UnHeard

This piece is not about me. Yes, Andrew Doyle has mentioned me in his February 8 article, https://unherd.com/2024/02/caught-up-in-the-gender-critical-civil-war/, and I asked UnHerd the right of reply, which was not granted, hence this piece. But this is not about me. It is about the right of women to hold on to material reality without being accused of being ideological extremists who want to compel everyone’s speech. So let’s start from what happened. Everything started from this tweet of mine 

The language is strong, as can be expected from a woman exasperated by the lack of understanding that using female pronouns for a man who admits he has a sexual fetish about ‘presenting as a woman’ and does not refrain from expressing it in front of  children, is a safeguarding risk. 

This past week has been a fractious one for people who describe themselves as gender critical. A very loose definition, which I do not believe, for example, represents my position at all. I do not hold any specific set of beliefs about gender identity; I simply know it does not exist in the material world, and it is a set of beliefs I find profoundly damaging to women and children. 

Following the publicity campaign for the publication of Debbie Hayton’s book (https://debbiehayton.com/book/),  a sort of schism was created. On one side, those who insist Hayton is a man and should always be referred to as a man. In fact, Hayton himself acknowledges he is a man displaying a quite extreme form of AGP, i.e. autogynephilia, a paraphilia where males are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as female; in its most extreme form, the male will undergo genital surgery to approximate the female body anatomically, not content with external presentation such as clothing, hair and make-up. On the other side, those, amongst whom stand Andrew Doyle, Janice Turner and other well known people who would describe themselves as gender critical, who arrogate to themselves the right to refer to Hayton as a woman (adopting female pronouns for example), either on the basis of a generic ‘Be Kind’ duty, or claiming to be able to identify the transwomen who are respectful to women, or finally specifying that the privilege of female pronouns is withdrawn for ‘known’ sex offenders (as claimed by Janice Turner in this article https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/debbie-hayton-transsexual-apostate-bhcjlpngj and on social media). 

The debate got very heated, especially because the (mostly) women who insisted that female pronouns should not be used to refer to men were accused of being, amongst other things, simplistic, purists, ideologues, extremists, ultras (this has already been reclaimed by feminists on social media), and of committing the cardinal sin of compelling speech. The likelihood that someone will refer to compelled speech is directly proportional to the likelihood that they have no knowledge of the US constitutional doctrine of compelled speech and its relationship with human rights’ freedom of speech jurisprudence. Asking people to refer to men as men is not a form of compelled speech, and defenders of free speech should be able to identify the object of their concern more clearly. 

There are two reasons why women took specific offence at these accusations: the first and most obvious one is that asking people not to misrepresent reality is not a limitation of anyone’s speech, let alone a form of compelled speech. In fact, if Dr Doyle were to claim in court that asking him to refer to a man as a man (incidentally, a man who admits being a man, as Hayton does) is a breach of his  human rights, he would be laughed out of court. Secondly, and most importantly, because women who know whence they speak, that is, the so-called ‘transwidows’ (former partners of AGP and transgender men), and female experts on safeguarding, have warned that presenting a male as a female in any circumstance where this may matter, but especially when children are involved, is a safeguarding risk and a breach of women’s right to dignity.

I offer just two simple scenarios and a counterargument to the exception of ‘respectful’ transwomen. As we know from the testimonies of many transwidows, their life with their AGP partner is a particularly damaging form of gaslighting, where their partner demands anyting from pretending he is female in all social and family interactions, to compliance to sexual practices that the women find degrading, painful, and humiliating. In this context, to see a male AGP celebrated and feted publicly for his honesty in speaking about his paraphilia, while glossing over the effects of it on his wife, and referring to him as a woman, is a cruel and unnecessary form of gaslighting of women who have personal knowledge of the abusive context of intimate relationships with AGP partners. How this played out specifically in the Hayton’s case, with his wife penning a defence of her role subordinate to her husband‘s AGP needs (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/im-a-trans-womans-wife-my-life-with-debbie-hayton-wfqp5b72x), is irrelevant to the story and the wider experience of transwidows who manage to exit their abusive relationship.   

The second scenario is even more concerning. We know that Hayton is a school teacher and that, while he claims not to insist on female pronouns, he apparently expects children in his class to refer to him as a female. In fact, when I asked him on social media whether he expects students to call him Miss, he promptly blocked me. Anyone with knowledge of safeguarding understands that this is a potential risk. Allowing a male to foster the pretence that he is of the female sex is never a good idea where there are children, and this regardless of whether we are talking about primary or secondary school children. It is common knowledge that there is a rise in the number of school children with mental health issues, including autism, and children for whom English is not the first language; it is the English grammar that distinguishes on the basis of sex in titles and personal pronouns, not a bunch of deranged harridans who want to compel people’s speech. It is cruel to confuse a child who may have a tenuous grasp on reality about which sex their teacher is. And one cannot expect children to reach proficiency in English if they are given contradictory rules on the use of titles and pronouns. 

Finally, as for the exception on the use of pronouns for transwomen who respect women or transwomen who are not known sex offenders, the counterargument is simple and grounded in logic and reality. For the first, the starting point is that no transwoman who respects women would ever ask for female pronouns to be used to refer to him. To do so anyway and even against their expressed preferences leads to the absurd result that it is advisable to use male pronouns to refer to a transwoman who claims to be a woman but female pronouns for a transwoman who claims to be a man. 

For the second, since there is no way of knowing whether a man has committed a sex offence, how are we to apply the rule? Turner referred on social media to known sex offenders, but as a woman she should be aware that most sex offences are never reported, especially if they do not escalate in a rape, and even in the case of rape. This may be an embarrassing realisation for men, but women know that there are many men who have committed sex offences with no consequence at all. I can relate numerous experiences, some involving men with roles of responsibility and influence, in academia, in health care etc. If nothing else, adopting such an attitude would result in repeated volte-face by women, and make the conduct of criminal trials against transwomen impossible. Are we supposed to switch pronouns only after sentencing, or after indictment, or how else? It beggars belief that this is even offered as an acceptable practice. 

To go back to the story, Andrew Doyle insisted that his freedom of speech allowed him to refer to men as women and that all women protesting on the basis of safeguarding and women’s rights were thinly veiled ideological authoritarians. When I criticised him for insisting on using female pronouns for Hayton, a man with an admitted sexual fetish, he accused me of being morally objectionable, a homophobe, a ghastly excuse for a human being, grim, and an unpleasant bigot. I have to thank the users who screenshotted his tweets, as he deleted them before publication of his UnHerd article, so that readers have to trust his words about me. The accusation that I am a homophobe is funny in the context, as I did not know Andrew Doyle is in fact a gay man. Indeed I was not aware of who he was when I asked him my question, as I am not in the habit of checking someone’s profile before engaging with him or her. Regardless, the accusation was then picked up and escalated by other accounts and at last check I had become a ʽblatant homophobeʼ, a ʽmisandristʼ, an ʽaggressive nut jobʼ and a ‘misandrist shit-stirrer’. Imagine my surprise when I see that Andrew Doyle singled me out, amongst the abuse that he did receive, in this fashion: ʽThen there was an especially malicious attack from law scholar Dr Alessandra Asteriti, who called me a liar and resorted to the defamatory claim that my objective was to “harm women and childrenˮʼ. Not only he singled me out as especially malicious (he had received messages of a profoundly homophobic nature by trolls whom he decided to present as feminists on the basis of the self description of those accounts) but even tagged my social media account, to make it easier, I guess, for people to attack me. Although I have a decent number of followers, they pale in comparison to the social media and media profile of Andrew Doyle. He also misrepresented my position. I did not accuse him of being a liar, but of lying about the sex of transwomen. This is a basic distinction. All of us can lie about something. It does not transform all of us into liars tout-court. To use female pronouns for a person you know to be a male is the very definition of a lie, i.e. a wilful misrepresentation of reality. And yes, since women have been telling him repeteadly that this lie harms women and children, to insist in the lie harms women and children. This is just the logical consequence of repeating a behaviour after being told of its consequences. It is not his objective, but the collateral damage of his misguided attempt at exercising ‘freedom of speech’. Lying about reality is not an exercise of freedom of speech but an exercise in obfuscation.

While accusing me of defamation, Dr Doyle conveniently deleted all accusations he had hurled at me, including the defamatory one of being a homophobe, which is now so widespread as to constitute a serious defamation of my character and reputation. In general, I would not put any trust in a claim of defamation where the accuser removes all evidence that the facts may not be as presented by him.  

I was the only one mentioned in the article and my profile included, to make it easier for people to find me and attack me. Much more vicious attacks were either not included or reported anonymously. I am not quoted but paraphrased, to make my question to him sound abusive. It seems an incredible coincidence that this supposed incident of female viciousness allowed Dr Doyle to publish an article advertising his new Substack account and trying to elicit sympathy from potential subscribers.