What schools should be teaching

The state of Florida recently passed a piece of legislation making it illegal for teachers to hold discussions with pupils under the age of eight about gender orientation. It seemed a very reasonable idea to me and I would guess that a largeish proportion of parents in this country, perhaps even a majority, would concur. I would not wish to indulge in an unrealistically idyllic view of childhood, but my own life was certainly less complicated in the years before I suddenly realised, much in the manner of Henry Miller’s famous epiphany, that (to bowdlerise a little) girls were all in possession of cervixes and might thus be receptive to overtures of a sexual nature – or that there might be boys who for complex reasons would remain unmoved by such a revelation.

That epiphany came at about 11. But the Florida legislation has been reported by the British media as if it were both prehistoric and fascistic, the assumption being that every-one else in the country would, upon learning of it, be rightly aghast. I was asked about the issue on Times Radio and I replied that I thought it was an exemplary piece of lawmaking and I fervently hoped we might enact the same stricture here.

A kind of appalled silence greeted my answer, almost as if they had witnessed me strangle a puppy to death live on air. Nowhere have I heard interviews with people who think similarly to me – just anguished shrieks from gay activists and the perpetually incandescent left.

Although I was ten or 11 when I was first told about homosexuals, for a good year prior to that the term ‘homo’ had been a very fashionable term of abuse in my school.