The fact no one likes to admit: many gay men could just have easily been straight

Long-suffering Spectator readers deserve a seasonal break from yet another Remoaner diatribe from me. My last on this page, making the outrageous suggestion that the populace may sometimes be wrong, is now being brandished by online Leaver-readers of my Times column as proof that I am in fact a fascist; so there isn’t anywhere much to go from there.

Instead, I turn to sex. There is little time left for me to write about sex as the thoughts of a septuagenarian on this subject (I turn 70 this year) may soon meet only a shudder. But I have a theory which I have the audacity to think important.

What follows is not written here for the first time, and much of it is neither original nor new; but on very few subjects have I ever been more sure I’m right, or more sure that future generations will see so, and wonder that it stared us in the face yet was not acknowledged. My firm belief is that in trying to categorise sex, sexuality and — yes — even gender, the late 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries have taken the medical and social sciences down a massive blind alley. No such categories exist. And it has been particularly sad in 2018 to see the ‘trans’ movement, with its hopes of modernising and liberalising public attitudes, walking straight into the same trap.

Sticking names on things and badges on people, and spouting corrosive nonsense about ‘crossing’ from one sex or sexuality or ‘gender’ to another can only warp self-knowledge and our knowledge of each other.

When I was young, I was told the whole world was divided into heterosexual men and heterosexual women, bar a small number of unfortunate ‘homosexuals’ of both genders and possibly an even smaller number in a third category, ‘bisexuals’, who ‘swung both ways’; plus, finally, a tiny band of wretched creatures who were physically not quite one thing or the other.