These days, you can chart cultural change through public loos.
In Los Angeles, gone are the bold-print doorsigns that say “gender neutral restroom”, complete with baffling stick men/women dressed in the kind of half-skirt, half-trouser ensembles that belong on a Jean Paul Gaultier runway; the interlinked ‘Mars’ and ‘Venus’ symbols with pompous explanatory small print welcoming “everyone, regardless of gender or expression”. Thanks, guys, but it’s a bathroom – none of us are planning to stay long enough to feel the love.
Today, the signs simply read: “We Don’t Care.” Or, my personal favourite: “Whatever. Just wash your hands.”
However, in the UK, when it comes to bathroom signs, there is no such levity. We’re still desperately contorted about trans and gender issues – and a long way from levelling out a debate that, I fear, hasn’t yet reached peak insanity.
I thought we’d peaked last year, when Always, the sanitary towel company, agreed to remove the ‘Venus’ symbol from its wrapping after the trans lobby complained that “not everyone who has periods identifies as a woman”.
I thought we’d peaked when the police were forced to reveal that convicted rapists were allowed to be logged as female when arrested, “if that is how they choose to identify themselves”. When the BBC promoted an educational short film telling nine-year-olds that there were “over 100” genders, that had to be it?
Surely we peaked last January, when former policeman Harry Miller was visited by police after tweeting “transphobic” comments (such as: “I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me”)? Miller claimed that the Humberside Police officer who interviewed him had said he’d committed no crime, “but we need to check your thinking”.
Which is Orwellian enough – but after Miller discovered his “tweet incident” had been entered onto his police record, as a “non-crime hate incident”, he launched legal action so that a court might establish once and for all that he had not broken any law. The police probe was decreed unlawful by the High Court on Friday.
But this is no time to celebrate, thanks to the opposition Labour Party, which, in the midst of its leadership contest, is busy descending into a farcical civil war over transgender rights.
A controversial pledge card calling on the party to expel “transphobic” members has exposed a faultline running through the movement – between and those who sign up wholeheartedly to the trans-activist insistence that “transwomen are women”, and seasoned Left-wing feminists, who worry about proposed reforms to make it simpler to transition legally and, thus, access all-female spaces – such as changing rooms and toilets.
Out there in the Labour heartlands, these are not the issues keeping voters up at night. It’s as if the party has learnt nothing from Trump or Brexit – or from Jo Swinson, the headmistressy and super-woke former Liberal Democrat leader whose election campaign went up in smoke on the altar of transgender ideology.
But all of this pales in importance beside an easily missed news item tucked away in this weekend’s Sunday papers. One headline ran: “NHS endorsing guide for transgender patients that approves puberty blockers and declares anatomy ‘is not always a good guide’ to determining a child’s sex.”
The NHS has already tarnished itself over matters of gender. More than once, the scandal-hit Tavistock Clinic, the country’s only NHS gender identity service for children, has found itself in the eye of the storm after accusations that it was “fast-tracking” young people into changing gender and offering children as young as 11 hormone-blocking drugs. But at least this shockingly proactive approach has been limited to patients within the clinic – until now.
A number of NHS trusts across the south west are to send out a “Supporting Trans People” toolkit, written by trans campaigners and branded with NHS logos, that declares that anatomy “is not always a good guide” to determining a child’s sex. It also condones the use of puberty blockers on adolescents, drugs that are, at present, licensed in the UK only to treat children who start puberty abnormally early, not those just questioning their gender identity.
Both the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and NHS England have ordered national reviews into the ethics of prescribing such treatment.
It’s the inherent contradictions in PC-culture-gone-mad that I can’t get past. Because if you pare down the argument for hormone blockers, it’s all about protecting youngsters’ mental health – a mental health that could understandably suffer if someone felt trapped in the wrong body for years.
So what do we do? We pump them full of drugs that keep them in that state, preventing their natural sex hormones, oestrogen and testosterone, from kicking in.
It’s official: we’ve hit new levels of gender insanity.
