The weather chart does not usually echo social trends, but Monday might be an exception. We could be about to be blown about by the world’s first transgender storm. This week, the Met Office began the practice of naming storms to strike the UK, in the manner that tropical hurricanes have been named by the World Meteorological Organisation since the 1950s. If a storm looks as if it is developing winds powerful enough to uproot trees and cause structural damage to buildings it will be given a name from a list. The list of chosen names goes through the alphabet in progression, alternating between male and female names.
The first named storm, Abigail, was due to brush the north-western fringes of Scotland on Friday morning, before moving into the North Sea and away to Norway to die. The next named storm may well be a depression which is currently sitting out in the Mid-Atlantic but is heading our way and is due to reach Britain on Monday or Tuesday. It is not yet clear whether it will be strong enough to warrant a name when it gets here, but if it does it will be christened Barney.
Trouble is, this is a storm which already has a name. It is the remnants of tropical storm Kate, which formed off the Bahamas last weekend, briefly developed into a hurricane on Wednesday near Bermuda before declining and moving away north-eastwards. It still appears on the Met Office’s charts as ‘ex-Kate’.
If it does get named by the Met Office therefore it will have undergone gender reassignment somewhere in mid-Atlantic. That named hurricanes often go on to become Atlantic depressions affected – and which may therefore end up having two different names — was not a problem that seemed to occur to the Met Office’s weather when it decided to name British storms. Or maybe it did, but they decided it would fit their diversity agenda to end up creating a transgender storm.
Next, I suppose we will have to have a gender queer storm, though I am scratching my head to think what that would be.
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