on the sexual element is wrong unless a crime has been committed.

Don't you think an experienced headteacher with a florid turn of phrase could turn that sow's ear into a silk purse?

I am also struggling to understand the purpose of the "cavity" while he is remaining supposedly monogamously married to a heterosexual woman. This isn't explained anywhere in the excerpt (and I sure as hell am not going to buy the book), I would be interested to hear his answer to that.

@RethinkingLife We rubbed along ok at a societal level, before the attempted erosion of female rights and identity; which is not to deny the frictional dynamics of a cross-dressing spouse.

And there’s different types of trans - a significant % are gay men, so not in intimate relationships with women; or in the 50s and before, shoehorned into marriage by society contrary to their sexuality. My reading of the US resorts is a combination of AGP + suppressed gay men.

It’s hardly a surprise to read of men’s contempt for women and families in the 50s. It’s fairly representative of the time.

There are just far too many men inclined to coercive control irrespective of gender or sexual orientation. That is a risk people run just for being in a relationship with a male.

In the wake of Hayton's articles, I've seen some people expressing sympathy on TwiX and arguing that AGP should be accommodated more,

Yup.

It's the entire purpose of the way he writes. He wants it accepted. Sanitised. Reasonable.

As I said, you are absolutely not getting the real deal.

It's a paraphilia. Not a sexual orientation. This will be the thing. Why should I not have a sexual orientation centred on myself?

This is where we're at. A man not being able to sexually gratify himself at the expensive others is distressed by it, and we need to accommodate him.

But hey, what was the OP? '

This is a real attempt at honesty'.

According to AGP research there’s a distinction between men who are aroused by wearing women’s clothing or having a female body/body parts - a vulva or vagina. Presumably some have both. For the men whose greater arousal from body parts, there’s a greater link with surgical transition.

We rubbed along ok at a societal level, before the attempted erosion of female rights and identity; which is not to deny the frictional dynamics of a cross-dressing spouse.

This reads like forced teaming and a presumption of a right to generalise.

If your almost prelapsarian scenario were true, why is the most common trope to explain transwomen's use of women's single-sex space 'for fear of the reaction of men'? Unless you mean by societal that it was then and now expected for women to budge up. Or is the unspoken part that men have never been expected to 'rub along at a societal level' and adapt their responses or behaviour to accommodate transwomen?

Good point. It's all about our unspoken courtesy being extended to them.

Where is the men's unspoken courtesy being extended to them?

'Accommodate' and 'understand' -

yes, it's what women are told to do aren't they? Understand him (and why he abuses you) and maybe you can learn to handle and manipulate him so that you're safer, and gosh he's so complex. Where as you? Well he's not wasting any of his time wondering what goes on between your ears, is he?

Fgs. Normal human relationships do not involve one sided intensive study of someone else unless they're your child with significant SEND (in which case please see 'burn out') or you're their therapist. And you have very strong boundaries and are in the relationship to move them somewhere better rather than being a nicer and more co operative enabler.

This stuff is not healthy. I have no interest in how a man gets turned on by women's stuff, or what bits of it I am not signing on for a fascinating voyage and lecture tour around the magical wonder of Him, no matter how happy that might make his penis. I am not co dependent. He can do whatever he bloody likes if he doesn't invade women's spaces, resources and whatever else.

And those trying to push that women have some duty to pacify paraphilic suffering men by being non consenting sexual objects, and accepting that this means some women are excluded from all resources so that some men can get their rocks off better, really need some sessions with said therapist and some help to sort out their boundaries.

Using and involving non consenting others in your sexual experiences is a hard line. It's never acceptable.

the frictional dynamics of a cross-dressing spouse.

That's a new way of describing domestic abuse.

Anyone who hasn't yet read Lundy Bancroft's book 'why does he do that' from the perspective of a therapist with a career working with domestically abusive men, many referred from the court and prison system, it's useful.

He talks about how many abusive men adore a good wallow in pop psychology about the intricacies of themselves and their wonderfully fascinating motivations and what it all means and getting people to splash about in the bucket of them. It isn't something he encourages. It isn't in any way a healthy thing, it's a part very often of how they are busy evading responsibility and creating double standards that allow them entitlements without reciprocation.

Perhaps it is important to bear in mind that the pre-TRA period in which some women and not others felt more or less ok with the 'compromise' of politely acting as if a person were their preferred sex was also a period in which we weren't torn to pieces if we made a distinction between transsexuals and cross-dressers.
I'm prepared to bet that very few women were ever happy to play along with cross-dressers in their spaces - because these were the people acting out a fetish, and co-opting the women they encountered along the way. The concept of a male-bodied 'transsexual' to most people would have meant a same-sex attracted male who presented as female, or in some cases a heterosexual male whose presentation was the result of a very extreme gender dysphoria amounting to mental illness (rather than simply the playing out of a fetish). These were the individuals who may have benefited from the 'compromises' that trans-activism has put a bomb under.

I don't mean to say anything about whether those compromises were a good thing or not, or about how many women were ok with them (and in what situations). Just wanted to point out how the forced re-engineering of language has made it hard to state certain relevant distinctions that used to be taken for granted (just as it has attempted to make the category 'woman' unsayable)

I think in those days we were also a LOT more naive and uninformed about what was happening in the heads of those men in women's spaces.

The TRAs have sorted that. The mask has been ripped off and metaphorically pissed on, and that genie is permanently out of the bottle. I get that Hayton and others have lost that nice illusion they benefitted from, and they regret the loss of this, but it doesn't make it any better that they did it to women in the first place.

Depends on the relationship. There’s abuse in some late transition relationships (ie control, bullying, isolation, gaslighting, boundary erosion etc) but not all.

Some people are very keen to show how open-minded, metropolitan and cool they are; so arguing that society accepts public elements of AGP as a reasonable accommodation, or that we see it as a sexual orientation rather than a paraphilia, is how these people are going to demonstrate how wonderfully liberal and tolerant (ie 'better than you frigid frumpy feminists') they are.

It’s this hey-man-just-be-cool behaviour which got us so many broken societal boundaries over the years because some sections of society apparently needed strict boundaries to make them behave with consideration (whether genuine or not) for women, children, and the vulnerable.

I'm plausibly not the only reader interested in your evidence base for that assertion and why that should be regarded as a counter-balance?

My understanding, from someone who would know, was that the famous 1960's Gateways lesbian club in Chelsea used to experience significant tensions between transvestites who wanted to attend, and lesbians who preferred that they did not.

Maybe nothing changes. The difference is that back then we could read read Jan Morris and feel we were oh so liberal, because most of us were not affected. In the same way that many men, including senior executives still feel able to do.