Our age of instant information obliges us to hold opinions on things we don’t know much about

Sometimes people wonder why a minority topic should galvanise so much attention. Why, for instance, is there so much coverage in the press of the “trans” issue? Very few people are transgender – far less than 0.5 per cent of the population. And yet every day’s news seems to have something about it. Why?

Events this week inadvertently point to some answers. Former NHS staff fear that the health service is “over-diagnosing” children with gender dysphoria. What is more, psychologists who have worked in the system have said that they are unable to properly assess patients because of fears that they will be branded “transphobic”. Here is an example of one of our modern madnesses.

As somebody who has regularly been branded “transphobic” by campaigning ideologues, let me parse some of this for those who are too afraid to do so.

It remains deeply unclear whether such a thing as “gender dysphoria” exists and, if so, how it can be identified. I have researched this issue and spoken to many practitioners and patients and I can say with confidence that our healthcare system, and wider society, pretends to know far more than we actually do about the whole thing. That is why the attention intermittently springs up. Because people sense – but cannot say – that we are pretending more knowledge than we have. What studies there are suggest that more than 80 per cent of children with “gender dysphoria” will in fact grow up to be happily heterosexual or homosexual in the body that they were born in.

Ordinarily you would have to know an awful lot about something before you started suggesting that children ingest ideas, and then drugs, and finally have surgery, to address an issue about which we understand very little. But the spirit of the age says otherwise.

And that is one of the many things about the trans issue that is so interesting: that it is simultaneously both extraordinary and typical. When Jo Swinson attempted to leap through the latest trans hurdle this week on the Today programme by refusing to acknowledge that men and women have different bodies, she was merely following one of the deeply-laid trends of our time.