After the Tavistock scandal, we must ask where the trans revolution ends

Trans people have always existed, but the radical ideology that drove this clinic was authoritarian

The day it was announced that the Tavistock clinic would close, Tom Daley marched into the Commonwealth Games with a pride flag bearing trans colours. If you wondered how it came to this, to kids being given puberty blockers on the NHS, the answer is that for nearly a decade the idea of gender nonconformity has been embedded into our culture, by celebs, doctors, TV, Tory ministers and even the odd bishop. And it is not, as the feminists would have you believe, a wrong-turn in liberalism from which we can now easily reverse – it is the direction of travel.

Trans-ideology is the inevitable culmination of the 1960s cultural revolution. Conservatives warned you this is where it would end; you ignored them; et voila.

For the record, trans people exist. I’ve known many, and surveys of history and anthropology reveal they’ve always been and in all places. The number one country for gender realignment surgery is Thailand. Number two? Iran. In 1985, a remarkable person called Maryam Khatoon Molkara, born male but identifying as female, draped herself in an Iranian flag and marched into the house of Ayatollah Khomeini, demanding an audience. The guards beat her up, but Khomeini agreed to meet her – and was so impressed with Maryam that he issued a fatwa legalising sex change surgery.

Here in Britain, the contemporary trans debate is mostly a family squabble between generations of radicals, a classic case of parents admonishing their children for everything they once did themselves. In the 1960s, Left-wingers deconstructed gender and sexuality. The nuclear family was shaped by a dying faith and an old-fashioned economy, they said; once the Pill was invented and women began careers of their own, we had to reexamine our sense of what was normal to keep pace with how people really lived. Gay activists discredited the notion of aberrant sexual activity. Feminists said gender was a construct and a prison. This coincided with a new take on children, insisting they weren’t miniature versions of their parents but autonomous human beings who should control their own destiny, even their education.

This an incredibly naïve view of children, who, if they’re not being shaped by responsible adults, will take their cues from popular culture or, worse, each other. The Tavistock clinic had been quietly working for three decades when, around 2015, there was a surge in referrals – caused by greater awareness of trans rights? Maybe. But let’s entertain the possibility that it was infantile mass-hysteria exacerbated by the internet.

What’s disturbing, according to the Cass Review, is that some clinicians allegedly handed out pills to vulnerable young people with potentially life-changing effects they did not understand. It’s worrying, too, that when Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, asked to meet a patient who had regretted having her breasts removed, she says that civil servants advised her it would be “inappropriate”. And sinister that parents believe schools have affirmed their children’s self-identity without their consent. Revolutions do love to subvert parental authority.

All of this became inevitable the moment Britain’s elite accepted the principle that a “trans woman is a woman” – stated, never forget, by Penny Mordaunt at the Despatch Box. If that’s true, then when a boy says they are a girl, we’re in a weaker position to disagree with them, and any attempt to dispute a statement of fact must, logically, be an expression of prejudice to be driven out of polite society.

Again, this is typical of revolutionary narratives. First, they uproot the old order in the name of freedom; then they identify what a free life looks like; next they prescribe it; finally, they police it. Many people have abstained from the trans debate because they are frightened that if they say what we all thought five minutes ago (you can’t change your sex with surgery), then they’ll be ostracised or sacked. I can’t blame them, but adults owe it to children to be honest.

Look, every teenager is confused and frightened by their sexual development; I know I was. I’m surprised that seasonal professionals have forgotten what that feels like. Perhaps some of the kids who presented themselves at Tavistock really were on a “journey” in relation to their gender, but an adult, with some experience of life, ought to intuit that they might also be depressed, confused, unwell or victims of abuse. It is often said that if you dispute the diagnosis of “trans”, then you think the individual doesn’t exist – but now and then, other people see us better than we see ourselves. Particularly family; ideally doctors.

The implication that Tavistock therapists prefered one pathway to resolve what could be a wide variety of problems hints at projection, a form of authoritarianism, the revolution entertaining its definition of freedom upon the very body itself. To return to Iran, the reason why this Shia theocracy endorses sex changes is partly because it despises homosexuality: unable to accept that a man is attracted to other men, it prefers to believe he has a medical problem that can be fixed with a scalpel.

Here in the UK, some gay activists have warned that girls seeking gender realignment might actually be lesbians, that because their sexuality doesn’t fit with their community, they have found a new pathway to conformity by becoming trans. Given, as I believe, that the 1960s set us on this trajectory, what they are really protesting is the revolution’s appetite for its own children – that when you tear up traditional rules, you liberate but you also create an anarchy from which new fascisms emerge.

It’s testament to the power of ideas, of how they can run beyond reality and begin to reshape it. To accommodate the idea of trans, science has been reimagined; our very language has been rewritten. And no one ever held a vote on it. Politicians are now crying “stop”, but the transformation has already largely taken place, and unless you engage with the basic propositions at play, you’ll never get to grips with what is going on.

Is a trans man a man? I’d like to say, “it’s none of our business”, but Tavistock demonstrates that it very much is.

It’s testament to the power of ideas, of how they can run beyond reality and begin to reshape it