Friday 26 January 2018

"I Don't Think Either Of Them Enjoyed It Very Much"

So said Ben Sellers when I mentioned to him that Owen Jones and Wes Streeting were no strangers to each other's gentleman parts. But growing up today, they would have been lucky to have had them to share. Thanks to the way of thinking that they themselves now espouse, their own younger selves would have been told to change their names, their clothes and their pronouns, and to submit to powerful hormonal treatment leading to drastic, irreversible surgery.

Call yourself what you like. Wear what you like. Use whatever pronouns you like, I suppose, since that does vary over time, so that a 1980s paper entitled France and Her Institutions would read oddly now. Have, as an adult, whatever drugs or surgery the psychiatrist prescribed for your mental illness. But recognise that that is what it is. Keep it the hell away from children. And keep your penis out of the ladies'. What a difference an apostrophe makes.

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