A question of bravery

Joe Biden announced in November: ‘Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.’ When Conservative MP Jamie Wallis came out as trans last month, Boris Johnson hailed the revelation as having taken ‘an immense amount of courage’.

Mr Wallis says that he was subjected to sexual violence after having ‘hooked up’ with another man in the autumn, which raises the question of whether the parliamentarian might be plain old gay. But then, nowadays being gay is dull. In fact, homosexuality having become a big snooze is one of this century’s healthiest turns of the cultural wheel. ‘There’s something you should know’ – freighted pause – ‘I’m gay.’ OK, fine. Now tell us something interesting about yourself.

On a dime in 2012 – exactly when same-sex marriage was welcomed across the West, and there’s no greater a let-down than a civil rights movement that succeeds – our obsession pivoted to transgenderism. It’s hard to recall any collective preoccupation that gathered momentum so quickly. Overnight, we were inundated with documentaries about people ‘born in the wrong body’, many of them children. Television programmes such as Orange is the New Black had transgender characters, while Transparent featured the phenom as its central premise. ‘Transgender Day’ was born. Early childhood education was revamped, so that six-year-olds were instructed that they could choose to be a boy or a girl or something in between.

There’s an element here of prurient voyeurism. We’re bored with hetero sex, which has become too permitted, and now carries a whiff of the unhip. We’re bored with gayness. We needed a new fixation. If the consequences of our latest social fetish were limited to what we discuss, read, watch and think, no problem.