Stephanie Hayton in The Times

[nythbran2]

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

Yes. I found this discordant too.

While I also understand that her faith includes seeking 'truth', the 'truth' here is that D Hayton is a male and pronouns are sex based.

It is like Stephanie is using the same 'faith' style basis of belief to then believe that D Hayton should be called 'she'.

It's perfectly possible to be a strong, intelligent career woman and have an manipulative, dishonest husband.

There's no escaping the conclusion that Debbie is telling lies - he has been public about several different versions of his AGP and they obviously can't all be true.

1, Before they married he told Stephanie that he 'had cross dressed a couple of times but it was in the past'.

2, In direct contradiction of that he's now claiming that he first had the urge to cross dress aged three and the urge has been so strong that for decades it was like 'a beach ball he was trying to hold underwater'.

3, He's also claiming that it was watching copious amounts of sissy porn that made him want to transition, ramped up his urges to cross dress and made his mental health decline, pushing him to want to be seen as a woman.

4, In contradiction of that he's also claiming that while he knows he's a man, he's scared of going back to being seen as a man in case his 'mental health' declines.

It seems odd to me that Stephanie, when finally given a chance to put her side, talks about her interest in truth but doesn't mention her husband's lack of honesty. It will be interesting to read other things that she says in the future.

@CantDealwithChristmas
"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."
^
If calling a man a "he" and using correct sexed-pronouns, and being angry that Hayton said Magdalen Berns was a "fellow activist" makes us "ultra" radfems then... I think you're in the wrong room.^

The tone in which "ultra" was used to describe us women who have reached the point of needing to draw a hard line, is very much like "t3rf".

When you're in a relationship like that, you do feel sometimes that by setting boundaries you are making active choices and so are not a "passive victim". But in retrospect when you've got out you see that they are not true choices as you are always bull dozed into them.

It can be difficult to accept if you have been a victim of abuse. I always minimise what I went through by saying that my ex was at the mild end of the AGP spectrum and I've no doubt he probably tells all and sundry that I abused him by telling him hard truths and trying to persuade him not to transition.

Stephanie obviously thinks that a woman with a good job who does presentations, like she does, is less likely to be an abused "victim" than some other type of woman. But abuse and coercive control is not class, career or education based it can happen to any of us. It's maybe also difficult for women who identify as clever (which Stephanie must be to have a physics PHD), to admit they've been abused.

Women often only start learning about abuse once they have exited an abusive relationship, whilst you're in one there's no energy left for dealing with it. Abused women are not a passive "other" and staying is not always the "strong" decision.

Unfortunately this hostage statement reinforces rather than distracts from any suspicion of abuse.

I imagine that if I was in her position with, I presume, mainly religious friends and a husband who was celebrated by the entire gentry left, I would think differently to how I do and certainly would have found it difficult if not impossible to leave.

I don't judge any trans widows for making different decisions to my own, it's important to leave the door open for them.

Come on. That's so patronising. She's a smart woman, clearly. Just because you see no value in her faith doesn't make it a "trauma response."

I happily describe myself as a terf and have done to on a number of occasions in the workplace and in social gatherings. You don't like it, I do. In the same way, I didn't use ultra as a slur.

I wouldn't personally use she pronouns for DH. But I can understand why The Times did. I think to go from that to claiming that JT is TRA-adjacent and as good as a handmaiden, which some people were doing on Twitter over the weekend, is a purity spiral too far and risks damaging the whole GC movement at the very point that it is going mainstream.

Everything about that article is odd. The timing of it, suspiciously like a damage limitation to the previous article. Weirdly truncated. The picture ‘at home’ of DH even though the article is, supposedly, by, and about SH. The intimacy stuff - almost like the ‘friend’ (what ‘friend’ I wonder?) was desperately trying to get her to look for the bright side of what she does have despite the huge amount that she had quite obviously lost. And just the air of who’s she trying to convince, us or herself? Odd.

I found this a more helpful perspective. I think there are parallels with the situation of someone whose spouse has had an affair. The wronged partner has a difficult choice between leaving, and staying in a marriage which has changed. Either choice is full of pain. Staying means working through a long process of trying to regain trust in someone who has not been trustworthy.

Both partners are flawed; everyone I know is flawed, I certainly am. Trying to negotiate a relationship when you have been deeply hurt is tough. It’s even harder if you retain suspicions that your partner hasn’t completely renounced the hurtful behaviour. But even when you have been ‘cheated on’, the relationship isn’t one way. The ‘innocent’ partner isn’t completely innocent - she or he has done things and said things that hurt the ‘guilty’ partner too, though that is no excuse at all for the ’guilty’ partner’s bad behaviour. And the ‘guilty’ party still usually has some good qualities!

So Stephanie has chosen a difficult path, and is almost certainly still conflicted. Having her life and choices put firmly in the public domain, and then, albeit sympathetically, criticised … that must dredge up some of the hurt and confusion of the years before she came to a position of some peace.

Like others I thought it was interesting but incomplete. Tinsel’s post above provides valuable context.

Very religious people can behave in ways that seem contradictory to their faith to others so I’m uncomfortable with statements that Stephanie would or wouldn't be doing something because she is religious. The truth is we don’t know.

She’s committed to stay with DH so what she says is going to reflect that.

Personally I think consuming large quantities of sissy porn is not exactly in line with Christian (or feminist) ideals.

I was hugely uncomfortable with her use of the term ‘genital intimacy’ as it looks like an attempt to place the missing sex within marriage as a purely mechanical act that is missing. Although I agree with her there are other types of intimacy and it is possible to have an intimate relationship without sex. Some marriages survive when one partner can’t have sex for medical reasons and they are still intimate relationships.

It did read a little like damage control as the book and DH are not being received as well as expected.

Both Hayton’s appear to think they are cleverer than anyone else.

Great post, so I'm repeating it.

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 agree she doesn't. It's her husband who has brought her into this. I'm sure she's not seeking the limelight.

I found the original article really odd, and very sad, and disturbing, but I think that JT should be commended for that. She's a journalist writing up an interview that is supposed to evoke a feeling as well as presenting specific facts and quotes, and she did that well. This is not a Year 3 writing exercise in which success/failure is based on whether the children used clear sentences, an appropriate number of adjectives etc. There was a LOT in that article that was said and implied without JT having to express it directly.

As for the SH article - it reads to me as deeply deeply sad. Whether or not Stephanie did that on purpose when preparing the piece, I could not say. But certainly, that's what is evoked when I read it.

I think that the family are trying to be make the situation work for them. And this article is Stephanie explaining how she remains in the marriage and that is absolutely her choice. The way she works through this is interesting, I think it is clear that there is plenty of unpick from her words in light of the situation. But ultimately, while I find interesting, it is also clear that staying within a relationship such as this, requires a certain amount of rationalising that others outside the relationship are going to find shaky.

The more of these stories that we see, I find a commonality of the rocky foundations of twisting the story to make it fit a belief system rather than being based on unvarnished truth. Some humans are more capable of living with this than others.

People aren't always logical, are they? I am completely mystified as to how someone can have a PhD in physics and still be a practising Christian, but she seems comfortable with it. People find their own way of reconciling contradictions, or at least not thinking too hard about them.

It's not uncommon for physicists to be religious, I recall somebody saying (I can't remember who) that they think "I'm so clever that if I can't understand something then it must be God".

The Economist had a piece years back (I remember reading it during one of the lockdowns) about the number of quantum physicists who end up converting to Roman Catholicism. So it's obviously a thing.

There is a theory called "non-overlapping magisteria", advocated by Jewish evoloutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, which states that religion and science are entirely different lines of enquiry with no overlap. So no conflict if you're interested in both. Gould was much less aggressively confrontational than Dawkins in dismissing creationism, and therefore more successful in my opinion.

She’s committed to stay with DH so what she says is going to reflect that.

This was how the article came across to me. It seems as if she has decided to stay (as the right thing to do) and is trying to rationalize that decision. It doesn’t seem like the writings of someone who is fully accepting and at peace with the situation as it stands. Only time might resolve this, I think.

Agree with this, she certainly doesn't come across as 'feisty and tough'. As PP says, it has a sadness to it.

The first thing that occurs to me is that when Debbie transitioned it was under the belief they were a man in a woman's body. Then down the line (when it was too late) DH realised they had AGP.
Now that must be a really difficult thing for a wife to reconcile - losing their husband and sex life over what is essentially a fetish.
When you love an actual person, that's right in front of you, with whom you had children and a life, I suppose it's hard to cut your losses. So maybe a woman in that situation looks for alternative forms of intimacy in the relationship, so as not to lose their husband altogether? Idk. It would be hard to reconcile being GC while faced with a person you love being unhappy. And having committed to remain married and being so far down the road, is there a point at which you just feel stuck ? Again idk. In her shoes, you wouldn't have seen me for dust. I think that married men (especially with children) who transition are so very selfish.

I read that article as her saying she's fed up of being used in everyone else's arguments, that she's an individual with her own life and thoughts and doesn't exist to prove points in other people's debates.

Re use of 'she's by JT, I think most people would do this as a social nicety. But no one should be compelled to use preferred pronouns because we all know that she = female and it's a lie to use it to describe a male. No one should he compelled to lie.

'Well, I've got nothing here. All along, you've been saying that, if necessary, you will leave and eventually I've got to the point of saying okay, you need to leave. And you're now saying you refuse.' So again, actually that was a turning point for Debbie. I think Debbie realized that if she wanted to stay within the family, she needed to actually start thinking about the family a little bit more, rather than just what she wanted and how she was going to do things. And after that, I started having a little bit more of a say and Debbie would ask my opinion about things and I felt that my opinion was actually making a small amount of difference, maybe not huge, but a small amount of difference. And we got through my daughter's exams and, at that point, you know, it was then three months after I'd said, 'I think you need to leave'. And things were better, though a long way from perfect but much better than that very, very low point.

So it would appear that Stephanie felt she had wrested some form of control back from Debbie, under the threat of kicking him out. Stephanie had a little bit more of a say, her opinion was being at least asked, and a tiny amount of difference was being made.

But now? He's bloody written about their entire lives, in every newspaper who'll have him, and is publishing a book.

And I'm sure I, and every other woman on here, is vastly uncomfortable picking over the words of this woman. Who we all have tremendous compassion for.

It does feel invasive and a little prurient.

But that's down to Debbie Hayton and his unstoppable desire to release his beachball.

Didn’t the previous article describe them as evangelical Christians?

The advice Stephanie was given on different kinds of intimacy will likely have been from a church-going friend invested in “helping” Stephanie to remain married to her husband despite the potentially marriage-ending course of action Hayton had announced to her.

I hope Stephanie understands the reason for people talking about her is because her husband has been so open and attention seeking. He’s responsible for bringing attention to her no one else (well maybe a wee bit Stella O’Malley as well).

As an aside the top photo of the two of them DH looks like any other aging tech dude/scientist that affects the straggly long greying/white hair look to appear unconventional.

So even the long hair says male to me in that picture.

And I'm sure I, and every other woman on here, is vastly uncomfortable picking over the words of this woman. Who we all have tremendous compassion for.

It does feel invasive and a little prurient.

But that's down to Debbie Hayton and his unstoppable desire to release his beachball.

This 100%.