It is a great disappointment to me that my phrases don’t get picked up by other writers and then society in general before ending up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chuck Palahniuk is credited with the use of ‘snowflake’ as a pejorative term, for example, and James Bartholomew claims (despite some evidence to the contrary) to have made up ‘virtue-signalling’. Both are now very familiar and even overused — but mine all get ignored.

I came up with what I thought was a decent neologism while being interviewed by Peter Whittle for his programme So What You’re Saying Is… Peter had been lamenting, as we all do, the endless hierarchy of acquired or claimed victimhoods by people possessing one or another ‘protected characteristic’ and suggested that this could only get worse in the future. I disagreed and told him that I thought we had at last reached ‘peak wank’.

Peak wank is the stage at which society finally says enough is enough, when the intersectional argument breaks down under the weight of its own manifest contradictions and we all cleave instead to a notion of the world as it is, rather than pretending to inhabit a fairy tale concocted by a post-Marxist village idiot. I had high hopes for peak wank: OED neologism of the year for the 2020 edition, I reckoned. ‘Peak wank/Pi:k waenk/. N. A tipping point in society when it can abide no longer the egregious ejaculate being deposited on it by the cretinous left.(R. Liddle 2019.)’ But this is highly unlikely: it has died a death. I rather hoped our own Charles Moore, a great ally, might have used it during his recent Question Time appearance, just to get the phrase out there. Nope. I bet if Carlyle or Burke had coined peak wank, Charles would have used it. I blame my low-born provenance.

But I do think we have reached that state, peak wank, despite the fact that the liberal elite continues to insist that people can identify as any form of victim they so choose and should be given succour, regardless of the realities. And rather wonderfully, I think that tipping point has been reached as a consequence of that most shrill and deranged of campaigns — that of the transgender lobbyists. My evidence for this belief is that almost no people, not even a significant number of transgendered people, go along with their arguments that first, men who identify as women are authentic women, and second, that children should be encouraged to transition as soon as some three-year-old lad says he wishes to go to a party dressed as Goldilocks.

I hear real doubt in the voices of BBC presenters when dealing with this manifest idiocy. They are aware that on our current trajectory we will have destroyed women’s sport, for example, within a decade, given that it is increasingly dominated by men in wigs and with stapled-on breasts. Even the BBC people recognise the danger in that.

And then there is the truly grotesque business being conducted at the Tavistock Clinic in London, where young people have been fed drugs and subjected to surgery because, under the influence of their woke teachers and parents and indeed social workers, they believe they should transition to a different sex, rather than that they are merely in the usual state of pre-adolescent or adolescent confusion. As I have reported before here, a governor has resigned from the Tavistock due to his grave reservations about the treatment imposed upon the kids.

And now the Times, an achingly liberal publication, has revealed that five clinicians at the Tavistock have resigned because the clinic has been approving ‘life-changing medical intervention’ for children and teens ‘without sufficient evidence of its long-term effects’. Lawsuits will follow somewhere down the line, I suspect. It seems highly probable to me that the vast majority of those children who express a wish to transition do so because it is the symptom of much deeper underlying mental health issues. Issues which might be better resolved through counselling or merely the passage of time — and through the immediate removal of this pro-transgendering propaganda which, startlingly, seems to have been swallowed whole by not only the social workers and the teachers, which might be expected, but also by a Conservative government. We will look back at these grotesque medical experiments and shudder, I suspect.

The transgender stuff is the tipping point, because even within the minds of the liberals at the BBC and the Times it looks dodgy — largely on account of the fact that it challenges other previously strongly held intersectional shibboleths which these idiots have also swallowed whole. Many lesbians, for example, object to these medical interventions because they realise that they too might have been subjected to them at an early age — and that if this process continues lesbians might, like the carrier pigeon and Heinz Toast Toppers, become extinct.

And the feminists have skin in the game too, having fought for equal rights for decades only to see men ineptly disguised as women taking their places on all-women short-lists and squatting alongside them, scratching their beards, in ladies’ toilets. But feminists also rightly aver that girls should not be forced to conform to stereotypical notions of what a girl should be — and they do not believe that those who don’t conform would be better off being men. It is an absurd and reductivist agenda.

The thing is, though, once you start to unpick the thread of just one of these intersectional arguments, the whole thing starts to fall apart like a mohair jumper knitted by a blind amputee. It is an edifice built upon wishful thinking and unicorn tears, the whole lot of it. The gender pay gap, colonialism being responsible for Africa’s ineptitude, children doing just as well when they are brought up by single parents or gay parents — all of these are fashionable political positions based upon demonstrable untruths. Once the transgender stuff has fallen, the rest will fall too. Peak wank, I’m telling you.

An earlier version of this article stated that a senior director, rather than a governor, had resigned from the Tavistock Clinic.