It has descended into a shouting match
Anyone still talking about ‘two sides in the transgender debate’ needs to look at the footage from Bristol yesterday. Actually, there was no debate. What happened was one group of people (mainly men) intimidating a second group of people (mainly women). The video is terrifying.
If you couldn’t catch what was said through their masks, here is my transcript:
Go, get in the sea.
Die out.
You’re dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Fossils.
You’re going to die out (x5).
You are ancient history.
You are fossils.
You are dinosaurs.
You have failed (x2).
Your ideas have failed.
Get in the sea.
Get in the sea like Colston.
Go home.
Get in the sea.
Masked man shouting at women in Bristol, 19 June 2022
The reference to Edward Colston’s statue – pushed into Bristol harbour two years ago by an out-of-control mob – was chilling. But Colston died in 1721. This time the suggested target was the living. Specifically, a group of women who wanted to meet on College Green in central Bristol to discuss women’s rights.
The protesters’ motivations felt like pure misogyny: when the two men had run out of blood-curdling threats, the masked bandit finished tellingly with, ‘look after your kids’. But this was was no naive young student, this was a fully grown man unleashing his fury on women. Behind him, the mob chanted ‘trans rights are human rights’, as if those ends justified whatever means – however vile.
And the police watched on as all this happened. In a statement, Avon and Somerset police said, ‘Earlier today, officers facilitated around 150 people’s right to protest in Bristol city centre… The right to protest is a fundamental democratic right and we are pleased to have been able to facilitate both these demonstrations.’
No, there was only one demonstration, protest, exercise in brutal intimidation – call it what you like. On the other side of the police line, the women just wanted to talk. Standing for Women who organised the event said:
Standing for Women organised a women’s free speech event ‘Let Women Speak’, not a protest or a rally. It’s an event aimed at combatting the silencing of women’s voices on the erasure of our rights, our spaces and our language posed by the totalitarian transgender promoting ideologues.
Standing for Women
I spoke to Bo Novak who had travelled from Wiltshire for the event. Describing the protestors as ‘anarcho-bully boys’, she told me:
They so reminded me of the Socialist Workers party I endured through my younger activist days, as well as Militant, back in the day. Just abusive angry men using a cause…
They did everything possible within the law to intimidate women. There was a lot of squaring up to police, there was a lot of shouting, there was a lot of pointing, and screaming and chanting.
At one point they just had their megaphone on a drone – high-pitched feedback – so that nothing could be heard.
Bo Novak
The silencing of women’s voices, indeed. The cause these men are using is transgender rights. My rights, in other words. It seems that they think by invoking trans rights they can do exactly as they please.
This needs to stop. The mob can never be appeased. For too long politicians and policymakers have prevaricated. Maybe they don’t understand what is going on. Well, they need to learn quickly, and not from the likes of Stonewall. The ideology that those groups have been pushing has got us into this mess. To get out of it we need to restore some common sense. It’s not difficult. There are two sexes – and that has been the case for around a billion years. The two sexes are different in our species and sometimes they need separate provision.
Some people struggle with their sex and their sexed bodies. In recent years we have become more accepting of those people, while medical advances have made it possible for people to change their bodies so that they can be more comfortable with them. But neither hormone therapy nor surgery can change anyone’s sex. Whatever I might have done to my body should give me no extra rights to impose on women. Nor should it give these so-called allies any rights to impose themselves on women either.
Debbie Hayton is a teacher and journalist.
* This article was first published by The Spectator on 20 June 2022: There is no transgender debate.
Debbie Hayton 
3 replies on “There is no transgender debate”
Those are just misogynist thugs who are looking for a reason to brutalize women — what astonishes me is that they are so up-front about their misogyny. Here in the U.S., misogynists pretend to love women because they don’t want to appear gay. What I see in those thugs are momma’s boys who hate their mothers. They are probably serial killers in their spare time. I’m quite sure that none of them cares one iota about trans women either. In fact, they probably hate trans women as much as they hate real women, since their skin-deep minds respond to appearances more than to substance.
Here in the U.S. incidents like that are rare because trans women have less support. Conservative Republicans don’t pretend to be supporters of trans women — they don’t like trans women, and they don’t like real women who want abortions or want any kind of power position in business.
I’d like to point something out, by the way. Conservative women who abandon their rights to be taken by trans women are probably the same conservative women who don’t support abortion rights.
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power -or- position (I wish I could edit comments here)
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Well said Debbie, as always. I worry how Stonewall are manipulating schools etc indoctrinating youth etc and have the cheek to say they stand for LG or B when they are clearing obsessed with pushing an extreme trans agenda which will eventually backfire. They dont care about trans people, only the millions they get from companies to tell them what to do, reason things are getting ridiculous and ordinary folk whove ignored it all are starting to notice and speak up, is theyre running out of ideas so having to think up stupid things such as pronoun badges. Re a certain bank tother day. If you call someone by their first name you dont use any pronoun so its irrelevant, bad english to go into a bank and say hello mrs Jane. If their surnames were on the name badges fair enough but is a pathetic way to force an agenda on staff who are scared they’ll lose their job if they say no. And frankly whats it matter when theres a war, disease, money tight, far more important things to worry about.
Ive read of whats going on in schools etc and its horrific, brainwashing the young who for instance, so indoctrinated, 60 ganged up, attacked a girl who simply said sex is male or female (& she had a nonbinary friend) .
This movement seems to love instilling fear and compliance, most are scared to speak up, so like Germany of the 1930s… now aimed at much larger group, yet they still seem to control many companies with an increasingly extreme agenda. The big worry of course is understanding sensible people like yourself will be blamed when this blows up and people running companies like Stonewall disappear, they clearly dont care about people. For them to be allowed in london pride march today, when LGB alliance (who founded, started gay rights in uk) havent, is a huge shock to me, especially after Stonewall actually said they didnt stand for lesbian or gay people unless they see trans people as the sex they choose to be eg a lesbian must be willing to have a relationship with a transwoman, clearly a contradiction.
If they dont threaten women why such desire to take over our single sex spaces. In female prisons, women assaulted by rapists is disgusting. The stats will only get worse and the outcry will start when some dreadful event occurs, though ive already read of many. But i see these rapists as men pretending to be women, using self ID to gain access to victims, calling these offenders transwomen is an insult to transwomen. Facts 90% all sexual assaults on females in toilets, changing rooms etc, are in unisex facilities. There are single unisex disabled facilities everywhere nowadays as 6-9million people are disabled, so the 6000 with a grc who can legally live as the opposite sex, could easily use these.
Most people not noticed/dont care, if doesnt effect them personally but the abuse and violence towards anyone who speaks up for women is making more decide to make a stand. Eg male thugs threatening women trying to meet peacefully. Outrage at unisex loos in theatres and now theatres playing to empty, this shows what people really think.
None of this extremism helps anyone who just wants to get on with their life whatever their belief or situation. I really cant understand why they are so adversarial. Why cant they be like me and just let people believe as they want, live and love as they want, and leave God to be their judge.
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