Stephanie Hayton in The Times

[nythbran2]

Share token: www.thetimes.co.uk/article/14e32be1-7d9e-41e9-833d-04defedc9cad?shareToken=7730fec65ff9cf9bf7f92cc29de3781c

I wondered if she would finally get tired of being spoken over/for.

Odd article. It just sort of…stops. Where’s the rest?

Stephanie will hate me saying this but I thought it was a really sad article. What a fucking mess.

I kept scrolling, but alas the end does seem to be missing in action!

What an annoying title - using both the words woman and wife to describe a man. It’s off putting.

Yes I wanted to read more. I do hope that if or when Stephanie wants to write more fully about her experience she will have the space to do so.

That was my thoughts as well.

It's great that people are given a voice, I'm just not sure what message Stephanie was trying to get across

My impression was that she is quite private but is tired of being used as a figure for other people's views, so she clarified her position. I agree it was quite short, but perhaps she doesn't really feel she owes us or anyone else a lot more.

I feel like this is knee-jerk reaction to both Debbie (and possibly his wife too) worried about book sales. If he had counted on gender critical women being #bekind and "yes he is a man but oh what a wonderful gracious one" buying his book, the past weekend might have worried him.
So bring in the calvary, aka Stephanie's endorsement of him.

I agree Rayon.

I also thought that her point about nature and evolotion is correct.

'I have also learnt something unexpected: that nature is strong. We cannot undo thousands of years of evolution because we want life to be different.'

I quite like this article. She comes across as a strong woman who knows her own mind and has an active life. She's saying that DH is important in her life but not the centre of it. She has a life of her own. She's also GC in as far as she several times emphasises the importance of life being 'grounded in reality', a reality which includes biological sex.

I'm GC but my approach to trans-identified people follows the Kathleen Stock approach rather than the Posie Parker. Stock (and Joyce and Bindel) have been best on the issue, imo.

I thought the hate for Janice Turner was unjustified given the subtle and equivocal nature of her interview with DH. Anyone who really thought it was a ringing endorsement of TRA needs to spend some time learning how to read closely and critically.

I am also uncomfortable with the idea expressed on Twitter (and here in a previous thread) that Stephanie Hayton is suffering from some form of 'false consciousness'. I think the very concept of false conciousness, rooted as it is in Marxist and postmodernist thought, is deeply troubling and doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all.

Is 'disagreement' hate now?

Interesting that 'abuse' appears in the second paragraph.
Also there are no photos of just Stephanie.
Also the intimacy comments are a bit odd - I do all those things with my partner and have never considered them as intimacy at all.

Thx for the share token, OP.

Interesting that she has thrown herself so totally into religion - often a trauma response.

This sentence:
"Unfortunately, it appears that the loudest voices are those who attack or jump to conclusions on minimal evidence."

• is a bit rubbish. The loudest voice is clearly that of DH, who gets platformed, interviewed & lauded constantly. He is always on TV/radio as a voice for comment.
  But we women? Not so much.

Disagreement's fine but I follow a lot of ultras and redfems across a number of platforms and some of them were absolutely going OFF on JT in a really personal and uncalled-for way.

I don't think all of them understood that The Times has editorial guidelines and some of them are specifically around how interviewees describe themselves and how to respect that. For example, if interviewing a sexual assault victim, the interviewee might prefer the term 'survivor' and so the journo would be expected to respect that although they might also add some editorialising around that.

JT's interview was in my view coloured and editorialised to demonstrate how jarring the pronoun thing was.

My concern about the GC movement is that parts of it are currently in a purity spiral. As a former Marxist (I am now fully reformed) who moved in a lot of Marxist activist and radfem circles in the 90s (where the TRA thing started, actually) I am very wary of purity spirals because the result of them is that the whole movement becomes weakened and loses legitimatacy, ultimately losing whatever gains it might have made.

This comes across as if The Times has rung her, and asked her to do this quickly as a follow-up to the article, to try to put a lid on the negative commenting on social media. It feels very strange that the Haytons are being presented as the 'acceptable face' of trans. All a part of the Labour Party and their supporters trying to find a stance that people will go along with, I suppose. And part of that is that women who won't play ball get labelled as extremists and bullies.

This bit is beyond cringe. He’s always front and centre.

The caption in particular. Who strikes a pose in a trouser suit in front of a big screen “at home” ?

I don't think all of them understood that The Times has editorial guidelines

I think they did. Janice Turner could have said she was governed by the guidelines, but instead made it clear on Twitter that this was her decision to use female pronouns out of 'respect'. And that she regarded those women who wouldn't do the same as 'ultras'. It was those comments, deliberately made for whatever reason, that really kicked off the arguments.

I would like to hear more from her.

I don't think anyone hates Janice Turner, just disagreed.

Stephanie has always been religious.

The intimacy comments are obviously a friend consoling her when sex was taken out of the relationship by Hayton's operation. Reasonable comments if the operation had been unavoidable but it must have been horrible losing her sex life because her husband developed an unhealthy obsession.

She's in a really difficult position because most of us find it hard to believe she's truly happy in that situation but it's her choice to stay with him.

She might've done in her original copy and then it got subbed out? It's not like The Times will publish her interview exactly as she wrote it. But she has to support her paper when talking about it on Twitter.

The intimacy comments are obviously a friend consoling her when sex was taken out of the relationship by Hayton's operation.

Or....it could have been what SH actually thinks?

As a feminist I feel uncomfortable with this implict idea that SH is somehow "obviously" unable to express herself and what she expresses must be what someone else has told her to say. Like I said, the dodgy concept of false consciousness.

How do we know SH doesn't have sex outside of the marriage?

She might've done in her original copy and then it got subbed out? It's not like The Times will publish her interview exactly as she wrote it. But she has to support her paper when talking about it on Twitter.

Support for the paper wouldn't require her to call those who think differently 'ultras'. That was quite a remark.
I agree that I think it's highly unlikely The Times would ever have used male pronouns in this article.

Stephanie Hayton is a grown-up. She's made up her own mind, and I don't think we can tell her she's wrong. With marriage, there's always a trade-off in what you're willing to put up with for what you get in return so presumably she values the companionship enough to decide to overlook the fact that her husband gets a sexual kick from pretending to be a woman.

Completely agree with your observations about purity spirals, CantDeal. It's especially annoying to see one forming just as we're getting somewhere, and the fact that the targets are so many of our longest serving and most moderate public supporters is pretty telling.