What terfs get wrong

The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as drug-users instead snorted up cocaine’s great gift of untrammelled narcissism. And yet the desire to live in a weird fantasy land did not quite disappear – far from it. Today, if you tell people that you are a pink giraffe, they are compelled by society to believe you and not judge you as being a deluded lunatic.

We no longer need Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey or the ghastly Timothy Leary: we have created a counter-rational fantasy world for ourselves without the help of acid or psilocybins. This much is evident every day on social media and in our newspapers. Often it’s just the little things that convince you there is a general derangement at large – such as a talk given in Cambridge recently by someone called Leah Palmer of the Scott Polar Research Institute: ‘Queering the Poles: How queer voices are changing how we think about the Arctic and Antarctic regions.’

Very queer voices, in my book, and those that might not find very much resonance with Scott himself. Nor am I sure how Pope John Paul II or Lech Walesa would feel about ‘Queering the Poles’. But there are people like Leah are in their little victimhood silos, believing the North Pole belongs to them, believing that they have special agency when it comes to snow and polar bears.

Less immediately ludicrous, at first sight, was a story from one of our junior schools. Neither the school nor the people involved were named. What happened was that a boy handed around to his classmates invitations to his birthday party. All but one of the kids in the class received an invitation, and the child who didn’t asked why this should be.