Nine years in the transgender debate

If a week is a long time in politics, then nine years is surely an eternity in the transgender debate. I began this blog in September 2016 to record my thoughts and archive my published work. If it has my byline, there’s a copy here somewhere.

Back in August 2021 – in a review to mark the 200^th post – I joked that I had chosen a career in physics to avoid words, before noting that I had written 174,951 of them in the preceding 199 posts. That wasn’t the half of it. Last week, I uploaded post number 499, and the aggregate word count reached 452,693. For my 500^th post, I want to take another look back my thinking and how it has developed.

Amid the many rapid political reaction pieces that permeate this blog, I have written some longer essays in which I have made three claims:

• Gender identity (the notion that being a man or a woman is defined by an internal, subjective feeling) is unprovable, unfalsifiable, and unnecessary to explain transsexualism.
• Autogynephilia (or AGP, a man’s arousal at the thought or image of himself as a woman) is routinely denied and denounced, but it can explain what’s going on in many male-to-female transsexuals.
• Perception is key to understanding the transgender debate, in which both sides are missing the point.

I’ve also formulated three hypotheses. I’ll set them out later in this piece, and they are for the future to test. I want to start by looking back.

The evolution of my thinking

I dismissed gender identity early on. If I don’t need a gender identity to explain why I transitioned, then why does anyone need one? Sometimes language needs to be blunt. ‘Gender Identity is Bollocks,’ I wrote in 2020, concluding the piece with the quip, ‘you either have them or you don’t.’ Nevertheless, gender identity ideology ripped through Western society, devastating the rights of women and the safeguarding of children. In January 2020, The inconvenient truth about transwomen documented the history and exposed the nonsense. If I had to select just three pieces for posterity, this would be the first of them.

The Inconvenient Truth About Transwomen

The following month, I discussed AGP for the first time. I was honest: ‘Autogynephilia drove my own transsexualism.’ I described it as a male’s propensity to be sexually attracted to a female version of themselves. The focus is inwards rather than outwards – introverted as opposed to extroverted, if you like.

AGP provokes condemnation from one side of the debate and outright denial from the other – but it is what it is, and it might be far more common than supposed. Långström and Zucker (2005) found that almost 3% of men ‘reported at least one episode of transvestic fetishism’. Some of those could have been driven to transition without ever understanding why they did it, while many more suffer in secrecy and silence.

I revisited the subject in May 2022. My Autogynephilia Story recalled my own experiences, including my struggles as a child. Three years on, it’s regularly the most read post on the entire blog, and I’ve therefore chosen it as the second piece for posterity.

My autogynephilia story

Shortly afterwards, the concept of perception came into my writing. ‘We need to talk about sex, not gender identity,’ I asserted in June 2022. But I also started to explore what people actually mean when they use the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’. We’ve been using those terms – or their predecessors – for time immemorial, and from long before anyone knew anything about gender identity or chromosomes. Moreover, if other animal species can distinguish the male and female of their kind, maybe human beings rely on the same evolved instinct? I argued that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ describe what we perceive, and they are intelligible concepts because we all share the same ‘common sense’.

My memoir Transsexual Apostate, published by Forum in 2024, explored all three ideas. It also described my transition and the impact on my family and professional life. Some extracts are archived here, including three pieces written by my wife.

Other writers have rubbished gender identity, while AGP has also been widely examined. Perception, meanwhile, has often been overlooked. I went on to suggest that the perception of other people’s sex underpins the whole debate, and it is the key to understanding what is going on. In the last of the three selected pieces – published more recently in July 2025 – I explored the outworking of perception in relationships between people and society as a whole. If biological sex matters, so must our perception of sex.

If Biological Sex Matters, so must Our Perception of Sex

As I concluded in that piece, my argument about why sex and perception of sex both matter won’t please either side in the current debate, and that may be all the more reason why it’s needed.

The impasse in the debate

From one side, we hear denials that sex is important, while from the other, there are claims that biological features visible only under a microscope are all that matter. Both are, I think, missing the point. Indeed, the conflict wouldn’t exist, let alone generate so much heat, if it were down to a mere question of science. Meanwhile, of course, we all recognise men and women when we see them.

For a while, the gender identity crew were in the ascendant, and they influenced law and policy that required people to discount the evidence of their own eyes when assessing someone’s sex. To them, the pronoun badge trumped everything, however absurd the outcome. Lately, the pendulum has swung the other way. Earlier this year, the UK Supreme Court wisely defined the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in terms of biology. Unlike gender identity, chromosomes are objective and meaningful. But policy that doesn’t acknowledge perception will lead to absurdities of a different kind.

Three hypotheses for the future

As a scientist, I want to test hypotheses. I foresee a time when humanoid robots walk among us. Indeed, men will build them if only to have sex with them. There will be androids (‘man-robots’ like C-3PO from Star Wars) and gynoids (‘woman-robots’ like T-X from Terminator 3). Despite lacking both gender identity and chromosomes – they will be merely perambulating machines – we will refer to androids and gynoids by the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ because we will perceive them to be men and women. That’s my first hypothesis. Let’s see if I am right; if I am wrong, at least I will know.

Meanwhile, we could all take a step back and try to understand why this debate became so intractable and vicious. A rigid adherence to the dictionary definitions of words is simply not, I’ve come to realise, how our minds work when it comes to making sense of the messy and ambiguous real world. Both sides are guilty of making dogmatic claims about the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and both are missing the point.

The transgender conflict has not been resolved in over fifty years and keeps getting bigger because both sides fear that the other will win and somehow redefine basic human perceptions and behaviours. But while words mediate our thoughts, they do not control our feelings. The concepts ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are baked into us by millions of years of evolution, and that evolved instinct drives our response to those whom we perceive to be men and women.

Whatever law and policy might say, ‘a man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.’ That’s how Rishi Sunak put it at the Conservative Party Conference in 2023, possibly without understanding the implications of what he was saying. But he was right, and neither side in the transgender debate will prevail because human beings will do what they have always done and fall back on their instincts. That’s hypothesis number two.

However, in the UK at least, we are in a better position than when I entered the debate in 2016. Today, women can defend their boundaries, and they know that they can defend them. Following the Cass Review, children can no longer be prescribed puberty blockers, while new statutory guidance stops schools teaching gender identity as fact.

As for transsexuals, we should never have been taking up places in society reserved for the other biological sex or competing as the opposite biological sex. For toilets and changing rooms, however, a ‘principle of least surprise’ will prevail whatever policy might demand. That leads to my third hypothesis: transsexuals who use the toilets that other users expect them to use will face fewer issues than those who generate surprise. In many cases ‘least surprise’ will follow when the transsexual uses the toilets designated for the sex that they most resemble.

I am not building a case for how I think the world ought to be; instead I am trying to understand and explain the world as it is. Whether I am right or wrong, I will leave my three hypotheses for the future to test. Meanwhile we should all maintain a sense of perspective. Most activities are mixed sex with equal opportunities for both; maybe the best advice for all of us is to get on with life and try to live it to the full.

That is where I am after nine years. Along the way, I’ve thought several times that I’ve said all that I could possibly say about the transgender debate. After 500 pieces, I do now feel that it is time for me to focus more on my family and my work away from the transgender debate. This certainly isn’t my last word on the matter – another piece is already lined up for next week – but there will be far fewer words to come than words that have been

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Debbie Hayton

24 September 2025