With a woke rainbow gloss

Jo Bartosch has something to say about the case of the trans toddler that I mentioned yesterday:

Daytime television isn’t known for intellectual rigour, but it would have been fair to expect a little journalistic curiosity. Instead, head gently titled, Holly Willoughby oozed sympathy, stating with surprising confidence: ‘As a society we tend to want to put people into a girl or a boy box that just fits with what we know. It makes sense, it makes us feel comfortable, but that’s not reality.’

In saying this, not only did Willoughby demonstrate an alarming level of credulity — she also entirely missed the obvious point. Stormy could be a little girl living outside of the ‘girl’ box. She could have short hair, wear trousers and like firefighters, while still being female. Instead, Stormy’s parents have opted to put their female child in the box marked ‘boy’, because it seems it is still considered shameful to have a child who does not conform. There is nothing progressive about this. It is informed by what was once known as sexism.

It's remarkable how they get away with it: presenting themselves as the progressive smashers of the old gender stereotypes, as if feminists and gay activists haven't been banging on about precisely this for years. Clearly, as Bartosch says, what they're doing is the reverse of progressive. They're presenting a young girl who doesn't like being girly as in reality a boy wrongly assigned as female at birth – however that works – and now showing her real gender. Back in the sex stereotype box, in other words. When can we start her on the puberty blockers and the surgery?

Between 2009 and 2019, there was a 1,460 per cent increase in referrals of boys, and a staggering 5,337 per cent increase in referrals of girls to gender-identity services in the UK. Research suggests that a disproportionate number of those who identify as trans as children would otherwise grow up to be same-sex attracted. A 2017 study of 4,500 children showed lesbians are 12 to 19 times more likely to be tomboyish as girls than their straight counterparts, whereas gay men are likely to be 20 to 26 times more likely to be effeminate as boys. In Iran, where homosexuality is illegal, transgender surgeries are performed on lesbians and gay men to make them appear as ‘straight’. In affirming the nonsensical notion that some children are ‘born in the wrong body’, we are at risk of doing the same in the UK, albeit with a woke rainbow gloss.