Good grief.

Men are in their prime forever, women only for a few years. You don’t like it? Talk to the science.

The CNN anchor Don Lemon will return to his regular morning-show role on Wednesday, the network announced late Monday night, after an uproar over a series of comments he made on the air last week about women and aging.

Women do it earlier and worse. That’s just how it is; look it up!

Mr. Lemon will be absent from Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” where he last appeared on Thursday, shortly after asserting on the air that Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate, “isn’t in her prime, sorry.” He went on to say that “a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”

“Prime” meaning what? Clearly fuckability, but presidential candidates aren’t candidates for fucking, they’re candidates for political office.

After his co-anchor Poppy Harlow pushed back, Mr. Lemon responded, “I’m just saying what the facts are,” and urged her to “Google it.”

Ah yes the facts – the facts that men don’t want to fuck women over 39. What else do you need to know?

Kenan Malik has a review in the Guardian of a book about colonialism – the “hey it wasn’t that bad” kind of book about colonialism.

In 1857, in the wake of the Indian mutiny, a British officer, Lt George Cracklow, described in a letter home what happened to captured rebels. “The prisoners were marched up to the guns… and lashed to the muzzles,” he wrote. “The guns exploded… I could hardly see for the smoke for about 2 seconds when down came something with a thud about 5 yards from me. This was the head and neck of one of the men… On each side of the guns, about 10 yards, lay the arms torn out at the shoulders.”

Nigel Biggar, in his new history of British colonialism, acknowledges the brutality of Britain’s response to the mutiny but argues that the use of violence is “essential” to any state, as is “the deterrence of others through fear”. He adds: “Whatever one thinks of ‘blowing from a gun’ as a method of execution, it was not indiscriminate, insofar as the victim had been judged guilty of some crime.”

Cool cool cool. Torture people to death for jaywalking as long as the people have been judged guilty of jaywalking.

The director of Oxford University’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, Biggar has caused waves in recent years with his call for a moral reappraisal of colonialism. Contemporary historians, he believes, have made us feel too guilty about Britain’s colonial past. We need to recognise not just the bad but also the good of empire. Colonialism is his attempt to create such a moral balance sheet.

If the sentence quoted is typical, he’s going about it the wrong way!

Biggar’s response to the treatment of Indian rebels exemplifies his approach. One might have thought that a professor of theology would have paused before attempting to find moral exculpation for such savage punishment. Biggar’s approach, however, is wherever possible to find good motives behind every colonial act – he portrays racial segregation, for example, as the product not of racism but of the desire “to protect native peoples from harmful encounters with settlers”. And where it proves impossible to locate a nugget of good, he seeks instead to find exonerating circumstances for the bad.

That kind of thing is a useful exercise in legal training, philosophy, and the like, but it has its problems.

Biggar claims that the empire wasn’t racist, and Kenan provides examples illustrating how absurd that is.

The Liberal politician Charles Wentworth Dilke’s claim that “nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labour of eastern peoples” was far closer to the reality of British perceptions than Biggar’s wishful account. As one-time prime minister Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, asked: “What is empire but the predominance of race?”

…

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Colonialism is that, for all the claims to be a “moral reckoning”, moral questions are rarely taken seriously. Consider the discussion of Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1834, for which slave owners received total compensation of £20m (about £16bn today).

The slaves, however, received total compensation of £0.

Biggar seems not to recognise as a moral issue the fact that while slave owners received reparations, slaves themselves did not. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, Biggar imagines that freed slaves continued working on the old plantations not out of economic necessity, having been deprived of all resources, but because of the generosity of former masters in providing housing and food.

That’s exactly how it played out in the US after the Civil War, too.

They translate.

It’s not just the “reactionary” bit that’s a translation – look at what else Caro S. translated. Kenan’s “a group of black lesbian militants” becomes “Black queer feminist socialist[s].” “Lesbian” is whisked out of sight to be replaced with the vastly more progressive and enlightened “queer”…

Republican Representative from Georgia.

A national divorce is it. Like the one Georgia and South Carolina attempted in 1860? That went well.

Originally a comment by Sastra on Hoo yoo aw.

It’s turning into a vicious cycle. Children who identify as trans are encouraged to violate boundaries and use the bathrooms, showers, sports teams, etc that they feel “comfortable” in. There are then people (including other children) who resist this and some of them do so violently, say by beating up a “trans girl” in the girls’ locker room. It’s safe to say that in that particular situation the catalyst wasn’t that a boy was behaving in an effeminate manner, but that a trans-identified male was in the girls’ locker room. They were attacked “for being trans.”

Yet they wouldn’t have been attacked if they hadn’t been where they shouldn’t. This recognition of truth sounds like victim-blaming and an excuse for violence. It’s not. They shouldn’t have been attacked regardless. But here we have adults who have created a situation which involves passive aggression by the future victim of active aggression. Denying that the first part is aggression is part of the setup. The children are being used in a rescue drama.

Again with the childish bee whoo yoo ahhh.

In what sense does everybody “deserves to feel safe to be themselves”?

Does Andrew Tate deserve to feel safe to be himself, including threatening and assaulting women?

Does Wayne Couzens deserve to feel safe to be himself, including falsely arresting a woman, raping her, and murdering her?

Does Donald Trump deserve to feel safe (including from arrest, trial, sentencing) to be himself, including sedition, treason, corruption, sadism, fraud, lies, bullying, theft, revenge, xenophobia, incompetence, dereliction of duty?

The slogan sounds nice, but then if you think about it for even a second it becomes apparent how stupid it is.

The ACLU is still beating the silly drum.

Imagine being a kid and watching adults in positions of power attack your right to be who you are and threaten your family, health, safety, and life.

Imagine being the ACLU and wording your calls for support in such a sloppy deceptive way. Nobody is attacking “trans kids'” right to be who they are. Some people are resisting the ideology that tells trans kids to alter their bodies in an effort to be who they are not. Men can’t become women any more than humans can become dolphins. Nobody is threatening the family, health, safety, and life of “trans kids.” Some people are trying to rescue them from this poisonous destructive ideology.

What is “TRANS YOUTH BELONG” supposed to mean? Nobody is trying to exile them or shun them. Some of us question some of their claims about themselves, that’s all. If ACLU staff claimed to be dolphins we would question them too, but that’s not the same thing as trying to exile or shun them.

The trans cult has made the ACLU so childish. It’s cringey.

An open letter from Dr Neil MacFarlane BA MBBS MA MRCPsych to the police harassing Kellie-Jay Keene:

I write to express my concern at what appears to be the oppressive pursuit of Ms Keen by Sussex Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, aided by yourselves. If Ms Keen is charged with any offence it is my intention to offer to provide a supportive pro bono expert witness statement, and to give evidence in person at any trial. I will also offer to provide similar support for any complaint that Ms Keen makes against Police and/or the CPS.

I have been a GMC registered medical practitioner since 1986, and a registered specialist in psychiatry since 2002. I have been an NHS consultant and worked in private practice. I have specialist training and experience in developmental psychiatry, which is directly relevant to Ms Keen’s campaigning against poorly evidenced “transgender” medical interventions. I also have experience in working with personality disordered and offender patients (including sex offenders for whom I was clinically responsible), and was an approved specialist under the Mental Health Act: that experience is relevant to Ms Keen’s campaigning for women’s dignity and safety.

I represent (because I was elected to a position within the Royal College of Psychiatrists on an election statement critical of transgenderism) the substantial number of psychiatrists who dissent from the official “transgender” policy of our professional body.

I have followed Ms Keen’s campaigning and studied several hours of her Youtube videos, including footage of what I understand to be her words spoken in Brighton last September, which have attracted complaints. I have had dialogues with individuals who have worked with her, and I have studied the objections of her critics.

In my opinion Ms Keen’s views and opinions have a strong basis in fact, and are substantially based on her own direct experience of interactions with trans identified people, particularly men. Her views are also informed by the opinions of respected professionals and academics such as the pioneering Canadian psychologist Ray Blanchard.

Ms Keen’s campaigning is reasonable and responsible, and it has been a substantial part of and influence on wider “gender-critical” campaigning of recent years, which has led to a major government review on “gender dysphoria” services for children and young people (and the closure of the leading NHS clinic), as well as the recent changes in prison policy in Scotland. Her use of language such as “men in dresses” and “fetishists” has been a proportionate means to create public interest in these issues. She does not “hate” trans-identified people: she believes their lives would be better if they desisted from such behaviours. I and many other mental health professionals substantially agree. I also agree that she is right to be concerned about links between transgenderism and child abuse.

In the context of the Wayne Couzens and David Carrick cases, the oppressive pursuit of Ms Keen risks further undermining trust in the police and the CPS, especially among women. Put simply, some of the decisions taken in her case may have been motivated by misogyny. In my opinion the belief, widespread among gender-critical campaigners, that Stonewall and many of its key supporters are substantially motivated by misogyny, is well founded. It seems very likely that Stonewall and related groups have played a key role in bringing forward the complaints against her.

This letter will be openly published. I intend to be part of the supportive protest outside Trowbridge Police Station, planned for 23^rd February.

Yours sincerely

Dr Neil MacFarlane

There.

J.A. alerted us to a back and forth between a philosopher and a biologist a few days ago. Here’s how it ended on day one:

Here’s how a new chapter started yesterday:

Earth. How about the earth – it definitely predates societies, because otherwise where would the societies have been? No earth, no societies, yeah? Ok, so the earth. Right. Is the earth a social construct? Hell yes! Look at globes! And photos in National Geographic. Therefore, trans women are women. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Bogardus continues:

By the way, it doesn’t have to be Saturn’s rings. Or the earth.

It’s just more grabby if you replace “something” (or the ever-popular X) with planetary rings, or the earth.

It’s probably an exercise in futility.

In schools across Britain, educators are mobilizing to fight back against [Andrew] Tate’s messages, belatedly realizing the outsize influence he has among their students. A British-American former kickboxer, Mr. Tate gained a following of millions with videos glorifying wealth and a particularly virulent brand of male chauvinism, before being barred last summer from many mainstream social media sites.

It’s nice that they’re mobilizing, but I think it’s hopeless. They’re the schools, and Tate is the opposite. Schools, parents, adults, females – it’s all the same thing. It’s all duty, respectability, boredom, obedience. Nah we’ll take the other side thanks.

Believing that schools are a microcosm of society — and a preview of its future — educators said it was crucial to target Mr. Tate’s influence early. Since last fall, principals have sent letters to parents warning of his reach, and Britain’s education secretary has said that influencers like Mr. Tate could reverse the progress made in countering sexism.

What progress? There hasn’t been that much. Some, but it’s always a battle. We certainly have never reached the sunlit uplands where contempt for women is a thing of the past.

British schools were already reckoning with what officials have recognized as an endemic culture of sexual harassment of students, leaving both young girls and boys feeling victimized and often unsure of the rules of interaction. Now, educators unexpectedly find themselves spending class time discussing Mr. Tate rather than their lessons.

“I am sad that I have taken up important curriculum time to talk about Andrew Tate,” said Chloe Stanton, an English teacher in East London. “But women have to fight enough in society without this type of attitude to deal with.”

Indeed, but teachers talking about it aren’t going to make a dent. I wish they could, but they can’t.

In recent months, Ms. Stanton said, students have started bringing up Mr. Tate in class. They extol his wealth and fast cars. And for the first time in her 20 years of teaching, her 11- to 16-year-old students have challenged her for working and asked if she had her husband’s permission.

She has heard students talk casually about rape. “As the only woman in the room, I felt uncomfortable,” she said. Once, a student asked her if she was going to cry. At home, even her own three sons seemed to defend Mr. Tate.

“He is brainwashing a generation of boys, and it’s very frightening,” she said. “They seem to think he is right. He’s right because he’s rich.”

Can we all just be hermits? Let’s do that.

Another fantasy idenniny unmasked:

Members of the American Friends Service Committee, a prominent Quaker organization known for its progressive values and social justice advocacy in the U.S. and abroad, have raised an alarm about a woman holding a leadership position within the organization who they say has misrepresented her ethnic background for years and who they fear may be working on behalf of groups seeking to undermine their organization.

Raquel Evita Saraswati, a Muslim activist who for years has encouraged people to believe that she is a woman of color, including Latina as well as of South Asian and Arab descent, is the AFSC’s chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer, a senior position that gives her access to the files of dozens of the organization’s staff and volunteers. But Saraswati, who was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel, is not a person of color, according to her mother, Carol Perone.

It’s a tad greedy, pretending to be so many DiVerse idenninies that you’re not. Latina and South Asian and Arab – come on.

Saraswati, her mother added, is of British, German, and Italian descent — not Latina, South Asian, or Arab. “I’m as white as the driven snow and so is she,” added Perone.

But she’s brown in her soul. Her lived experience is brown. She started speaking a mix of Spanish, Arabic, and Urdu when she was just a tiny child.

Perone noted that her daughter converted to Islam in high school and that at some point she seemed to have felt the need to portray herself as having a different ethnic identity.

Well that’s high school for ya.

Oskar Pierre Castro, a human resources professional who participated in the search committee to fill Sarawati’s position, told The Intercept that she had presented herself as a “queer, Muslim, multiethnic woman.”

In other words she presented herself as Interesting.

“It really touched all the points,” said Castro, who works for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a Quaker group that frequently partners with the AFSC, and who was involved in the search along with AFSC staff members. He added that he had been impressed by Saraswati’s credentials and charm and that he thought she would be a good fit for the diversity and inclusion role because “it seemed that there was an element of lived experience and understanding because of the lived experience, not just the academic and extra training that come with being in a position where you are an equity and inclusion practitioner.”

And the best part is you get to tick a whole bunch of boxes with just this one person.

Castro added, “In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim, it’s a woman, all these things, and someone who seemed to get it. I definitely feel conned. … I feel deceived.”

Why was he excited about ticking the Muslim box? Would he be excited about ticking the fundamentalist Protestant box, or the strict Catholic box? Conservative religions are conservative, whether they’re “diverse” or not. “Saraswati” wears hijab while women in Iran and Afghanistan are beaten up, imprisoned, tortured, killed for refusing to wear it. Why are organizations that consider themselves progressive excited to sign up a woman wearing hijab (along with heavy makeup, sculpted eyebrows, and earrings)?

The revelation that Saraswati appears to have created a false impression about her ethnic background has roiled the AFSC.

Where “created a false impression”=”lied.”

H/t Sackbut

Does Labour have a women problem? Ooooooooooooooh that’s a tough one, I dunno, do we think it does?

Originally a comment by Artymorty on A good teacher wouldn’t do this.

There’s no doubt that it’s a sexual fetish. We can even speculate about its roots, because there’s quite a lot we know about this kind of fetish in men. It’s likely that in his childhood, as his sexuality was undergoing its first spurts of hormonal awakening, he suddenly discovered a great interest in the breasts of one of his schoolteachers. A schoolboy-crushing-on-schoolteacher’s-breasts narrative became a fetishistic fantasy that never went away for him, and because he’s got the “sex-role-reversal” glitch that drives most crossdressing straight men, he’s now fixated on playing out the role of the teacher with the breasts that will captivate the student. In his case, he’s gotta make the “breasts” as big and captivating as he possibly can. And he seems to be completely out of control, like an addict gone off the deep end. He’s taken his hands off the wheel and the brake lines have been cut. (Sorry, I’m mixing my metaphors again!) I know it’s unpleasant to think about it. Because it’s unpleasant! He’s very much enacting his sexual fantasies in a room full of children. It’s truly awful. He should be fired, criminally charged, and forced to get therapy.

But I’m equally furious at the school board. Do they really not know that this is a fetish? Or are they just pretending not to know? Do they think culture war politics override the safety of the students? It enrages me. I know (or knew, as they’ve mostly abandoned me by now) far too many people who would look at this story and see it as nothing but an unpleasant culture-war episode. They see the fetishistic abuser teacher and all they can think is, “Boy, those evil MAGA monsters from the bad tribe are gonna use this to score points against the vulnerable trans people in our good progressive tribe” and then they just try and put it out of their minds (because no one likes to dwell on the times when their enemy got the upper hand and scored a hit) and completely forget about the part with the ACTUAL REAL LIVE KIDS getting actually harmed by this asshole.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on It’s a disguise.

So wearing it in classroom settings in order to force the participation of minors legally required to be in school (a captive audience) is the whole point. The discomfort and distress of reliably accessible gatherings of kids, over whom he excercizes authority (granted him by people who could easily take it away), is the whole point of the operation. If this core, essential, personal identity is so integral to his being, why does he drop it as soon as he’s away from an audience? Call me a closed-minded transphobe, but this looks a lot more like public performance of a fetish than the right to personal expression of a “legitimate” gender identity (whatever that might be). If this isn’t the parading of a fetishistic fantasy, how are we supposed to tell the difference between some sick kinkster getting his jollies at the expense of minors in his charge whom he’s supposed to be teaching, and a genuine trans identity arising from dysphoria? How would his defenders have us distinguish truly marginalized and victimized trans identified males (like him, they would claim) from the opportunistic perverts taking advantage of the current (and one hopes, fleeting) concern for trans “rights?” Will there be appeals to some kind of “gender fluidity?” “Pippa” Bunce trolled the business world; this guy’s fucking around with children. But we can’t just stop there. What difference would his purported “gender identity” make to the acceptability of this behaviour in the classroom? None. Even if he’s “really trans,” what he’s doing is disturbing, disrespectful, and inappropriate, and his “rights” should not override the requirements for safety, dignity and professionalism that one expects to be incumbent on all teachers.

A “dress code” is not going to solve this if it still allows this teacher to wear huge fake tits. What if he started wearing a wig of dreadlocks and spoke in a crude Rasta accent? What if he suddenly sported woven-in sidelocks and claimed to be an Orthodox Jew? This charade of womanface of his is at least as repellent and deserving of censure and resistance as these Black and Jewish hypothetical examples. How long would the school board or teachers’ union support this guy if he’d chosen to appropriate either of those “identities”? He’d be let go. In a flash. And rightly so. But come to work in a shameful, humiliating, degrading get-up that mocks women and girls, and the board and the union defend you and make excuses as to why this is somehow to be accepted and tolerated. Because of Holy Precious Gender Identity.

So what other fetishes are the school board (and union) prepared to accommodate? What if a teacher showed up in baby clothes and diapers, demanding he (let’s just go with the fact that it’s gonna be men that try to pull this shit, shall we?) be changed and fed and cuddled by his students? Would that fly? What if he claimed to be a girl baby, making him trans? They’re happy enough surrendering access to children to the imposture of some wearing huge prosthetic breasts, why would they object to someone dressed up in cute baby clothes?

Why is the school board so desperate to find some accommodation with this man, to allow him to remain in the classroom? He can’t be a good teacher because a good teacher wouldn’t do this. A good teacher would not sacrifice his or her students’ needs, welfare, and dignity in the service of his or her selfish and inappropriatedesires. Teachers taking sexual advantage of students are fired and sometimes arrested. This fetishist doesn’t have to touch a single pupil, but he is forcing a grotesque, sexualized display on his students, and anyone else he comes into contact with in the school. Why is the board so reluctant to deprive this clearly disturbed man of its school property as a platform and venue for his degrading, fetishistic performance? The support of the union is unlikely going to be recalled in the years to come as a shining example of labour activism.

They should fire this guy’s ass and welcome the resulting lawsuit. Buy out his contract and show him the door. Take away his parking space. Whatever. I don’t really care how they do it, but they have to GET HIM OUT OF THE CLASSROOM. He has shown he does not deserve to be there. He is an impediment to learning, and is harming the well-being and dignity of everyone he forces himself upon. If he really wants to dress up like that, he can do it on his own time (of which he’ll have lots more), and he can round up his own audiences victims, who will no longer be offered to him by the classfull, but will consist of people who can walk (or run) away from him without being written up for truancy. I know it’s a become a cliche, but Who will think about the children? Their interests and safety should be paramount in this. If this question does not cross the minds of a GODDAMN SCHOOL BOARD, then maybe they should just resign and go home.

It turns out that the gigantic breasts guy doesn’t wear them as part of his “transition”; it turns out he wears them some of the time, to…make a point? Surprise the crows? Exercise those hard to reach muscles?

While parents have raged about transgender teacher Kayla Lemieux being allowed to wear Z-cup prosthetics in front of students, the shop teacher was spotted ditching the controversial fetishistic fashion after work and stepping out in public dressed as a man.

…

The teacher — who until a few years ago went by the name Kerry — left Ontario’s Oakville Trafalgar High School this week wearing the gigantic breasts, a blond wig and glasses, but it wasn’t long until the cartoonish clothing came off.

After shopping at a department store and pet supplies shop dressed as a woman, Lemieux headed home to get changed and emerged dressed as a man 30 minutes later. 

Lemieux then spent the afternoon in public wearing men’s sweatpants, trainers, a gray T-shirt and a navy puffer vest without breasts, makeup, glasses or wig.

The Post includes a photo. It’s funny because it’s not even a sort of meeting in the middle – not purple sweat pants and a red T-shirt and a magenta puffer vest, but all manly drab boring colors. No flamboyance, no camp, no hint of anything even slightly girly, just grey, grey, and dark blue. Mind you the trainers have little splashes of yellow toward the back. Oooh, daring.

Gretchen Felker-Martin is on the job again.

A renowned transgender horror author who signed a letter last week condemning The New York Times’s coverage of trans issues has tweeted that she wants to slit J.K. Rowling‘s throat.

Gretchen Felker-Martin named a series of writers she accused of transphobia – including Rowling – in a tweet sent on February 12. She added: ‘If they all had one throat, man.’

…

Another writer she railed against, journalist Jesse Singal, condemned Felker-Martin for making the death threat, and said she has a long history of making threats of violence.

In Felker-Martin’s debut novel, Manhunt, published in February 2022, Rowling is murdered by being burned alive. 

That’s how we know how progressive this movement is – publicly fantasizing about torturing people to death.

The UN’s 2022 report on gender equality:

The latest available Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 data show that the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030.

Or any other date.

COVID-19 and the backlash against women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are further diminishing the outlook for gender equality. Violence against women remains high; global health, climate, and humanitarian crises have further increased risks of violence, especially for the most vulnerable women and girls; and women feel more unsafe than they did before the pandemic. Women’s representation in positions of power and decision-making remains below parity.

Also (which they don’t say) women’s rights are being further eroded by gender ideology and all that goes with it.

So sometimes the UN does know which people are women. Unless there’s an unspoken “including/especially trans women” here.

News out of Florida:

Art lovers in Miami looked on in horror on Thursday night, when a collector accidentally knocked a $42,000 (£34,870) sculpture by US pop artist Jeff Koons to the ground.

Oh no, $42,000 gone, just like that!

The statue – one of Koons’ iconic Dog Balloons – smashed into tiny shards, and had to be swept into dustpans by gallery staff.

…

Luckily for the woman, the piece is covered by insurance, Bénédicte Caluch, an art advisor with Bel-Air Fine Art galleries which represents the sculpture, said.

Whew, that’s a relief!

But what I want to know is, in what sense was the piece actually “worth” 42k?

In the sense that someone might be willing to pay that for it, and the sense that Koons and/or people who market his work think people will be willing to pay that for it.

Fortunately however there are lots of them, and I daresay Koons could just whip up another one, or a dozen more, if he thought there weren’t enough now.

The sculpture was part of a limited edition which has now shrunk from 799 to 798.

A limited edition. What’s a limited edition? A device to drive the price up.

“That’s a good thing for the collectors,” Mr Boero told the Times, laughing.

Hahaha yeah. So really this is a happy story!

All the more so because hey, people want to buy the smashed balloon dog.

Despite [its] being shattered into thousands of pieces, there is still interest in buying the destroyed sculpture.

Mr Gamson offered to buy it there and then because, as he said on his Instagram account, “it has a really cool story”.

Will the insurance company still have to shell out 42k?

The usual apologies for the Mail, but it reports that medical people are being told to talk in Gender Neutral unless told otherwise. 1% of people claim to be Gender Interesting so everyone has to be confused by doctors and nurses carefully avoiding calling them women or men.

Steve Barclay last night ordered an urgent investigation into new guidelines that tell NHS staff to treat all patients as gender-neutral.

Nobody is gender-neutral, so it’s bonkers to treat patients as gender-neutral because a few wannabe originals pretend they’re neither women nor men.

It instructs doctors and nurses not to use phrases such as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ or ‘he’ and ‘she’ until a patient has confirmed their gender identity.

Mind you, “Mrs” is the wrong word to use in the absence of information, while “Mr” isn’t. Surely the Mail understands that after what’s it been now? Half a century? “Mr” works for all adult males and assumes nothing; “Mrs” of course is specific and assumes marital status. The implications of that discrepancy are indeed insulting (they go back to coverture), so yeah, don’t call a woman Mrs unless she tells you to.

The 16-page document features a foreword by Dr Michael Brady, national adviser for LGBT health at NHS England, who describes it as a ‘must read’ for all health and social care professionals.

Oh stop. Call L Ms; call G Mr; problem solved; no need to read boring guidelines for something so basic.

It doesn’t though. It doesn’t ensure that people feel respected. On the contrary. I would feel enraged if a medical person did that to me.