Oh no! My six-year-old is trans-exclusionary

The new rules of gender-fluidity are completely lost on children, who change identities 100 times a day

Have you had The Conversation with your children yet? Not the one about the birds and the bees, but the one about how some bees feel they are actually a bird trapped in a bee’s body, or a bee trapped in a bird’s body, or neither bee nor bird but somewhere in the middle of the beebird spectrum?

I have. It didn’t go that well, to be honest. “But you can’t just change like that!” protested my six-year-old son, thereby marking himself out as the worst kind of TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). “I’d hate to be a girl anyway,” mused my eight-year-old son. “They can’t fight and their toys are rubbish.”

“Well I’m a princess and you’re a bum-bum,” retorted his four-yearold sister. So much for liberal parenting.

Perhaps a professional educator would do a better job of broadening their cis-gendered horizons. A primary school in Hartfield, East Sussex, held a “transgender day” recently, to encourage the tots to explore issues of gender-fluidity.

It was meant to be part of their education in “British values” – a deliciously nebulous subject inserted into the national curriculum as part of the Government’s anti-radicalisation strategy. The idea seems to be that if we can teach the next generation to respect each other’s non-binary gender identities, they will be less likely to take up arms and wage global jihad. Well, here’s hoping.

But some of the parents at St Mary the Virgin school did not approve. Three actually took their children out of school for Transgender Day. Perhaps – it’s not impossible, even at a Church of England school – they had religious objections.

Or perhaps they were afraid that the idea of transgenderism might be catching; that once their children’s minds had been jemmied open, all sorts of dangerous proclivities might get in.

One minute your wholesome little boy is into football, Ninjago and thumping his brother; the next she’s a pangender ceterosexual fighting to bring down the global patriarchy.

Personally, I have the opposite worry. I want my children to be open-minded about gender and sexuality. I want them to have the run of the dressing-up box, from Cinderella to Spiderman, for as long as they feel drawn to sparkly nylon. I want the boys to feel able to cry, and their sister to punch them in the head. As far as is possible in a world full of stereotypes, I want them to steer clear of pigeonholes. And right now, gender politics seems to me nothing but floor-to-ceiling pigeonholes.

You can be agender, bi-gender, cisgender, demigender, graygender, intergender, genderless, genderqueer or third gender – but by God, you will accept a label. Go gingerly when applying it in public, though, especially if you are unpractised and over-40: this new language is as orthodox and closely policed as any medieval catechism. Calling someone a trans-woman, as opposed to a transwoman, is pretty much a hate crime (since the hyphen suggests a certain scepticism).

The rules of gender-fluidity have been laid down incredibly fast, and have already calcified into a set of unchallengeable truths. You are how you feel. Gender identity is a selfrealisable truth. I have no doubt that there are some children – a tiny minority – who suffer from gender dysmorphia right from the off, and will never feel comfortable in the body they were born into. But most children, left to their own devices, can change identities a hundred times a day and move up and down the gender spectrum without ever requiring a change of label.

Trans activists, like old-school misogynists, are forever patrolling the perimeters of male and female behaviour, making sure we all adhere to some kind of type. But children – especially the young ones – have no respect for boundaries. And long may they stay that way.