Janice Turner interview with Debbie Hayton in the Times

[CaptainWarbeck]

Share token link here: Debbie Hayton: the trans woman taking on the trans activists

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/df87fe47-3dd3-4f35-ac48-81f54aeb418f?shareToken=a53b2f201cdd4c204b9009b204cb1ef3

Janice neatly runs through a history of trans issues with Debbie including a discussion of AGP. An excellent read I thought and will get a wide audience as a Saturday Times Magazine article.

Hayton says he has a paraphiliac fetish.

This fetish compels him to try to get others to see him as a woman and/or refer to him as a woman.

This is the whole premise of his book.

Women are objecting to being compelled or forced to participate in Haytons fetish.

Datun, this is currently the top rated comment with 300 votes:

"I rather think the crux of this issue for many, if not most, females is ignored.

In humans, as in all mammals, female has a distinct meaning. That meaning obviously has a limit, a boundary, as does the distinct meaning for male.

Any man declaring himself to be a woman, ie: female, violates the boundary of the meaning of the sex class that is female. It is a violation of the integrity of the sex class that is female.

This violation, occurring as an assertion of male power over females, is against our female consent.

It is a blatant deceit on all women and girls to use 'she' or 'her' when referring to any man who pretends he is not a man, whether it is considered a matter of courtesy or not.

It is a blatant deceit on our entire society for any law to state that a man can become a woman.

Women are very angry about this violation and this deceit."

This one has 205 votes:

"Why is it “common courtesy” to pander to people’s fantasies that they have changed sex? ? Is it also “ common courtesy” to pretend to a skeletal anorexic that she is too fat because she wants you to say she is? In both cases you are participating in a lie."

And this one, 175 votes/likes, whatever it's called:

"When it went from being a courtesy to an enforced obeisance, everything changed."

She gets to choose? She gets to tell us she chooses all over her national newspaper column. She gets to accuse “women” of sending hate mail to DHs head. What is a woman though? Why does JT get to choose and I don’t. The bottom line is you either are one or you are not one. If you are not one then JT cannot decide for the rest of us how to address you and then tell other women off for not agreeing with her.

Thanks Rex.

That article merely reinforces the complete disconnect some people deal with between the logic of fighting to retain the integrity of the words women and girls need, and people being kind to their mates.

Although, that was not the intention here I am sure. But it surely does show that disconnected thinking.

Thank you Rex!

I can't see the comments. Is that because I don't have a subscription, even though I'm reading it through a share token?

It's bloody interesting that the people commenting are not taking their lead from her article. They have been informed elsewhere.

The hyperbole is strong. Personally I wouldn’t recommend writing to DH’s school to complain about him. The school is activist central and any criticism would fall in deaf ears and likely be wilfully misconstrued. However, it does deeply trouble me that DH’s role in the NEU’s guidelines is glossed over, the fact that pupil’s at DH’s school don’t have the luxury of choice that Janice Turner had, DH’s own views on social transition in schools and assertion that GNC pupils come under the “trans umbrella” are not probed and made clear.

Somehow all the safeguarding issues of gender identity in schools and DH’s role in that either get a pass or become the elephant in the room because what- there’s a need to be “courteous”?

Absolutist, extremist, ultra….those names are pretty loaded and emotive names to be called…potentially I think quite damaging.I wonder who will shout those names at us first to shut down debate?

The problem is, we haven't been able to talk about it. Even mentioning it would get you an instant deletion on here.

I still think Janice will get there in the end. I just hope she's not livid enough to stop listening.

My impression is that JT, Stella O'Malley are ever ready to tell us about their listening skills. It's not unrealistic to consider they may at sometime disengage in the Doyle way given the use of "extremist, ultra" and similar terms.

I wonder if a newspaper would ever consider giving Julia Long an opinion piece to lay out a position? Or KJK? Now KJK has founded a political party, is it feasible that we'll see her on Question Time? That would be a fair eye-opener for the nation. I should think the traffic on TwiX would be immense.

I would really like to know how much choice Hayton's pupils have in being "courteous".

Datun, yes I think they stopped people being able to see comments unless they subscribed, a while ago. But I can't remember when.

“I wonder what these women would like Hayton to do? Just disappear? They already believe the Gender Recognition Act — which allows trans people to change their birth certificates in limited circumstances involving a medical diagnosis — should be abolished for perpetuating a lie. Now it seems that they want to scrap employment protections for those who have undergone “gender reassignment” under the Equality Act too.”

This is interesting too.

She seems to think that some male people should be allowed to live a myth until the court system declares they have physically harmed a female person enough to be jailed. Does she understand just what she is saying here?

Has she said in the past that she believes removing the GRA is ‘extremist’ territory?

And there was that denigration again. ‘Ultra’ now ‘extreme’. Edie Wyatt pointed out the power differential of these journalists and academics compared to the women with limited or no platforms that they are scolding and denigrating. It is becoming clearer and clearer.

JT has complained that the women who she disagrees with are doing the cause ‘no good’. How hypocritical can you get? Denigrating those women in The Times and telling women to effectively ‘play nice’ or shut up is hardly doing this cause she declares to support any ‘good’ either. She may not have intended this, but this is very clearly what she is doing with this follow up scold.

Aren’t they?? It’s starting to feel that now it’s got out into the wider public consciousness, that some ppl feel a need to separate out those horrid “ultra extremist” GC women eg like people on here who’ve been fighting this for years and the nice acceptable mainstream GC women in the media who won’t scare the horses.

It's one thing to read on Twitter that people are calling you a liar, telling you you're an idiot for accommodating a fetish. You may think ach, this is just Twitter drama.

It's quite another to find your readers have similar views, albeit expressed more politely.

Apart from anything else, even if she disagrees with all the people who are commenting, it is they who are buying the paper.

Got it thanks.

Would you say most of the comments are in broad in agreement with us?

Are all the people who are buying the newspaper and reading Janice's articles, ultra, now, too?

Ah well now that reads like a party political broadcast doesn't it? Only GC bigots ultras would vote conservative!

This however blows my mind I will use female pronouns for some trans women. ......... But those who respect women, like Debbie Hayton, or those I meet in real life, I will respect.

How exactly is getting off on pretending to be a woman respectful?! & why does meeting someone IRL force you to respect anyone??? Weird

You may think ach, this is just Twitter drama.

I agree. Except she didn't, and chose to write that article. I'll be polite and call it a dog's breakfast of a piece.

It's quite another to find your readers have similar views, albeit expressed more politely

Yes. This will sting. This one was to the point:

"This is the first time I've felt significant disappointment over one of Janice's articles."

(77 votes)

These two went on a tangent but falls into the same category:

"To describe Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great, as an 'unreadable harangue' is to do a great diservice to the memory of a seriously great man of letters."

"The last thing you can honestly say about Christopher Hitchens is that his writing was “unreadable”. You may not have enjoyed the experience or agreed with his opinion but as your own quote makes clear, he was a precise, lucid, juicy..."

Would you say most of the comments are in broad in agreement with us?

Yes. Overwhelmingly so as I type.

Are all the people who are buying the newspaper and reading Janice's articles, ultra, now, too?

I guess! 😂

Does she know that getting a doctors diagnosis of gender dysphoria was necessary, because men with AGP were not to be given a gender recognition certificate?

When this first kicked off, I read reams from men telling other men exactly what to say to doctors, because, 'if they knew we get turned on by silk panties', they wouldn't give us the certificate.

Honestly, women have worked so hard to make the authorities understand that this movement is driven by men's paraphilias, and now they do, they're fine with it!

“I’m reminded of the New Atheists, who moved from merely not believing in God to aggressively denouncing anyone who did. I interviewed Christopher Hitchens about his unreadable harangue God Is Not Great, in which he called religion “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry”. I have no faith either and I’m a passionate secularist, but I’ve never seen the point in railing at an old lady lighting a church candle with “hey, loser, God doesn’t exist”!”

This doesn’t seem to be quite the right comparator at all.

I think a more accurate one would be the religions that call their congregation ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ such as ‘sister x’, Or who have titles such as ‘elder x’ where x is their name, teaching society that they should all use these labels outside of the congregation to respect those people. That is more accurate a comparator.

or does she honestly think that people should respect any title or label someone is given just to make a person feel ‘respected’ and ‘seen’? Regardless of whether you treat that person with respect in every other way?

FWIW, I respect her right to use whatever pronouns she wants. It is the framing of others who choose not to and who are saying why as ‘ultras’ and ‘extremists’ that I have an issue with.

Yep

This thread has a recurrent theme about what indulging anyone in their non-falsifiable identities can get to. I've posted several links there to live streamed court hearings (some with analysis from a commentator) that are a mess because of multiple self-ids, not only into another sex but up to 26 health conditions.

These identities and protected characteristics are weaponised and used to obtain accommodations that courts and other bodies would never ordinarily accord to other people who have horrendously chaotic lives and circumstances.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5003873-wtf-have-i-just-read?

Identity politics can create horrific circumstances for other people. Fisher discussed this in Exiting the Vampires' Castle.

The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3413036-Class-and-Identity-Politics-Mark-Fishers-Exiting-the-Vampire-Castle

I admire the writing skills of JT, Burchill, Bindel, Stock et al. I can't deny that I'm beginning to feel this is the Deptford People Project playing out in a shifted sphere.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3203804-The-Deptford-People-Project-and-the-impact-of-self-ID-and-transactivism-on-working-class-women

I think what it comes down to, is that JT is uncomfortable with being blunt to someone face to face. I understand that; so am I. And she extends that politeness to her articles about Hayton, again because to be bluntly honest would seem impolite. But she seems to be missing some of the consequences of elevating politeness over truth.

This article was a piece of hypocrisy.