A couple of years ago the Daily Mail did a long flattering article on James “Jan” Morris, the famous pioneering dick-remover.

While Jan was feted around the world for her exquisitely warm and vivid prose, her sense of romanticism, her ground-breaking travel books, for being the first to report that Edmund Hillary had reached the top of Everest in 1953, and for her courage and conviction in embracing the ‘real Jan’ in her pioneering transition from male to female — at home she was rather different.

According to [his youngest child] Suki, who yesterday published an excoriating account of Jan’s appalling parenting in the Sunday Times, her famous parent was selfish, neglectful, sexist and deeply unkind.

Huh. Well you know what? That’s a deal-breaker. That’s four things that no parent should be – that’s a list of four qualities that make their owner a really terrible person to raise a child. It means the person is incapable of giving the child what it needs. If you’re like that, don’t have children at all.

But perhaps her worst crime was being so unforgivably blind to the impact of her 1972 sex-change operation — at a Casablanca hospital, by a dashing young French surgeon called Dr Georges Burou — on those closest to her.

There again – that’s not some minor flaw, it’s a crime against his children.

Jan’s career was already flying at this stage. But her sex change simply magnified her fame. And the demands placed on her by others. Which was fine by her, because she loved to be busy.

‘Three-quarters of the time, I was abroad: wandering around, having a marvellous time,’ she admitted in an interview with the Financial Times in 2018. Even when she was at home with Elizabeth and the children, she’d be glued to her typewriter writing at least 3,000 words a day — even on Christmas Day.

‘My chief fault is an utter self-centredness. It hasn’t always been good,’ she once declared.

That’s not just a “fault”; it’s a disqualification. If you’re utterly self-centered you need to leave other people mostly alone. If you’re utterly self-centered you absolutely should not be in close relationships where the other person expects some affection and attention and the like.

The whoopdedo about his being trans doesn’t even matter; the problem is that he’s the kind of person who decides to “change sex” despite the fact that he has four kids and a wife. Being trans seems to be completely inseparable from being utterly self-centered, and that’s a bad quality to have.