A transgender physics teacher by the name of Debbie Hayton is facing disciplinary action and potential expulsion from her seat on the Trades Union Congress LGBT committee, for stating trans people are biologically attached to the sex they are born-as.
The incident initially occurred in July when Debbie wore a T-shirt which read "trans women are men. Get over it." As is to be expected in today's culture, it didn't go over well and complaints claiming she was "propagating hate speech against the trans community" were sent to the general secretary of the TUC.
Fast forward to now and her fate has yet to be decided, but that she could be kicked from a committee she's sat on for five years all because she dared share her point of view is a concerning one, to say the least.
No doubt she knew the provocative statement would cause a ruckus, but in the increasingly one-sided realm of trans activism, such contrarian opinions are needed. Especially given a trans woman is now falling prey to a deluge of claims that she is transphobic. All this because she stated what many know to be factual. A person born as a biological male is still biologically male, regardless of whatever hormones or surgeries they subject their bodies to.
As a transgendered person myself, I believe trans people should be respected as the gender they identify as because of the location in the brain where gender dysphoria takes root. Although, more correct than saying "I am a woman" would be saying that "I am a *trans* woman." Many individuals however want to forget that distinction, but it's an important one for I will never be biologically female. I was born with male genitals, I have a prostate, my skeletal structure is that of a man, and that is still just scratching the surface of the many ways my body differs from natural born women.
If a trans person was born as the gender they identify as, then they certainly wouldn't need to transition. Yet to the LGBT 'community' and its activist component at large, none of that matters. Speak up and you'll just be attacked en masse.
People who push against whatever the mainstream narrative at large happens to be, increasingly find themselves labeled every negative buzzword that's popular at the time. Using myself as an example, as a right leaning writer with a moderately large reach on twitter who is vocal about my stances on the absurdity that is trans activism, I am flooded with comments calling me "transphobic", "bootlicker", "terf", "truscum", "Nazi", and countless other slurs and insults.
Not discussed nearly enough is the environment of fear that gay and trans people have been shuffled into. Speak one's true thoughts and a brigade of hate will beat them into submission. There is no room for opinions that run counter to the current fringe left consensus.
Some people break free, but few are conditioned to survive the social media dog piling that often accompanies a person sharing a different point of view, so they break down and ask for forgiveness or hold their true beliefs tucked down to be safe. Although it's hard to blame them when being honest can put careers and livelihoods at risk.
A common phrase within the woke side of the online echo chamber is "support trans women", but as current events clearly show, that saying only includes those who toe the line. So perhaps instead of supporting trans women, people should support those who dare to be brave by speaking their minds and questioning the status quo, and in that respect, Debbie Hayton has earned my support.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Sophia Narwitz is a writer & game journalist from the US.
Reader Comments
Hayton merely expressed her opinion since she had a public forum to do so, not unlike everyone else when the camera is rolling or when Comments are open like here. So all we get is just a (dirty) laundry basket of opinions that raise emotions while being devoid of data or productive discussion.
It seems Twitter is now seen as a kind of pulse of society, and tweets are regularly reprinted in published articles and opinion pieces as evidence - of something or other. It's more likely that Twitter is too often nothing more than a mainstream 4-Chan of adolescent emotional hate speech and misinformation.
Hayton is not a woman.
Hayton is a Mister-bra-and-panties.
* Of course in the past, accurate sex/gender identification was important for the purposes of millennia of misogyny.
Identifying historic misogyny is ... misogynistic? This is, I dunno, like saying black slaves were bigots? This has nothing to do with SJWs and whatever nonsensical PC woke controversy apparently infesting college campuses and which dances across the pages on SOTT. I'm not involved in that at all.
It's historical fact that females were required to do or not do a whole list of things regarding: Clothing, educations, jobs, property ownership, participation in governing bodies, inheritance, decision-making, you-name-it. I thought everyone knew this?! My assertion is that gender-based pronouns are becoming problematical but perhaps aren't even necessary since there's usually no reason , other than some personal social situations maybe and medical or police matters, to identify sex/gender, especially of strangers.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves why exactly we so desparately want to know the sex/gender of every single human. Those arguing for such identification want to preserve the fiction that there are only two human sex/genders, and of course, they need to be able to readily determine which one everyone supposedly is. Easy identification and classification requires continued use of the traditional pronouns as well as clothing, externally visible sex-linked body parts, etc.
There's personal belief/bias, and there's historical data.
You state: You really believe that every woman that has ever lived did "clothing, educations, jobs, property ownership" as a matter of coercion rather than choice? That there is, essentially, nothing in the history of female activities on this planet that involved choice based on natural proclivity and that it was all coercion?
Btw, it is clearly not a fiction that there are only two sexes, with a few anomalies here and there.
Joe "Every woman that [sic] has ever lived", "nothing in the history of female activities on this planet", "all coercion" are one of those logical fallacy bad argument thingies, maybe just a little family of straw men.
It is "clearly not a fiction that there are only two sexes"? Says who?
If your mind can be subverted away from the basic reality that there are two sexes, you're screwed.
I'm getting a little tired of having to point out to supposed adults that two-plus-two make four, that skies are blue, grass is green, etc.
Go and get some help.
So me quoting back to you what you said is "straw man"? That's appears to be another example of your extremely subjective take on this topic.
Biological science going back millennia says there are only two sexes. But hey, in line with your take on history, feel free to make up your own 'truth' on that one too and present it as objective.
Westermarck; Marriage, A History, Coontz; The Treasures of Darkness, Jacobsen; The Female Goddess, Patai, Archaic Egypt, Emery; Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, Clark; Herodtus; The Egyptian Book of the Dead. I'm still seeking further L&K about the ancient past, but even documentaries over the years have never suggested females were coerced. Just the opposite in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
There is a small section in Howard's 3rd vol where he briefly chronicled the rise of Feminist issues in the late 18th through the 19th centuries. But he doesn't present any evidence supporting the complainants.
The nearest reference to such phenomena I've come across was an aside by Albert Knock:
“One would hardly believe that during the last half of the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth, a red-hot feminist controversy raged in Europe like the plague, and that virtually all the capable male minds of the time lent themselves to it, some maintaining that woman is by nature an inferior being, properly subject to man, and others maintaining the contrary. The subject had a large literature before the invention of printing; and after that, a great number of books appeared. Even the colossal Erasmus of Rotterdam chipped in with a short treatise, On Christian Marriage, which was probably more or less done to order at the instance of his English friends.” p219 The Superfluous Man
My ancestral history is fairly extensive, and it doesn't appear in mine. I don't even mess with Art, perhaps Camille Paglia's publication might reveal something. But the smattering of literature I've read in Spanish, translated Russian, and Anglican covering the last 4 centuries makes no such assertion. Now Emma Goldman the celebrated Feminist of the last century made a bit of noise. But it is easy to see from the story of her childhood and immigration to the US that she was embittered discovering even in the US, there was no redress for her "deprived" origins.
Well, this a real problem. The eminent Dr Thomas Szasz once responded to my inquiries about "advances" in MRI and the claims being made thereby about ADHD. He explained succinctly, and I lament I did not save his communiqué, that it was impossible for anyone to correlate behavior with brain activity, simply for the reason no one can ever locate where thought processes reside in the brain--if at all. Now if a person could "mind-meld" perhaps something could be accomplished that way. But then, the results would always be subjective and therefore scientism at the least.
My take on the idea of "gender dysphoria" takes after:
Camille Paglia;
The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.” The Weekly Standard 6-15-17
Jim Goad;
“I will briefly detour to note the soul-scorching inanity of those who insist that “gender” and “sex” are two entirely different things, with the first purely cultural and the latter purely biological. It never seems to occur to these dolts that culture is an expression of biology, nor that throughout world history with very few exceptions, nearly all cultures just so happened to “assign” gender according to this “male/female binary” they’re insisting is rooted in bad ideas rather than penises and vaginas. To me, “gender” and “sex” might as well be synonymous, and anyone who insists otherwise has been tickled with goose feathers one too many times.” Takimag 7-23-18
Alan Finch quote, The New American 4-14-16;
“Former ‘transsexual’ Alan Finch; ‘You fundamentally can't change sex…. Transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists.… Giving surgery to someone desperate to change sex is a bit like offering liposuction to an anorexic.’ And it’s only a civilization starved for Truth that would address psychological problems by creating social problems, as it puts boys who fancy they have girls inside of them inside girls’ locker rooms.”
and of course, the Biology course I had in 7th grade, back when it was taught w/o the Marxist overlords controlling the textbooks.
Ah, that eminent scientist Camille Paglia...
Your unnecessary reference to "Marxist overlords" says a lot, too.