The nonsense world of emotional support animals

Sometimes an event or a phenomenon is so perplexing and so terrible that it’s best not to deal with it too directly and for too long. Best to look at something tangentially related, which is why I’ve spent so much time recently worrying about Kirrin Medcalf’s dog.

Kirrin is head of ‘trans inclusion’ at Stonewall, the charity which once fought for the rights of gay men and women but now devotes itself to trying to overturn the heteronormative patriarchy, using the notion of transsexual kids as a Trojan horse. Don’t worry. You don’t need to understand that. It’s best not to, if you want to stay sane.

All you need to know is that for Kirrin and for Stonewall, it’s violent heresy to say that men and women are biologically different. For them, your biological sex is what you say it is, simple as that, and even to think otherwise is to do great harm.

Kirrin appeared in court last week because Stonewall is currently being sued by a lawyer called Allison Bailey, who claims that they bullied her and cost her her livelihood as a result of her insistence that men and women have different bodies, which of course they do. Bailey has been harassed by the usual activists in the usual way – death and rape threats – but nonetheless it was Kirrin who appeared to feel most victimised. Although he appeared in court only online, via Zoom, he insisted on being accompanied by his mum and his support dog. Just the sight of Bailey was too traumatising for him without the dog.

I can’t bear to think about what Stonewall’s weird ideology does to children: the unthinking glibness with which they tell kids they can choose their sex, then push them towards mutilating their bodies and taking drugs which will make them infertile.