He’s not the messiah, he’s a transwoman

Apr 1, 2024 by Jill

by Victoria Smith, The Critic:

Transsexual Apostate is a disturbing book, written for disturbing times.

It is no fun being on the wrong side of “the trans debate”. Given the choice between rainbows and kindness, or binary sex and bigotry, who’d want to align themselves with the latter? This is why so many feminists, troubled by the insistence that “trans women are women”, go to great lengths to educate ourselves.

This whole thing can’t just be what it looks like — men deciding that nothing of ours cannot be theirs, not even the very experience of being us. There must, we tell ourselves, be more to it than that. Like Debbie Hayton, what we tend to find — at least if we dare to keep tugging at the thread — is that we were right to start with. Hayton, a post-operative transwoman who came to realise his sex could not be changed, found himself asking similar questions to feminists and drawing similar conclusions.

Gender identity “was impossible to pin down”; it “explained nothing”, or rather, “it explained away the truth”. Alas, there are women who could have told him that years ago. “If I had known in 2012 what I know now,” he writes, “would I have transitioned? In short, the answer is no.” Then again, as he muses a paragraph later, “maybe I did need to learn the hard way?”

Transsexual Apostate is a disturbing book, written for disturbing times. It is the story of a personal mania set against a broader cultural and political descent into madness. A decade ago, Hayton — a straight, middle-aged father of two — decided that the issues that had gripped him since childhood could be resolved if he became a woman. Online forums persuaded him that he had in fact always been one. “It might have been fantastic nonsense,” he notes, “but it was the message I wanted to hear [ … ] It was not for me to address a psychological disorder; instead the rest of society needed to affirm my true gender.”

Read here

Read also: Take it from a transsexual – transwomen are not women by Debbie Hayton, spiked