Society

Just over five years ago, I wrote an article here about sex and gender and the issues raised by policies and practices allowing people to self-identify in the gender of their choice. Then, the topic was obscure and marginal to a great many people: my decision to write about it was regarded by many friends and contacts as eccentric and perhaps self-harmingly misjudged. Today, with the sex/gender debate firmly established on the political agenda, I’ve largely left the conversation. Where once there weren’t enough people in politics paying attention, I sometimes think there are now too many. Would it really do any harm to ask a surrogate mother to affirm

Anyone who has ever published a book and been dismayed by an anonymous review online will have cheered inwardly at the story of David Wilson. Professor Wilson is a criminologist and historian who has published several books. Each of his books has received a scathing one-star review on Amazon from a pseudonymous critic calling himself ‘Junius’. The latest was posted, he says, within a few hours of his new book being published: ‘abysmal… avoid… low quality… poor research… would disgrace an undergraduate dissertation’.  Such reviews aren’t just words: they can cause material harm to books in Amazon’s ranking system. Most authors will have experienced something like this (I’ve got off pretty lightly so far, though I

The spouse of one of Britain’s major party leaders would be forgiven for feeling both queasy and furious about Labour’s wave of attack ads against Rishi Sunak. Not Akshata Murty, aka Mrs Sunak, who has already been through some very rough stuff about her and her husband’s tax affairs – but Victoria Starmer, wife of Keir, on the basis that those who dish it out must expect to have to take it back in kind and without complaint. Politics is the proverbial rough old trade at the best of times, but there is now every sign that the looming 2024 general election will be one of the dirtiest ever.  People

Joseph Stalin knew better than Vladimir Putin. After world war two, as the Cold War began, the Soviet dictator took the view that it was more trouble than it was worth to invade Finland again, as he had done with humiliating setbacks in the Winter War of 1939-1940. Too many parents or grandparents of those in the Finnish audience had died in the 1939-1940 war for suspicion of Russia to have faded And so the Finns were spared the fate of Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians and other peoples of eastern and central Europe who were occupied and then communised. They had to pay a price for this absolution. The country was

Andrew John is a ‘radical’, not a politician – or so he claims. The Archbishop of Wales stated his mission when he was elected to the post barely two years ago after a swift and overwhelming majority among the Church in Wales’s electoral college. John is low-key, humble and mild mannered in person, but is also unafraid to speak his mind: he has aired uncompromising views on migration, integrity in public life and nationalism. His most outspoken opinions are on the issue of Welsh independence. Earlier this year, John went further than any of his predecessors in expressing his personal thoughts on the subject: he said the ‘situation we have

Did you realise that one in every 67 Muslims is transgender? That adults with no educational qualifications are almost twice as likely to identify as transgender as university graduates? That the London boroughs of Brent and Newham are home to higher proportions of transgender people than Brighton and Oxford? These are some of the astonishing results from the 2021 census of England and Wales, which was the first in the world to ask about gender identity. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) released detailed census data for England and Wales on Tuesday. These data deepen the problems raised by Alice Sullivan, professor of sociology at University College London, and myself