It rarely pays to be ahead of your time

00:00 08:42

Lionel Shriver has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Following the release of the Cass report deprecating NHS ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors as reliant on rubbish medical research, the number of comment pieces disparaging the cult of transgenderism has exploded. Such columns would never have been published even a couple of years ago. Finally, pushing disturbed children and adolescents into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment in the service of adult fanaticism is starting to look, um – iffy. For outliers who’ve been frantically signalling, ‘Hey! Maybe a society that’s mutilating its own kids has lost its way!’ this watershed should constitute satisfying vindication. It does. That’s the good news.

The bad news: the lie that you can choose to be whichever sex you feel like is entrenched in Britain’s school system. Activist teachers who’ve blithely ignored cautious government guidance aren’t likely to drop their warped ‘genderbread’ lesson plans or their exciting collusion with children against their own parents merely because of a spot of bad press. The fashion for sexually neutral language that gave us ‘birthing people’ and ‘bonus holes’ is embedded in the NHS, the media and many charities, and these dehumanising linguistic abortions won’t likely evaporate overnight.

Pronoun badges may eventually be preserved behind museum glass as fascinating artefacts from an era in which the West lost its collective mind, but for now they’re still garnishing lapels and aren’t yet subject to widespread social derision. ‘Preferred pronouns’ in emails continue to helpfully inform recipients that the correspondent is either a frightened conformist or a proud conformist. Transgenderism is even more sanctified in the United States, where support for inadequately trialled experimental drugs and permanently disfiguring surgeries even for children remains the ultimate progressive purity test.