The public is fed up with wacky gender ideology. So why is it still being forced on us?

Virtue-signalling businesses have failed to grasp that the public has no interest in overzealous wokery

LGet the message theatreland: most people just want a gents and a ladies, not urinals and cubicles

ately, in Britain, there has been a sense that things are moving in the right direction in the ongoing war between the trans lobby and women fighting for sex-based rights.

Last week, thanks to a Telegraph exclusive, it was announced that Mermaids, a charity for trans or “gender diverse” youths, would be investigated by the Charity Commission for sending breast binding devices – which can be physically dangerous – to girls without their parents knowing, and telling children that puberty blocking drugs are “totally reversible”.

Earlier this year, to great fanfare on both sides of the Atlantic, the Tavistock gender clinic, which gave children puberty blockers and assisted them on the road to surgery, was told to shut after an independent inquiry found it put young people at “considerable risk” of poor mental health and mental distress.

It’s not just regulatory powers clamping down on the most extreme institutional manifestations of the madness. Studies are showing that the public – little old us – have extremely mixed feelings about the handling of the trans cause, especially self-ID, by which a man can access any womenonly space if he simply says he’s a woman.

A survey from More in Common earlier this year found that while most Britons think children at school should be taught about trans people (though at secondary, not primary level), most don’t want trans women competing in women’s sports, or having free access to women’s changing rooms, toilets, hospital wards or prisons (though the number of those who do support this, roughly 26 per cent, struck me as still rather sizeable).

But in general, we don’t want this topsy-turvy, highly niche stuff redrawing every bit of the landscape, putting women in danger and making many people feel deeply uncomfortable while they’re at it. And although there are those hopeful signs that things are going in the right direction, there are other signs that, well, they aren’t.

Last week was a reminder of how deep the rot has gone. Sussex police put out a press release about a “woman” convicted of historic sexual assault against children. Except at the time of the crimes “she” was a man named John Stephen Dixon. A woman on Twitter who objected to the police’s use of “woman” was warned the force would not tolerate “misgendering”. It was bonkers, and Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, ended up intervening, reminding the police to police criminals not pronouns.

Commercial outfits are just as bad. I exhaled with fatigued dismay when I read that Virgin Atlantic is now going to offer optional pronoun badges for customers and crew. Juha Järvinen, the airline’s chief commercial officer, boasted: “It’s so important that we enable our people to embrace their individuality and be their true selves at work... It is for that reason that we want to ensure our customers [and crew] are addressed by their preferred pronouns.”

Honestly? Pass the sick bag. Not because some tiny proportion of staff, as a small sample of the population at large, may want to wear a badge, but because Virgin is turning diversity ideology into a branding exercise, and forcing it down customers’ throats.

As for all the guff with toilets, it is just so obviously out of sync with what the vast majority of what their users want. That obscure academic theory concerning a tiny minority has become the political shibboleth of our day is whacky enough. That it’s managed to redraw the whole familiar – and intimate – topography of public toilets is pure insanity.

It has become commonplace in theatreland, too, at least in London – just as it has in parts of the medical community (including obstetrics) – to pretend the word “woman” doesn’t exist, lest it cause offence.

These days, we’ve become used to signage suggesting “all genders” are welcome, and occasionally one sees reference to “cubicles” (already Too Much Information), but at a play at London’s Royal Court the other night the two toilet options were: urinals and cubicles. In other words: men and women. Except, when a man doesn’t want to use a urinal, he must then use the ladies. When, in fact, given the insane imbalance in lavatory provision, it should be the other way round, and often is when women tire of the queues for their own loos and men kindly oblige – or did so in the days of proper men’s loos.

Everyone knows that men don’t see women as a threat when they take their clothes down but that the reverse is not true, and for good reason. Threat aside, women simply prefer their lavatories to be for women. It’s something of a sacred space and always has been. And men presumably feel the same. Also, do we need to know exactly what men are doing when they disappear? It’s all just TMI.

Everyone entering and leaving the lavatories looked fed up and slightly grossed out. Get the message, theatreland: most people just want a gents and a ladies. By all means throw in a single toilet or two, which can also be for those with disabilities.

After the play, my friend and I discussed the madness. She has two daughters, whom she fears for, partly because of the tyranny of self-ID and its implications. She is traditionally Left-leaning, but after the play she leaned over and whispered: “No wonder the Italians want Giorgia Meloni; people are just so fed up with this rubbish and lies.”

The election of Meloni, the far-Right Italian prime minister, has come as an extreme and, for many, a sobering shock. But she didn’t come from nowhere, and we’re going to have a lot more of her ilk if we don’t come to our senses – and soon.