The tragic case of Debbie Hayton

Anti-trans campaigning trans woman Debbie Hayton’s wife has written an article about their life together.

Hayton has said she traumatised her wife. The wife, a Church of England lay reader, appears not to want to leave Hayton. The piece reeks of self-martyrdom. They are not having sex. When their son called himself “cisgender” Stephanie was “horrified”. She could not bear Debbie being hormonal, saying she was like a teenage girl, “unmanageable”. The thought that a partner should be “managed” repels me.

Stephanie opposes all care for trans people. A counsellor suggested she could help Debbie shop for clothes, but she objected stridently: the counsellor had no business “impos[ing] demands on existing relationships and people”.

Stephanie asked Debbie what being “a woman born in a man’s body” meant. Debbie could not answer. If Stephanie ever tried to understand, that seems as far as they got. Instead, she tolerated. Stephanie has not moved on from her original ignorance, which is by now wilful: she writes, in the present tense, “I rarely wear make-up; but this does not make me a ‘man’.” Of course not; but being trans makes Debbie a woman.

They don’t seem to have much of a relationship. Stephanie does not find Debbie attractive, and says this in the first paragraph, which Debbie, masochistically, publishes on her blog. Stephanie is glad that colleagues have other things to discuss than trans issues.

Debbie started social transition in December 2012, and within five months Stephanie “had endured enough”. And yet she stayed. They went to LGBT events where she judged the trans women were not acting like women, then they went to Charing Cross to see the psychiatrist. Stephanie looked round disapprovingly at “very tall people with large hands, short skirts”.

Stephanie has had to draw deeply on her faith, she says, and the sense of God’s purpose, even if she has resisted that. Initially, Debbie had reasonable, trans-inclusive opinions, such as that when to transition was up to her.

Could Stephanie have made Debbie a self-hating anti-trans campaigner? Debbie’s delight in being published in rags like The Spectator, and the love-bombing by such as Julie Bindel, now so cruelly withdrawn, may have had a part in it. But Stephanie’s sniffing distaste, for twelve years, and Debbie’s slavish acceptance of it, bamboozle me. Hayton is ashamed of being trans. Their relationship must be hell for them both. They deserve each other.

Hayton was in The Spectator again, sucking up to JK Rowling, claiming Rowling is one of the most important people to roll back “gender ideology” and one of the most effective gender critical campaigners in Britain. Unfortunately for her, she also put in some mild criticism. She argued that Rowling was impolitic in calling Lucy Clark, the football manager, a “straight bloke”. People who had no definite opinion might think Rowling was inciting a social media pile-on, and that was bullying. Hayton was trying to be helpful: how could we be most persuasive?

Julie Bindel wrote a post on her Substack under a picture of a woman holding an axe over a bound man, attacking Hayton: she is “as bad as the rest of” the trans women. She says she should never have been polite to Hayton- he [sic] is “vile”, “grubby”, and “creepy”. This is Abjectification.

When Hayton linked to her Spectator screed on facebook, she got 87 comments. Susan Oliver called Hayton “Another male telling women to shut up”, and shared Bindel’s article with the comment “Sums you up perfectly, matey”. Jayne Gosnall called Debbie’s Spectator piece “lazy journalism”, “an ACTUAL THREAT to women’s rights”, and called Debbie a “frothing at the mouth activist” with a “self-serving male agenda”. Rosemary Sloan called her a “straight, white middle-aged bloke”. Bizzie Brynne called the article “tone-deaf mansplaining”. Jane Roper wrote “Thanks for showing women who you are”. Lyndsey Shipstone called her deeply patronising and misogynist. Nellie Renewal said Debbie showed “patriarchal privilege”. Julie Laudon wrote, “Thanks for the mansplaining, AGP creep”. Stacey O’Brien wrote, “You don’t get a say… get over yourself”. She is happy for anyone who looks at her facebook page to read this rage and contempt.

Anyone with Debbie’s talents could not be published in the Spectator if she wrote the truth. She only gets to write the cis transphobic agenda.