Even though I’ve had a sex change operation … I’m not and never will be a woman

This is the third of four extracts from my book, Transsexual Apostate published by the Daily Mail

You may think that changing your sexual identity should be an issue of concern solely to people like me. Though middle-aged and married with three children, after decades as a secret transvestite I came out and transitioned from a man to a woman, first socially by cross-dressing and changing my name from David to Debbie, then physically by subjecting myself to the extreme surgery of having my genitalia sliced and diced and reconfigured.

We transsexuals are a smallish number in a UK population of 68 million. But what should be a personal and private matter affecting just a few has become public property and a game-changer insidiously affecting the whole of society. Gender identity ideology now permeates our institutions. It has hijacked the narrative of all our lives.

Take the sudden, unwelcome proliferation of preferred pronouns. Email signatures, internet profiles, even identity badges, are no longer complete without a nod to pronouns. ‘My name is Alan and my pronouns are he/him.’ ‘Hi, I’m Barbara and my pronouns are she/her.’ ‘Hello, my name is Colin and I use he/they pronouns.’

People never used to feel the need to do this. Now it’s almost obligatory. You might imagine a transsexual like me would approve. I don’t. If asked I always refuse. I say: ‘My name is Debbie and I am not declaring any pronouns.’ I think preferred pronouns are a retrograde move, but more on that later.

First I want to concentrate on the most scandalous effect of the new obsession with transitioning – the dreadful things we are doing to children. Today, thousands of impressionable youngsters lap up gender identity ideology as the answer to all their problems – and are encouraged in this dangerous assumption by those who should know better. I feel for today’s transgender-identified children and I worry greatly about them. I transitioned because I thought I had a gender identity that was different from the sex I was born with, even though I had never been able to define ‘gender identity’, even to myself. I still feel like a heterosexual man, but one who wants to be perceived as a woman. I’ve come to realise that I had transitioned without knowing why. And I was not a teenager – I was approaching 50.

I know how vulnerable young people are. If, back in 1980, aged 12 and secretly dressing in my mother’s clothes, a teacher had told me I could be a girl, I would have been all ears. If they had told me that there were drugs and surgeries that could make me look like a girl, my next question would have been: ‘Where do I find them?’ That was the stuff of my dreams. I would have been desperate to sign up for the full package.

And it would have been a mistake. As I have discovered through personal (and physically painful) experience, transition is not an elixir. But I do not think I would have discerned that truth as a child.

What I now know – and it has put me at odds with the militant transsexual community – is that gender identity disorders are just that: disorders. Whatever is happening, it is part of the human condition. We did not need to invent a new belief system to explain it and we certainly did not need to sell it to children.

Tragically, though, some children have been subjected to life-changing physical interventions, treated with cross-sex hormones, the long-term effects of which are unknown because this truly is experimental medicine. Puberty blockers may stop their natural development so they will never know what it means to grow up the way nature intended. Some teenage girls will never be able to breastfeed their own babies after electing to have a double mastectomy – ‘top surgery’ as it’s called by the LGBT+ community (the T stands for transgender).

One plastic surgeon – Dr Sidhbh Gallagher – touts her business on social media, where she styles herself ‘Dr Teetus Deletus’. Her videos are glitzy and her language is juvenile but her product is profound and permanent. Of course, not every child who struggles with their sex will undergo such catastrophic – and irreversible – surgery, thank goodness. But the impact of gender identity ideology is being felt widely in schools.

I am a science teacher and after nearly 30 years in the classroom, I know full well that growing up is hard – it always has been. Some children struggle with their changing bodies. Others have difficulties coping with the fickle nature of relationships among their peer group, both within their sex and between the sexes. But what is new is the concept of the ‘trans’ person, and by extension, the so-called ‘trans child’. According to gender identity ideology, the trans child is a young person who does not identify with the gender that was assigned to them at birth.

It must sound tantalising to children who struggle with their sex, particularly when the message is proselytised with the help of ‘genderbread persons’ and ‘gender unicorns’ in bright, cheerfully coloured cartoon images that push the concept of gender identity on to children who believe what they are told.

The creators of the unicorn define gender identity as one’s internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or another gender(s). And everyone, they say, has one. For transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same. Female, woman, girl and male, man, boy are also not necessarily linked to each other but are just six common gender identities.

But this is simply not true. Those concepts are linked. We are male or female in the same way that each member of every other mammalian species is male or female. Females produce large gametes – called ova, or eggs – while males produce small motile gametes called sperm. Sperm meets egg and the cycle starts all over again.

Adult female humans are called ‘women’ and adult male humans are called ‘men’; juveniles are called ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ respectively. There is certainly variation within each sex, but that basic division accounts for everyone. We all used to know and accept this, even if we didn’t like it. But now children have been told that the traditional view of sex is simplistic (it isn’t), that scientists have found out more (which they might have done, but there are still two immutable sexes), and that not everyone falls into the binary (they do).

When these ideas come into schools, they can go virtually unchallenged. My view (and my experience) is that gender non-conformity can be tolerated – celebrated even – without the need to pretend that any child is really the opposite sex, or has a gender identity. But schools and teachers have been seduced to the point where they no longer recognise reality. This was a problem during Covid restrictions when children spent their days on the internet rather than physically in school. But it persisted when those restrictions were relaxed.

Back in the classroom, children were again a captive audience. But some teachers had by then embraced gender identity ideology and vigorously promoted it, presumably genuinely believing it would improve their pupils’ lives.

Other teachers then shrugged and paid lip service. After all, if it makes some people feel happier about themselves, it can’t be a bad thing, can it? Actually – behind the rainbows and sparkles – it can be very bad.

Few secondary-school teachers train to be teachers of PSHE (personal, social, health and economic education); rather, we are physics teachers, or teachers of maths, English, geography, art, whatever. For many of us, PSHE is something that needs to be covered, perhaps with their tutor group after taking the register and reading out the notices for the day. But with no free time to develop their own programmes, the temptation is to say: ‘Just give us a scheme and we will deliver it’. And so schools have bought ready-to-teach materials from external providers.

These are not hard to find from, for example, Stonewall UK (the gay and lesbian charity which became ‘trans-inclusive’ in 2015). It claims to have a ‘dedicated team of education professionals’ who work hard to ‘bring you the resources and guidance you need’. Teachers struggling to find the time to mark their books suddenly have one less task to worry about. Job done!

But what job and why has it been done? Gender identity ideology can look harmless at first glance. But behind the bright and colourful resources, adults are making promises they can never deliver. Youngsters are taught that they can choose to identify as boys, girls or perhaps something else. This has a profound impact on some of them to change who they are, the names they call themselves and the pronouns they declare. And they are supported in this, their ideas reinforced rather than scrutinised, by a ready-made community on the internet which applauds transgender-identified children as heroes.

But the fact is children have always harboured fantasies; our job as teachers should not be to affirm them uncritically but gently and sensitively to steer them back to reality. Youngsters need to grow up and find themselves, not be railroaded into off-the-peg identities.

The BBC once told children there were ‘over 100 genders’ but in some respects it didn’t go far enough. Every human being is unique: if there are 7 billion of us then there are also 7 billion different genders. But for all the variation in personality, there are just two sexes.

Science cannot be fooled even if people can. Boys who yearn to express femininity (as I did) do not need to become girls as part of the deal. Meanwhile, girls who are desperate to reject that very same femininity don’t need to identify as non-binary to cut their hair, wear trousers and climb trees. Nobody needs a gender identity – we simply need to be ourselves.

I’m sometimes asked by other teachers to advise on trans policies. I’m not a policy expert but two general principles seem to me to be self-evident.

Firstly, we cannot change our sex and nor can we wish it away. In schools, we sometimes need to treat boys and girls differently – in sports, changing rooms and toilets, for example. In these situations, biological sex matters and transgender-identified children must not be accommodated with the other sex.

The second principle is inclusion. That does not mean placing boys in girls’ spaces, or vice versa but they can and should be included in mixed-sex spaces with everyone else. Schools should also be sympathetic to pupils who prefer to opt out of stereotypes bundled with their sex. We should, of course, protect gender non-conforming children from condemnation, criticism and ridicule but we need not cite gender identity. Crucially, nobody should need to claim to be trans or non-binary in order to be respected for being different.

Gender identity ideology must be challenged – that is my firm belief. It imposes unscientific and harmful ideas on children. In not much more than a decade, this new faith has gripped our society and is fundamentally distorting it.

The parallels with traditional religion are unmistakable. There is a priestly class – trans people – who are at the centre of a belief system with its own doctrines and creeds, which are self-serving and inward looking. They are considered immune from criticism and, at the same time, so weak and vulnerable that they need special protection.

Politicians and policymakers defer to their demands like their predecessors centuries ago bowed to the requirements of the Church. Children are educated in this belief structure, and adults expected at least to go along with it if they want to be seen as worthy people.

Question gender identity ideology and you are labelled anti-trans and a bigot and you are shamed and shunned until you comply. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is perhaps the most high-profile objector, even receiving death threats for her perfectly reasonable view that people cannot change their biological sex.

Dissenting politicians have been subjected to censure from within their parties, while ordinary people have received appalling abuse for simply stating the truth – human beings cannot change sex.

To continue the religious theme, those like me who once believed the dogma but have seen the light and left the faith are apostates, deserters, heretics, even traitors. We are seen to be bad people who need to be silenced.

But I refuse to be silenced in my belief that transgender women (biological males who transition) are not women. I am also deeply concerned about the drift towards gender self-identification – where any man can simply declare himself to be a woman.

This is a dangerous nonsense that makes women vulnerable to predators and I will continue to press this point despite the campaign of lobbyists such as the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), Stonewall and Amnesty International.

It worries me that decision- makers are capitulating to the demands of pressure groups not only to enshrine gender identity into law but to push the boundaries as far as possible. I was horrified by a report from Dentons, a global law firm based in London, in 2019 that encouraged campaigners to press for children to be allowed to change their gender (and hence their legal sex) without the approval of adults, especially, it seemed, their parents. Needing parental consent, it argued, could be ‘problematic’ for minors. Should parents disagree, the state should take action against them for ‘obstructing the free development of a young trans person’s identity’.

These comments should have raised red flags. Why the need to shut out parents and keep things quiet? But too many governments and policymakers simply caved in. In workplaces, human resources departments and trade unions – usually on opposite sides of any argument – were united in announcing that self-declaration of gender takes precedence, displacing other people’s perceptions of us.

Public services have been captured by the mantra of inclusivity. Hospitals fly Pride flags while the police paint rainbows and Stonewall logos on the sides of squad cars. These days, Stonewall UK reigns supreme with dogma such as ‘Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid’.

It’s a statement I repudiate. Their central belief – that we all have a gender identity that determines whether we are men, women or something else – not only flies in the face of science, it demolishes women’s boundaries and their sex-based rights. Ironically, it also defines all human sexuality as attraction to gender identity rather than to the sex of a person, denying the basis of gay and lesbian existence.

I am mightily relieved to have escaped the quasi-religious trans community. Far better to be a transsexual apostate grounded in reality than a follower of their ideology, clinging to that ethereal fantasy that we have a gender identity. We don’t. Fulfilment is not found in identity groups, no matter how colourful the pink-and-blue transgender flag flown by anarchists, rabble-rousers and any political activists looking for a fight, in the knowledge that styling themselves ‘trans allies’ means they can act with impunity.

Fulfilment comes through self-awareness, self-understanding and self-contentment. For me, transition was hard work; self-discovery was harder – but infinitely more worthwhile. Why would anyone want to be defined by a transgender identity, when they could just be themselves?

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From Transsexual Apostate by Debbie Hayton

This extract was first published by The Daily Mail on 28 January 2024: Even though I’ve had a sex change operation … I’m not and never will be a woman.

Transsexual Apostate is published by Forum (Hardcover, £16.99)