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When I wrote about the hijacking of childhood by the trans lobby last month – and lamented the knee-jerk reactions of an education system too scared to question its agenda — the reader response was the greatest and most impassioned I’ve had in 13 years at this paper. The letters and emails came from men and women young and old, gay, straight and trans — and almost all zoomed in on the following quote from Dr Kate Godfrey-Faussett. Reacting to the revelation that in one British school where a whopping 17 pupils were changing gender and almost all had turned out to be autistic, the British Chartered Psychologist described what was going on as “state-sanctioned child abuse.”

It’s worth noting that not one of the Telegraph readers who wrote to me dismissed this as hyperbole. Not even those who admitted to having spent “a lifetime trapped in the wrong body” and were “grateful” for the medical advances that meant people no longer had to. Because much as the trans lobby likes to muddy the argument by declaring us all “transphobic,” that simply isn’t true. Let people decide what’s right for them when they’re adults, was the general consensus.

And I’d hope most fair-minded people would understand that the whole different strokes conversation does need to be had with kids. Certainly we’d all agree with the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health’s statement that “it’s helpful to children to learn the meaning of terms such as lesbian, gay and bisexual.” But at the right time. Every parent knows how crucial timing is. And if anyone tries to tell me that primary schoolchildren are of sound and rational mind I shall point them in the direction of my daughter, who currently identifies so vehemently with a superheroine ladybird named Ladybug that she’d have the vile synthetic, highly flammable red and black-spotted onesie she refuses to take off surgically adhered to her body given half a chance. Will she still be wearing that onesie next month though? Next week would be pushing it. But we’re not allowed to talk about fads. Fads are belittling to these fiercely progressive little humans whose innate, superior knowledge can’t be questioned.