Powers-that-be must not pander to militant ‘gender-fluid’ lobby

News that Topshop is introducing genderneutral changing rooms has delighted my 15-year-old, who would happily waterboard me with her progressive views on gender fluidity.

She may be a bit normcore when it comes to being born a girl, being happy to be a girl and having no immediate plans to transition into anything but an older girl, but that doesn’t mean she’s blinkered on the issue of human rights.

Unlike me, apparently. I may have demonstrated against the Poll Tax. I may have marched (and danced) to free Nelson Mandela. I may have singlehandedly brought about a U-turn in local health policy as a young reporter in Edinburgh, when I campaigned on behalf of an anguished ex-soldier whose gender reassignment treatment was stopped midway due to funding cuts.

But I’m one notch up (or even down) from a climate-change denier because I reserve the right to remain sceptical about the current wave of militant indignation from the intersex, pangender, bi-gender lobby.

Actually, that’s not true, I am more perturbed by the way in which the powers-that-be are reacting – overreacting.

Do we really need a new category on our census forms? Must our daughters be banned from wearing school skirts in case a transgender pupil feels uncomfortable? Are unisex loos in primaries the only way to tackle transphobia? Last year, the Women and Equalities Committee in Parliament estimated 650,000 Britons are “gender incongruent” to some degree, which is to say uncomfortable with the sex they were born into.

That’s a personal tragedy for those individuals and it’s impossible not to hope they receive the support they need. But they represent one per cent of the population. Demanding that pregnant women no longer be called expectant “mothers” in case it offends a handful of transgender people is stupid.

Being offended doesn’t confer moral superiority; sometimes, it’s a choice. Nor is feeling discriminated against the same as being discriminated against. Alienating the many to appease the few is neither fair nor logical and has the opposite effect to the one intended, leading to antagonism.

Back to Topshop – and I applaud its gender-neutral policy; normalisation is always better than special pleading.

Trying on jeans is where the non-binary battle needs to be fought, not in the key institutions of the land.