Starbucks in the UK is selling a new “cookie”:

Starbucks have come up with this particular tooth-rotter in the name of something they present sweetly. Purchase a “mermaids cookie” and a full 50p will be given by Starbucks to the charity Mermaids. So sweet. So innocent. Or sickening. Depending what you know.

Also on what you wonder. I wonder if Starbucks has ever given 50p per cookie to a feminist group.

Personally I view Mermaids as one of the most sinister charitable organisations in the UK. Starbucks simply says that the group supports “young transgender and gender diverse people and their families”. The undrinkable coffee chain claims that all those 50 pences will pay to support a helpline for such people. In fact everything that Mermaids pushes is deeply controversial and with implications which need to be properly interrogated.

Like wtf “gender diverse” is supposed to mean, for a start, and why people who are it need a helpline.

People do not question the new orthodoxy. If someone says that certain children should be given puberty blockers so that they can transition into approximations of the opposite sex who are we to question it?

So it is fitting that this week the news emerged of a 13-year-old girl applying for a judicial review against Oxfordshire County Council. The cause is the council’s ‘Trans Inclusion Toolkit for Schools 2019’ which Oxfordshire County Council has given to more than 300 schools in the area.

Its advice says – among other things – that girls like the girl known only as ‘Miss A’ should share changing rooms, lavatories and even residential dormitories on school trips with any boy who identifies as a girl.

And it’s not so much “should” as “should/will be required to.” The idea is not that it should be optional. Pretend the boy in the next bunk is a girl or stay home.

The fact that multinationals like Starbucks can so easily jump on board with the agenda that Mermaids is pushing is just the latest demonstration of how fast this new orthodoxy is being accepted.

Accepted and pushed on everyone else. Accepted and protected via the demonization of all dissenters. Accepted and cheered, accepted and glorified, accepted and treated as sacred.

Meanwhile parents and others who object to this agenda are wrongly portrayed as backwards and bigoted: people who are trying either to make people murder trans people or make trans people kill themselves. Thus with the language of catastrophism is an actual catastrophe mainstreamed into society.

I disagree with Douglas Murray on most things, but not on this one.