Diane Jones

When will this horrifying madness end? I wonder how many of these women are young and will soon come to regret their decision to have healthy body parts cut away and incinerated in the name of ‘authenticity’. The NHS is doing irreversible harm instead of following the mantra ‘first, do no harm’. And we’re paying for it.

I’m a British journalist who’s spent more than 20 years working inside mainstream media. Over the past decade, I’ve become increasingly concerned by something happening inside journalism and other institutions: opinions once considered perfectly ordinary are becoming unsayable, while fashionable assumptions are increasingly treated as established fact. I’m interested in how that happened - and what it means for all of us. I write about media, politics, free speech, sex and gender, Covid, immigration and institutional groupthink. Most of my perspective is British because that’s where I live and work. But increasingly, the same arguments are playing out across the Western world - often at exactly the same time. I don’t claim to have all the answers. I do believe we should be able to ask the questions. If that interests you, stick around.

I find myself using the word ‘Orwellian’ quite a lot these days. Unfortunately, it’s not hyperbole. Anyone who’s read Nineteen Eighty-Four will know that Orwell foresaw a future in which all of our lives were under constant scrutiny and obedience to the state was mandatory. We’re not quite there yet. But Covid showed us just how easily, and willingly, the state could reach into our lives, deploying every manner of psychological pressure, backed by the force of law, to make us comply with whatever arbitrary rule had been dreamt up that week. Since then, we’ve seen people imprisoned for things they’ve written on social media. Just expressing ‘wrongthink’, even stating something as straightforward as ‘sex is immutable’, can potentially end your career. And, right now, Parliament is scrutinising a truly Orwellian piece of legislation - the draft Conversion Practices Bill, which threatens to see the state reach even further into family life, potentially criminalising parents. Which parents? Parents who love their children and don’t want them going down a medical pathway because they’ve become convinced, as so many vulnerable young people have, that they were somehow ‘born in the wrong body’. Parents who simply want to take their time, reassure their children that they’ll be okay and who quite rightly don’t believe that pumping minors full of hormones, or putting them on a pathway towards having parts of their healthy bodies removed, constitutes a compassionate response to a condition that most children grow out of. These parents could find themselves getting a knock at the door. And who is presiding over all this? @andyburnham, with his easy banter, ready sense of humour and reputation for straight talking. Yet his government is proposing what I regard as one of the most dystopian pieces of legislation this country has seen in modern times. I urge everyone who’s unfamiliar with this Bill to look into it. And to be afraid. Write to your MP. Write to Andy Burnham. Make your voice heard. Because this Bill must be stopped, or Orwell’s vision may prove not to have been fiction after all.