The Times - Debbie Hayton: the trans woman taking on the trans activists
Debbie Hayton: the trans woman taking on the trans activists
She was married with children when she transitioned. But when Debbie Hayton began questioning the idea that people with gender dysphoria are born in the wrong body, she found herself under attack by the trans community
From early boyhood, Hayton, now 55, fought a powerful inner urge to be female, yet went on to marry and father three children. After full gender reassignment surgery at 47, she initially embraced trans activism before starting to believe its central precepts — that trans people are “born in the wrong body” and can literally change sex — are both false and unhealthy for trans people. For this she was ostracised and denounced, and ultimately sacrificed the presidency of her union, NASUWT (the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women’s Teachers), which she would have assumed in April. She is, as per the title of her new memoir, a “transsexual apostate”.
I meet Hayton at her home on a modern Bristol estate she still shares with her wife, Stephanie, but our paths have crossed before. First at an early meeting of Woman’s Place, a group set up in 2017 by left-leaning feminists to oppose Tory plans to introduce self-identification. Most welcomed a trans woman’s support, but not one lesbian academic and her friends, who screamed from the balcony, “You’re a man!” Hayton is used to flak from both sides, most painfully from former friends in trans support groups. “They say, ‘None of us like you, Debbie. No one agrees with you. You’re an oddity.’ And I think, ‘See if I care.’ ” They are set to be enraged by her book, which broaches the biggest trans taboo by arguing many men who transition — including herself — are driven by “autogynephilia” (AGP), literally the desire for oneself as a woman.
Hayton compares tamping down this urge to the intense, incessant effort required to keep a beachball submerged in water. Let go for a second and it will fly to the surface. Hayton, the son of a Cumbrian bank clerk, was three and learning to count in tens when he was first aware of the beachball. “Twenty, thirty, forty…” When Hayton reached 80, he felt an electric thrill: for some unknown reason he associated the number with the word “tights”. Already he knew women’s clothing was taboo, so he’d fish his mother’s laddered hosiery from the bin and try it on in secret. He relished any chance to cross-dress, like playing a ladybird at the village fête wearing black woollen tights he longed to keep. Aged eight, his grandmother walked in on him in the bathroom and he braced himself for an angry shaming which never came, perhaps because his parents were too embarrassed.
Although every night he prayed to wake up a girl, in all other respects Hayton was a stereotypical boy like his two brothers. He disdained dolls, preferring books, which he devoured then catalogued alphabetically and in height order. As a teenager, he’d leave his home town, Kendal, to buy women’s clothes in boutiques where he wouldn’t be recognised, cross-dressing in secret, then, after sexual release, feeling only confused self-disgust. Very bright yet socially awkward, he lived in constant terror that the beachball would bob up and expose his illicit desires. He barely dated girls until, in his third year at Newcastle University studying astrophysics, he met Stephanie, just 19.
What was special about her? “She was beautiful,” says Hayton beaming. “And a physicist, like me.” When they fell in love an odd thing happened: the beachball vanished. “I thought I’d been cured,” says Hayton. “That I was finally free.” But after six months the beachball was back. Both evangelical Christians, they did not live together before they married aged 25 and 23, and as their wedding approached, Hayton felt he must tell Stephanie his secret. He was sweating with dread as he confessed he sometimes cross-dressed, yet she would barely recall the conversation.
Both Haytons completed PhDs and qualified as teachers, moving to Birmingham where they had a baby girl. Two sons followed. Life was full and hectic. Hayton shot up the teaching ladder to head of department, working 60-hour weeks. Yet still he secretly bought women’s clothes, stashing them in the gap behind drawers or the most inaccessible part of the loft. Owning them was the buzz; trying them on was disappointing. “What you want to see in the mirror is that female version of you,” she says. “But what you see is the male version in clothes not designed for you, and it’s not very attractive. So you think, ‘No, this is silly.’ ” A dozen times between 25 and 45, Hayton took a bin bag of clothes to the dump, vowing to stop. Binge, purge, repeat. “I was like an alcoholic or someone trying to quit smoking.”
Growing up, Hayton had seized upon any article in his mother’s magazines about what was then called “transsexualism”. “I recall one in the Seventies about a successful airline pilot who transitioned and was sacked. This person was wearing jeans and a polo neck and the journalist said, ‘Why would anybody go through all that and lose everything, simply to wear clothes you could wear as a man?’ And I thought, ‘I know exactly why, but I can’t explain it.’ ” Otherwise, people who transitioned seemed impossibly rich and fabulous — like the model April Ashley or author Jan Morris — who’d jet off to Casablanca for surgery.
The internet changed everything. Hayton learned from online groups that ordinary people were transitioning and such forums, she writes, “were one click away from highly sexualised websites that peddled transvestite porn”. Hayton read enviously of another teacher who’d transitioned. “I thought, if they can do it, why can’t I?”
In 2011, Hayton could hide her feelings no longer and told Stephanie, who was shocked. “Trans issues were not in the mainstream then,” she tells me. “And my priority was our three children, then aged nine to thirteen.” The couple agreed Hayton should not transition yet, just grow longer hair. But now the beachball was slipping out of her grasp and, with it, her mental health. Hayton closed her eyes and ran diagonally across a main road, then considered jumping under a goods train. Now, looking back, she wonders if she was talking herself into a crisis “to give myself permission to transition”.
With scientific rigour, the couple drew up a precise timetable, but Debbie kept shifting it forward. “What really upset me was Debbie only listened to her online friends, who told Debbie repeatedly I had no say in our marriage,” says Stephanie, “and my only role was to go shopping with her for women’s clothes.” Hayton began ticking off the milestones, changing her driving licence and passport to prove to the NHS she was “living as a woman” and could thus be prescribed female hormones. Yet she had still not worn women’s clothes in public, so arranged a trip to the Lake District with a trans support group. What was it like? “We hear a lot about gender dysphoria, but not gender euphoria,” she recalls. “It wasn’t that male sexual buzz, which is very fast, very climactic. This was a sense of contentment in who I was.”
Two friends followed behind Hayton, who wore a skirt and make-up, noting how many passers-by did a double-take. “There were a few, but mostly people didn’t notice or care.” On the train home, “I did a Superman thing in the toilet, took my skirt off, put my jeans on, wiped off the make-up and tied my hair back. It was the most depressing experience, a huge comedown. Then I went back to the family.” Shortly after, Hayton broke the news to her head teacher (very supportive), her pupils (mainly nonplussed) and her own children, who “found it very difficult” and continue to this day to use mainly male pronouns and call her “Dad”, which Hayton does not mind.
Next she was prescribed testosterone suppressants and female hormones, creating a graph to chart her developing breast size and going on giddy shopping trips. This, says Stephanie, was the hardest point, with Debbie distracted and self-obsessed. Meanwhile Stephanie shouldered the whole domestic load, going to parents’ evening alone so their children wouldn’t be embarrassed by Debbie. Hayton jokes that, alas for wives, “living as a woman” doesn’t involve doing more chores. Eventually, Stephanie asked Debbie to leave the family home, but that crisis point passed and their relationship began to improve.
Post-surgery, the beach ball finally popped, and at peace with herself, she began a different journey. Hayton was her school’s union rep, and in 2015 was invited to take a trans seat on the TUC’s LGBT committee. A few months after surgery, she was invited to a seminar on trans rights where she heard a feminist academic, opposed to enshrining self-ID in law, point out that the concept of “gender identity”, on which it was predicated, was totally undefined. Hayton realised that, having transformed her body to align with her supposed female gender identity, she had no proof it existed. So what had compelled her real, urgent need to be seen as a woman?
Another free-thinking trans woman introduced her to the work of eminent Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard, who had categorised trans women into two typologies. First were “homosexual transsexuals”: gay men whose boyhood “effeminacy” makes living as a woman seem an almost “natural” next step. The second are “autogynephiles”: heterosexual men who mainly transition later, often after fathering children, and are driven by desire for their female self.
“So while some middle-aged men have affairs with women,” says Hayton, “middle-aged AGP males have affairs with themselves, which creates feedback loops.” She means that, while a man may buy his wife lingerie to look what he considers sexy, she might decline to wear it. But an AGP buys it for him/herself “and there’s no female partner to say, ‘Not likely!’ So this is why you get these spectacular results.” Like what? “AGP males prancing around the supermarket in high heels and miniskirts. What you are seeing is an embodiment of how that person would like the ideal woman to dress. Autogynephilia is a rare window into male heterosexuality, because men usually keep their feelings and porn fantasies strictly under wraps.”
Blanchard’s theory was adapted by Anne A Lawrence, herself an AGP trans woman, who argues autogynephilia is both a sexual and romantic attraction, calling it “the love that would rather its name wasn’t mentioned”. Certainly Hayton, who now wears jeans, T-shirts and little make-up, seems to have reached the comfortably married stage with her female self.
So why is autogynephilia so controversial, with academics such as J Michael Bailey, author of The Man Who Would Be Queen, being vilified by activists? “First,” says Hayton, “what man wants to admit fancying himself? Second, the‘born in the wrong body’ theory posits being trans as a terrible misfortune, so everybody needs to be kind to us and give us rights. Whereas if you’re having an affair with yourself, you’re obliged to take responsibility for your own actions and the damage you cause.” Moreover, it’s harder to demand access to intimate female spaces if that need is erotically motivated.
For decades, says Hayton, transsexual women have relied upon female goodwill to use their bathrooms and changing rooms, but self-ID destroyed that precious trust. “Women were happy to take in the odd refugee from masculinity. But in the past five years it’s become a wave of colonisers, and that’s very different."
Hayton has stopped using ladies’ loos, seeking out gender-neutral third spaces or, if there’s no choice, the gents. She no longer needs the world to affirm her gender and is amused she is called he/him when out with Stephanie but she/her with a male friend. Having dinner with her younger brother recently, she overheard the waiter say, “The blokes on table 11 need their drinks,” and laughed rather than “complained to customer services about being misgendered to get a £50 voucher, as some do”.
These days, Hayton’s classic “persistent, consistent and insistent” childhood dysphoria may have led to doctors prescribing puberty blockers and hormones. Does she wish she’d transitioned earlier? Hayton points to a photograph of her adult children on the wall. “There’s three people who wouldn’t be here if I had — and not being able to have your own kids is huge. I’d already had a vasectomy when I transitioned. Second, try finding a life partner as a post-operative 22-year-old trans woman attracted to females. Your dating pool is tiny. Basically you’re looking at bisexual women and many of them end up with men.” That, she says, is her biggest fear for transitioned children: they’re unavoidably marginalised. “We can give them Pride flags, but there’s more to life than that.”
Encountering parents online who believed their troubled children were being hastened towards medical transition made Hayton even more sceptical. She began speaking out, writing articles, including for The Times. Now her personal views were publicly at odds with her TUC LGBT committee. When she chaired its conference, the chamber brimmed with hostility and she was denounced from the floor. Yet, doubling down, Hayton was photographed in a T-shirt she’d had made up for a Woman’s Place event mocking Stonewall’s campaign slogan. It read “Trans women are men. Get over it!”. At her next committee meeting the other trans rep thumped the wall then stormed out. Half the members, who’d signed a complaint to the TUC, posed together in “Trans women are women” T-shirts.
Separately, Hayton was rising up the NASUWT, elected to the national executive and a key negotiator in industrial disputes. Next step was the national officers committee, a four-year term in which she’d automatically serve her third year as president. Hayton was elected — her manifesto had no mention she was trans — whereupon activists bombarded her school with complaints, then, when her head stood by her, reported him to child protection for endangering trans children by employing her. Eventually, her NASUWT opponents tabled a position statement saying, “Trans women are women,” which was passed. Unable to support it and refusing to stay silent, Hayton resigned, forfeiting the chance to lead Britain’s seventh biggest union and, ironically, be the first trans person to lead any union.
It was a mighty price to pay for her beliefs. “I was an apostate who’d left their religion,” she says, “and they were out to destroy me.” Now she is a part-time physics teacher while running an educational consultancy. Their children now grown up, the Haytons moved to Bristol when Stephanie became Church of England adviser for lay ministry in the diocese.
Transition often ends in divorce, yet they have managed to repurpose their marriage, sharing a room but not a bed, both now celibate. “It does work,” says Hayton of her remodelled genitalia, “but it’s not as easy. And without the testosterone in your body, you just can’t be bothered.” Both say they are bonded by love and a long shared history. Debbie notes that while she gained her female self, her wife lost the man she married. And Stephanie, feisty and tough, balks at the idea she is a passive victim, a “trans widow”. “I feel sad at times, but I’m at peace and Debbie is so much happier.”
For Hayton, the likely fury that will greet her book is worthwhile if it helps other people like her. “My philosophy is I had a psychological disorder that I did my best to sort out,” she says. “Unlike many trans activists, I’m not going around shouting at people, just getting on my with my life. So whose philosophy works best?”
Transsexual Apostate: My Journey Back to Reality by Debbie Hayton (£16.99, Forum) is published on February 8. To order a copy, call 020 3176 2935 or go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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