Today I appeared on the Jeremy Vine on 5 show in my usual role of “right-wing person you want to hate but secretly agree with”.

Here was the moment that got the most enthusiastic response:

"This gender fluid thing has got completely out of hand." James isn't at all impressed with the idea of non-binary "dames" in panto, or the way gender issues are being taught in some schools. But what do you think about it?@JamesDelingpole | @TheJeremyVine | #jeremyvine pic.twitter.com/K2LJ6JVFNV — Jeremy Vine On 5 (@JeremyVineOn5) December 18, 2018

I wouldn’t be surprised if, even as I type these words, some transgender rights activist group isn’t already plotting how best to destroy my career because “hate speech.” Perhaps like my fellow male chauvinist sexist reactionary pigs Germaine Greer and Jenni Murray — note to U.S. readers: two very prominent feminists who’ve fallen foul of the transgender Gestapo — I’ll end up being “no platformed” at countless universities. Who knows, it’s possible I might never be invited on the BBC ever again. (Thank heavens for Channel 5, eh?)

Yet all I’m doing is stating what almost everyone in the world believes.

What weird, weird times we live in when 99.99 percent of the population still believes that there are only two sexes — male and female — but can scarcely dare say so for fear of falling foul of the T (for Transgender) lobby which has cunningly tacked its agenda on to the LGB (Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual) lobby despite the fact that the two groups’ interests are often antithetical.

And this isn’t paranoia, by the way. As James Kirkup has reported in the Spectator, even MPs who feel strongly that transgender activism is having harmful consequences are afraid to speak out. He cites a ComRes survey in the Sunday Times:

28 per cent of all MPs agree that people should be able to decide their own legal gender without the approval of a doctor; 50 per cent disagree. 59 per cent said that the rise in the number of children presenting as transgender “is a worrying development that has not been properly explained or discussed yet.” 67 per cent said “I am concerned that rules allowing men to self-identify as women and access women-only spaces like prisons and refuges could be exploited by abusive individuals.” MPs are worried. But why haven’t they said so? Why does that ComRes survey constitute real news, filling in quite a large blank in our understanding? What I find most striking about the survey, is what MPs thought of this statement: “I feel I can speak freely on transgender issues without undue fear of social media attacks or being accused of transphobia.” Only 33 per cent of MPs agreed. 54 per cent disagreed. In other words, the majority of MPs do not feel that they can freely discuss an issue that concerns the welfare of children and the safety of vulnerable women. That, I think, is about as profound and worrying an example of a chilling effect as I’ve encountered in a career writing about politics and policy. When MPs can’t talk about something important, something has gone very badly wrong.

Apologists for the transgender movement often trot out pieties like these below:

Im absolutly no expert but those offended by the gender debate seem to have many of the same type of opinions that people held about gay people in the 1970s and before. Also Brighton council didn't say boys can have periods. — bob craft (@bobcraft2) December 18, 2018

I disagree. I’m delighted that gay men and women now live in a world where they can feel comfortable to be themselves (though some of my gay friends tell me they kind of resent being accepted like straights: it takes all the danger and excitement and exclusivity out of their sexual proclivities) but the transgender movement is much more insidious than the gay rights movement, especially with regards to children.

Friends of mine have children at school in Brighton (Britain’s epicentre of “woke”: the place whose local council ordered its schools to teach children as young as eight that people “of all genders” can have periods) – and aren’t at all comfortable with what’s going on. Their daughter reports that lots of her friends are now pronouncing themselves “gender fluid” under the influence of all this propaganda they’re getting from their trendy lefty teachers. The upside is that the daughter is becoming a lot more soundly right-wing as a result. The downside — and this is the most serious consequence of this dangerous fad — is that children are being steered towards hormone therapy and even reassignment surgery at an age when they’re really far too young to be sure of their sexual identity, running the risk of doing permanent damage to themselves which they may end up regretting for the rest of their lives.

Sometime in the not-so-distant future we are going to be reaping a whirlwind. I personally know one transgender person who is very, very bitter about having undergone reassignment surgery during a period of confusion about their sexual identity only to regret it later. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this. And when these victims are looking around, wondering whom to blame, I think they’ll have ever right to be furious at the government (for not standing up to the transgender lobby) and the liberal-left media, for its shamefully uncritical approach to the issue, as embodied by idiot articles like this one.