Among all the complex social issues of our age, there is nothing more emotive, incendiary or toxic than the subject of ‘trans’.

Nor, it seems, is there any topic which has raced so swiftly up the national agenda. Only five years ago, the word trans had barely been heard of.

Now pages of newspapers are devoted to it – along with never-ending demands for society not just to change the language surrounding it, but to make up the science, too.

Trans may, in years, to turn out to be psychologically or biologically provable. But to date, no meaningful physiological differences have been shown to exist between trans and non-trans people [File photo]

Consider the debate around gay rights. For many people it moved too quickly – but it still took decades to go from acceptance that homosexuality existed to the position where gay marriage was legalised.

By contrast, trans has become something close to a dogma in record time. Conservative Ministers are campaigning to make it easier for people to change their birth certificates and alter their birth sex.

A local authority has issued guidelines suggesting that in order to make transgender children feel more accepted, primary school teachers should tell pupils that ‘all genders’, including boys, can have periods.

Among the crowd madnesses we are going through at the moment, trans has become like a battering ram – as though, perhaps, it is the last thing needed to break down some great patriarchal wall.

One is the way that trans is portrayed in popular culture, especially online. Another is the increasing number of concessions to any and all trans demands by figures in authority. A stock image is used above [File photo]

Above all, it is an issue we appear to have reflected on very little. What and who is trans? What makes someone trans? Are we sure that it even exists as a category?

And if so, are we certain that attempting to turn somebody physically from one sex to another is always possible? Or the best way to deal with this conundrum?

In recent times all sorts of people have been swept up together under the ‘trans’ umbrella, from individuals who occasionally dress as a member of the opposite sex to those who have undergone full-blown gender reassignment surgery.

But the subject has become so bogged down in controversy that dealing with it requires a forensic approach.

Perhaps the best place to start is the part of the debate that is the most fixed and thus the least problematic: the issue of ‘intersex’.

Intersex is a natural phenomenon known to the medical profession for centuries whereby a small percentile of humans are born with ambiguous reproductive organs, or other related biological anomalies.

Persistent Mullerian Duct Syndrome, for instance, is the term for people who are born with male genitalia but who also turn out to have female reproductive organs such as fallopian tubes or even a uterus.

Only five years ago, the word trans had barely been heard of. Now pages of newspapers are devoted to it – along with never-ending demands for society not just to change the language surrounding it, but to make up the science, too [File photo]

Intersex is a perfectly legitimate, sensible and compassionate cause for anyone who cares about human rights to take up. Yet it is striking how rarely this happens, even when trans is in every day’s news.

There is remarkably little understanding of how relatively common intersex is: it has been estimated that in America today, around one in every 2,000 children is born with sexual organs that are indeterminate.

Instead, today’s social justice campaigners tend to home in on the far more difficult aspects of the trans debate (‘I am who I say I am and you can’t prove otherwise’) and run with it, as I will demonstrate.

Transsexualism is another strand in the discussion. Dating back to the post-war period in Europe and America, it concerns a small number of high-profile cases of people who, during this era, had changed from one sex to the other.

One of these was the British writer Jan (formerly James) Morris. Morris, a father of four, had served in the Army in the last days of the Second World War, afterwards working as a foreign correspondent.

His transition into Jan began in the 1960s. Already renowned as an author, James, now Jan, became one of the most famous trans people in the world.

Her 1974 memoir, Conundrum, remains a highly persuasive account of why some people feel a need to transition across the sexes.

In it she describes how she first became aware of feelings of having been ‘born in the wrong body’ at the age of three or four.

The desire to become a woman became stronger with every year, culminating with gender reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972 which left her feeling ‘deliciously clean’ and euphoric.

She freely admits, however, that her decision put severe strains on those around her. Before her operation, she’d had to divorce her wife Elizabeth, although they subsequently remarried in 2008 after same-sex partnerships became legal in the UK.

‘I would not do it for fun,’ says Morris. ‘And if I had been given the choice of a life without such complications I would have taken it.’

Born a boy in 2000, Jazz Jennings began to appear on social media talking about being transgender at the age of six. At the age of seven, the child was interviewed by the American TV host Barbara Walters, who among her other questions asked him who he was attracted to. The promotion of Jennings continued unabated. Jennings is pictured above earlier this year

It is perfectly easy, then, to recognise there are people born intersex, and to understand that there may be some born as one sex who sincerely believe they should be in the body of the other.

What is exceptionally hard – and what we have few means of knowing – is how to navigate the leap beyond biology into personal testimony. Intersex is biologically provable.

Trans may, in years, to turn out to be psychologically or biologically provable. But to date, no meaningful physiological differences have been shown to exist between trans and non-trans people.

This lack of evidence is one reason why some people believe the trans issue is a delusion. And this undertow of suspicion exists even while society as a whole is being encouraged to accept trans people’s claims on their own terms.

In April 2015, the former Olympic athlete and reality TV star Bruce Jenner came out as a trans and revealed his new identity as Caitlyn Jenner. Within weeks she was on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in a cream-coloured corset.

Germaine Greer made a pariah- by girls she won rights for British journalist Julie Bindel has been one of the most consistent and hard-fighting feminists for decades. But in recent years she has fallen victim to the trans tripwire. In the early part of this century, Bindel started to notice that people who had been born men and were now demanding to be regarded, and treated, as women (whether they had had any surgery or not) were all over what had been her area. In 2002, she had been incensed by news that a Vancouver rights tribunal had ruled that a male-to-female transsexual named Kimberley Nixon should be allowed to train as a counsellor for female rape victims. In 2015, Germaine Greer (above) was due to deliver a lecture at Cardiff University. However, a significant number of students didn’t want to hear from the most influential feminist of the late 20th Century Indeed, the tribunal said Vancouver Rape Relief’s refusal to allow Nixon to train for this role had breached her human rights and awarded $7,500 for injury to ‘her dignity’ – the highest such amount it had ever awarded. The decision was later overturned. Bindel let rip in a newspaper, defending the Rape Relief sisters who ‘do not believe a surgically constructed vagina and hormonally grown breasts make you a woman’. She added. ‘For now at least, the law says that to suffer discrimination as a woman you have to be, er, a woman.’ Bindel rounded off her tirade with a flourish: ‘I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s does not make you a man.’ For this phrase in particular, and for the article as a whole, Bindel was going to suffer for the rest of her life. Even a decade later she was forced to cancel an appearance on a panel at Manchester University after dozens of rape and death threats against her were reported to the police. Bindel was not the last feminist to trip the trans wire. In 2015, Germaine Greer was due to deliver a lecture at Cardiff University. However, a significant number of students didn’t want to hear from the most influential feminist of the late 20th Century. Greer’s views on trans issues were, they said, ‘problematic’ and she had demonstrated ‘misogynistic views towards trans women’. Only years earlier, it would have been deemed the height of insanity to dismiss Greer as a misogynist. Yet here they were, claiming that among her crimes was ‘continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether’. In a subsequent TV interview about the controversy Greer said: ‘Apparently people have decided that because I don’t think that post-operative transgender men are women, I’m not to be allowed to talk. I’m not saying that people should not be allowed to go through that procedure. What I’m saying is it doesn’t make them a woman.’ Insulting Greer became a rite of passage for a generation of women who had benefited from her trailblazing. In Cambridge University’s Varsity magazine, Eve Hodgson wrote: ‘Greer is now just an old, white woman who has forced herself into exile. Her comments are irreparably damaging, reflecting a total lack of regard for trans lives.’ It did not stop there. At the London Pride event in 2018 lesbian campaigners spoilt the LGBT party by protesting at what they saw as the transgender takeover of the celebrations. The UK gay press accused these women (‘TERFS’, or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’) of bigotry. And a few weeks later at Manchester Pride, there were reportedly loud cheers when a gay male MC, charmingly, announced that the protesters in London should have been dragged off by their ‘saggy t***’. Advertisement

That year was the one in which trans rights, visibility and demands went mainstream and suddenly Jenner was everywhere. Glamour magazine named her one of its ‘women of the year’.

At the ESPY (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly) awards ceremony, she was presented with trophy for courage and given a standing ovation by an arena full of sports people.

But like everything else in the growing trans story, every fragment and splinter had the potential to take out anybody who had even hesitated before the stampede.

During and after the ESPYs, the American football quarterback Brett Favre was lambasted for not clapping Jenner enthusiastically enough.

Although he had joined the standing ovation for her, he controversially took his seat again before everyone else had sat down, and this was caught on camera.

For this behaviour, the New York Post denounced the culprit’s insufficient enthusiasm with a piece entitled ‘Brett Favre makes the ESPYs uncomfortable for everyone’.

Nobody seemed certain how many seconds of standing ovation was correct to give a trans woman receiving an award for courage.

Some attention to the etiquette in the Soviet Politburo might have helped.

The only lesson unarguably imparted was that if everyone is applauding a trans person, you should make sure you are the last person to resume your seat.

Given this crowd madness, is it surprising so many parents in the US and Britain are beginning to worry about what the next generation is being taught? Or what, in some cases, is already being done?

They worry when they hear the San Francisco-based developmental psychologist Diane Ehrensaft claim that a one-year-old ‘assigned male’ baby who unsnaps a onesie and waves it in a particular way is in fact giving a ‘pre-verbal communication about gender’.

Parents do not rejoice when they read about a nine-year-old drag queen being given a modelling contract with an LGBT fashion company and telling other children in a viral YouTube video: ‘If you wanna be a drag queen and your parents don’t let you, you need new parents.’

And they worry when their child’s school allows anyone who says they are the opposite gender to be recognised and treated as such.

One parent from the north of England described how her 16-year-old daughter came out first as a lesbian and then as trans.

When her father and mother attended a parents’ evening, they discovered that the school had already been using their daughter’s chosen male name and were using male pronouns to describe her.

Advice to schools from the Scottish government is that parents should not be told if their child wishes to change gender.

Elsewhere, its document ‘Supporting Transgender Young People’ suggests pupils should be able to compete in sports in the gender they feel comfortable with, and that parents should not be informed if their child wants to share rooms with members of the opposite sex on school trips.

In other parts of Britain, couples have told of going to parents’ evenings where a parent called their child by the ‘wrong’ gender, only to be told by the teacher: ‘Oh, didn’t you know? Your son/daughter identifies as a girl/boy.’

This happens, by the way, at schools which have to get parental permission to issue a child with aspirin.

Parents are also becoming familiar with the phenomenon known as ‘clustering’.

In 2018, the ‘equality information report’ at one school in Brighton known for its ‘liberal vibe’ had 40 pupils between the ages of 11 and 16 who ‘do not identify as the gender presented at birth’.

A further 36 pupils said they were gender fluid, meaning that they did not identify with their assigned gender at birth ‘all the time’. One effect of all this is that the UK has seen a 700 per cent rise in child referrals to gender clinics in just five years.

Trans campaigners suggest the clustering and the referrals are happening because some are more aware of the possibility they are trans than they would have been a few years ago. But other explanations are at least equally possible.

One is the way that trans is portrayed in popular culture, especially online. Another is the increasing number of concessions to any and all trans demands by figures in authority.

In online culture, it is not at all unusual, for instance, for the taking of hormones to be turned into an absurdly easy and consequence-free exercise. On YouTube, Instagram and other sites, there are countless people who say that they are trans and who push the idea that you might be, too.

A video by Jade Boggess (a female-to-male transsexual) called One Year On Testosterone has had more than half a million YouTube views alone.

Another, by Ryan Jacobs Flores, about the same subject, has more than three million views. In such videos testosterone injections become known as ‘T’ or ‘man juice’.

Some of these people who are transitioning in real time become celebrities in their own right. Not older figures like Caitlyn Jenner, but bright, bubbly new YouTube stars like Jazz Jennings.

Born a boy in 2000, Jennings began to appear on social media talking about being transgender at the age of six.

At the age of seven, the child was interviewed by the American TV host Barbara Walters, who among her other questions asked him who he was attracted to.

The promotion of Jennings continued unabated. At the age of 11 the Oprah Winfrey Network broadcast a documentary on her called I Am Jazz. It is now in its fifth season and continues to make her, her parents and siblings (who all appear on the show) famous and rich.

In recent times all sorts of people have been swept up together under the ‘trans’ umbrella, from individuals who occasionally dress as a member of the opposite sex to those who have undergone full-blown gender reassignment surgery [File photo]

Season five follows Jazz turning 18 and going into her ‘gender confirmation surgery’.

On the trolley, she clicks her fingers sassily and says: ‘Let’s do this.’ The YouTube excerpts alone of I Am Jazz have received millions of views.

But it is not just the element of popular culture in this that is likely to be having an effect. There is also the willing agreement of medical professionals.

On a series like I Am Jazz, it is clear there are medical professionals perfectly happy to do everything they can to help turn somebody who was born a boy into a girl. It is all part of a slide of acceptance which has led the NHS to sign an agreement that its staff will never ‘suppress an individual’s expression of gender identity’.

Despite some healthcare professionals warning about the potential for ‘overdiagnosis and overtreatment’, the assumptions all continue to go in one inexorable direction.

Among the most hard-nosed but likely arguments for an eventual slowing of the current trans stampede is the growing possibility of an avalanche of lawsuits.

Although the UK, including the NHS, has opened itself up to this eventuality, the potential in Britain for successful future legal actions is nothing compared with the US.

Whereas Britain’s health service is struggling to satisfy the increased demand for gender reassignment surgery, in the US there is not merely a movement but a business incentive for pushing this.

Just one of the signs that trans is an area where social demands are starting to attract business opportunities lies in the apparently cavalier way in which trans activists – including some surgeons – are now talking about life-changing surgery.

Take, for example, Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy. Regarded as a leader in her field, she is medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

During her career, Dr Olson-Kennedy has, by her own admission, regularly issued hormones to children as young as 12. And in an article in a recent medical journal, she reveals that a number of girls aged just 13 had been put on cross-sex hormones for under six months before they were given surgery.

Furthermore, she has been publicly critical of the idea of mental health assessments for children who say that they want to change sex.

‘Establishing a therapeutic relationship entails honesty and a sense of safety that can be compromised if young people believe that what they need and deserve (potentially puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery) can be denied them according to the information they provide to the therapist,’ she has said.

Olson-Kennedy is also sceptical about the idea that some 12- or 13-year-olds might not be in a position to make an informed and irreversible choice.

In online culture, it is not at all unusual, for instance, for the taking of hormones to be turned into an absurdly easy and consequence-free exercise. On YouTube, Instagram and other sites, there are countless people who say that they are trans and who push the idea that you might be, too. A stock image is used above [File photo]

And she has emphasised that: ‘When we make a decision to move forward with medical intervention, either puberty suppressants, or cross-sex hormones, the most important person we consider in that decision-making is the child – the young person.’

Questions about the age at which people who believe they are in the wrong body should be allowed to access drugs or surgery are worth contesting deeply.

Not least because there is growing awareness of children who may have identified as having gender dysphoria but who then grow out of it – many of them to become gay.

This heaps problem upon problem. Nobody likes recalling the time when gay people were told ‘it’s just a phase’, but what if trans is (even on occasion) just a phase? And what if that phase is realised only too late?

These questions are not primarily ‘transphobic’ but rather child-centric, and the attempt to medicalise such concern has made the trans tripwire far uglier than it needs to be.

People expressing concern about the trans issue may not, in fact, be ‘denying the existence of trans people’ or claiming that they should be treated as second-class citizens, let alone (the most catastrophising claim of all) causing trans people to consider suicide.

They may simply be urging caution about something which has not remotely been worked out yet – and which is, currently, irreversible. And what, in this crazy world, is the earthly harm in that?

©Douglas Murray, 2019

The Madness Of Crowds, by Douglas Murray, is published by Bloomsbury Continuum on Tuesday at £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until September 30. To order, call 01603 648155 or go to mailshop.co.uk