Now that women can vote and homosexual couples can marry, you might imagine that the world’s student activists, trade union leaders and environmentalists would pat themselves on the back and break open a bottle of sustainable elderflower juice to congratulate themselves on a job well done.
But no. They have decided that we must now all turn our attention to the plight of people who want to change their name from Stan to Loretta, and fight for the right for men to have babies.
I’ll be honest. When this issue first began to surface a couple of years ago and we had pop stars such as Sir John running about, talking endlessly about the transgender cause, I did roll my eyes a bit. Because in the immortal words of Reg, from the People’s Front of Judea, “Where’s the foetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box? ”
As far as I was concerned, men who want to be women were only really to be found on the internet or in the seedier bits of Bangkok. They were called ladyboys, and in my mind they were nothing more than the punchline in a stag night anecdote.
I wasn’t alone either. Only recently I was chatting to a doctor about how people can now demand gender reassignment surgery on the NHS and he said, “I get lots of people in my surgery with a Napoleon complex. But I don’t buy them a pointy hat and a French army uniform.” I found that funny.
But there’s a distinctly unfunny side to the coin. Just recently some friends of friends were having one of their eight-year-old daughter’s school chums round for a sleepover. As the day approached they received a call from the girl’s parents, who said, “Er, she’s not actually a girl.”
She had been born a boy but had insisted from the age of three that she had a girl’s name and wore girls’ clothes and, later, that she went to a girls’ school. And her parents had simply indulged this whim.
I was horrified. I wanted to seek them out and explain that they were free to live a lunatic life, washing their armpits with charcoal and liking Jeremy Corbyn’s thoughts on how ballistic nuclear submarines must be built by the comrades and then used as flower pots. But they must not, and I was going to emphasise this with spittle, be allowed to poison the mind of a child.
When I was five I wanted to be Alan Whicker, but my parents didn’t buy me a blazer and send me to hospital to have my adenoids sewn up. Other kids wanted to be super army soldiers or astronauts. It’s what kids do: dream impossible dreams.
You don’t actually take them seriously. You don’t take them to a hospital when they’re 10 and say, “He wants to be a girl, so can you lop his todger off?” Because what’s going to happen five years later when he’s decided that being a man isn’t so bad after all and he’s in the showers at the rugby club?
And there’s more. Only last week we received news from the Daily Mail that at Isle of Wight prison nine inmates have decided they would like to be women and now want the NHS to stump up £100,000 for the necessary procedures.
Transgender enthusiasts talked with serious faces about how this demonstrated the scale of the problem and the horror of being a woman trapped not just inside a man’s body, but inside a man’s prison as well.
Yes, but hang on just a cotton-picking minute. When I was at school, I announced that I would like to be confirmed as a Christian. This was seen by teachers and my housemaster as a sign that I was growing up, so they happily agreed to my request.
And from that day on I was allowed to skip compulsory chapel on a Sunday morning — where you were checked and ticked off on a register — and go instead to the early morning village communion service, where you weren’t. Which meant I didn’t have to go to church at all and could therefore spend all weekend with my girlfriend.
Can’t anyone see, I wailed, that this is what’s going on in the Isle of Wight nick? They tell the screws they want to be women, they get a bit of make-up and some breasts to play with and they are then transferred to a women’s prison, where they can spend the rest of their lives being a lesbian. It’s every man’s dream.
To try to calm down a bit, I turned to the BBC for guidance, and there I was told there are 650,000 people living in Britain today with some kind of gender “issue”. Well, I just sat there shaking my head, because the simple fact is: there aren’t.
We are told that one in 10 of the population are gay, that one in 10 have cancer, that one in 10 support Isis, that one in 10 think Corbyn’s doing a good job, that one in 10 have a criminal record, that one in 10 are living below the poverty line and that one in 10 were born elsewhere, and now we are expected to believe that one in 100 are transgender. Well, if that’s so, it means that — according to my maths — fewer than three in 10 are healthy, straight, honest, British people who don’t want their genitals altered. And that’s obviously rubbish.
But then I thought of something. Let’s just say for a moment that one in 1,000 are transgender. Or one in 100,000. Or even that it’s actually just one. Let’s say that there is one person out there who is a woman living in a man’s body, or the other way around.
I started to imagine what life might be like for the poor soul. It would be dreadful. Absolutely awful. And all they seem to want to make their life better is a third gender option box on official documents. That’s not really the end of the world for everyone else, is it?

my condolences to Carrie btw (or the todger at least)

and for what's its worth I read entire Clarkson article (ALi posted)

I can't see much that is any more offensive than the usual stuff he comes out with

the thing with Clarkson his - and what I think makes him such a *** is not what he says, yes he's boorish with views stuck in the 50's much like my Father, who during an Xmas lunch, used the term "mongrel" to describe a person with downs syndrome (he simply does not know any better)

no with Clarkson - I suspect he is a MASSIVE hypocrite, I suspect that if someone planned to build a high speed road outside his house - or increase the speed limit in his village etc etc

he would be right at the top of the barricades

in some ways evangelical scientism is as dangerous and alienating as evangelical religion

And He said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation."