A Daily Mail columnist has claimed that the “powerful transgender lobby” is threatening the sanity of so-called “normal children”.

Sarah Vine claims that a new book on gender identity for kids, Can I Tell You About Diversity, is threatening cisgendered children.

The journalist asks readers: “have they simply caved in to the powerful and very vocal transgender lobby for fear of being branded as ‘backward’ or, worse, as bigots?”

The wife of former Secretary of State for Education claims that young people are no more questioning their gender in 2016 than in 1916, but that stars like Caitlyn Jenner and Eddie Redmayne are forcing children into changing themselves.

“Ideas that, until recently, were considered at best fanciful, at worst extreme, seem to have infiltrated traditionally sober institutions, including the medical establishment (hormone therapy is now available on the NHS even to pre-pubescent children) and, perhaps more worryingly, education”, she writes.

She even cites one story – verified by nobody but herself – that a school child was given detention for saying they were not trans.

“I recently heard about a secondary school pupil who, during a PSHE (personal, social and health education) classroom discussion about gender, said that, on balance, she thought she was probably just ‘normal’”, Ms Vine writes.

“Cue sharp intake of breath.

“The correct terminology, the teacher informed her curtly, is ‘cis’.

“She was even punished with a detention.”

The columnist calls for ending the “nonsense” of LGBT-inclusive education.

“In attempting to improve the lives of a vanishingly small minority, we are threatening the sanity of — and, yes, I’m going to say it — normal children.

“It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.

“Yes, there must be compassion for the very few who experience gender confusion.

“But there must also be common sense that this is not something that affects the majority of children.

“But then common sense, that once great British characteristic, seems to be a dying quality these days.”