Wrestling with your gender identity? Me neither. But those who are unhappy either with the gender they were born into, or with the whole male-female divide, are very much centre stage right now.

Just last week I was filling in an online form from Mind, the mental health charity, which is working with my 11-year-old daughter’s school on its policies for parents, staff and pupils. Question 3, are you Male or Female, is followed by a third option – Another: please specify.

I was tempted to identify as Mermaid, on the basis that this is non-binary, but thought better of it. The fourth question asked: Have you ever identified as transgender, now or in the past? I’ve gone to confession all my life but have never faced anything as intrusive as this.

Maria Miller, chairwoman of the women and equalities committee, who recommended passing the Gender Recognition Bill into law, which would allow anyone to identify as a different gender without so much as a doctor’s certificate

That’s the thing, though. Questions that never actually occurred to us are now presented as routine.

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Left to ourselves, without any prompting from activists or officialdom, how many of us, let alone our children, would actually see our gender as an issue? My own guess is, vanishingly few.

But that didn’t stop the Government – which obviously hasn’t enough to do right now – from launching a grand consultation about whether the law on gender recognition should be liberalised.

Now the golden rule in politics is: never consult on anything to which you don’t know the outcome before you start. So, I guess that means the Government has already made its mind up to pass the Gender Recognition Bill into law, which would allow anyone to identify as a different gender without so much as a doctor’s certificate, let alone surgery.

Transgender charity Mermaids consulted on the three-part ITV programme, Butterfly, starring Anna Friel but Transgender Trend charity is concerned the new show is 'one-sided narrative' that may encourage children to swap gender

That’s right: you simply declare that your sex at birth is different from the one you feel, and your passport and birth and marriage certificates can be amended accordingly.

It’s not just the Tories who are tying themselves in knots here. This paper reports today on an ugly spat in the Labour Party between a transgender activist born as male and a party official, and another trans member, about the wisdom of passing the Gender Recognition Bill.

The activist tweeted an extremely offensive remark to the member during the row and a complaint was made to Labour HQ about it.

The member was concerned about an issue raised by a Girl Guide leader recently, about how a change in the law might affect the safety of young guides.

For instance, if a biological man identifying as a woman becomes a Guide leader with responsibility for young girls on expeditions, what might happen?

Former girl guides leader Helen Watts near her west London home. Watts was sacked after clashing with guide leadership over transgender rights

Good question, to which the response of the Guides was to sack the woman who raised the issue. Labour, for its part, appears to be backing its activist,

Can we get one thing clear? There’s nothing to stop any of us from identifying as whatever we like.

I used to know a former admiral who passed as a woman without the benefit of the law. I have a transvestite friend in Ireland who identifies as Annabelle on his trips to Dublin, and dresses accordingly.

Any of us can identify as man, woman or unicorn, and live our lives accordingly without asking the law to be complicit in a fraud.

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It’s not just that we’re being asked to collude in a legal fiction. It’s that making gender identity an issue in the first place creates confusion, self-doubt and worry in young people – the ones whose mental health we’re so worried about.

And, as feminist groups point out, allowing trans people with penises – otherwise known as men – into women-only spaces compromises women’s safety in prisons or refuges.

The Government’s official consultation closed on Friday. But it has to decide now whether to act on the findings.

So, let’s tell our local MPs what we think. And what I think is that we’re being asked to accept a lie, that gender is all in the mind. People can do what they like. But changing the law to go along with the pretence, that’s another thing altogether.

Dolce & Gabbana has brought out a lipstick range. Lovely colours, fab packaging. But £36? You know things are getting out of hand when one person’s lipstick costs the same as another’s pair of shoes.

Nick Clegg has accepted a job with Facebook

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So, Nick Clegg goes to Silicon Valley as communications head for Facebook to help tech ‘become the servant of progress’.

I know Mr Clegg a bit; he’s a very nice man. But other than niceness, what does he have to offer Mark Zuckerberg?

In my journalistic dealings, I rarely came across anyone with less news sense than Clegg. But if Zuckerberg is out to get a perfectly formed example of the European elite, he’s got his man.

There's something increasingly weird about the way we treat children. On the London Tube the other day, I made my 11-year-old daughter sit on my knee to leave space for an adult to sit down, only to have grown-ups on either side of me offer her their seat. Recently, I saw a sturdy boy of about ten stay put as a feeble man with a crutch boarded a train; it was me who had to ask the child to give up his seat. We've got this all wrong.

Old school justice for graffiti dunce

It’s bad enough to spray-paint graffiti on a wall. It’s that bit worse when you do it in someone else’s country. It’s worse still when you do it on an 800-year-old fortress.

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But Lee Furlong from Liverpool capped all that when he put his name on the Tha Phae gate in Thailand. He couldn’t even spell it right: what the Thais got was ‘Scousse Lee’. Remember that bit in the Life Of Brian where the Romans find an insurgent writing graffiti in bad grammar (Romanes Eunt Domes)? They make him do it 100 times correctly.

When Mr Furlong gets back home, someone should force him to write ‘Scouse’ 20 times on his own wall. That’ll learn him.

A backpacker from Liverpool is facing jail after spraying 'Scousse Lee' on an 800-year-old Thai fortress. Lee Furlong, 23, was caught on CCTV using a can of black spray paint to tag the historic Tha Phae gate in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand

A chick-LIT – sorry, women’s fiction – author, Liane Moriarty, says it’s wrong to describe it thus because ‘women read more than men’. True. But chick-lit is in fact useful shorthand for: rubbish books about relationships written by women.

Let’s learn to talk about death, the NHS says. Younger doctors feel awkward about raising the issue with older patients. There are good and bad ways of doing it, though. When I took my mother to see a consultant in Ireland, we could hear him bellow at another patient through the wall: ‘YOU ARE NOT GOING TO GET BETTER.’

Re ‘murdered’ Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi – reported to have had his fingers cut off one by one. If this is how the Saudis treat dissidents who work for The Washington Post in their consulate in Turkey, imagine what they do to them back home.

Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammad bin Salman. Britain will be under increasing pressure to act against Saudi Arabia after the Gulf kingdom admitted dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed at its Istanbul consulate

Huddersfield… the latest child-grooming scandal, to follow Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale, Derby, Banbury, Telford, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Bristol, Halifax, Keighley, Newcastle.

All of them involved the revolting sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls by men, almost all of them Asian, nearly all from Pakistan.

When the Catholic Church had to address the issue of clerical abuse, it set up an independent commission and instituted reforms to change things. It’s more difficult for whole communities to do the same. But it’s time to try.

What’s the other thing the Huddersfield gang-grooming has in common with all the other gang- grooming (see above)? That’s right. When the girls’ families told police that Asian men were brutalising their daughters, the police did precisely… zero.

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They were more worried about Islamophobia accusations than protecting girls. An idiot police spokesman declared: ‘Lessons have been learned.’ Yeah, right. How about sacking the police chiefs who presided over what looks rather like collusion in rape?