I want to talk about pride and about shame. I have never been what is crudely referred to as a “flag shagger”. I have never sat through the Queen’s Speech at Christmas, and I can’t name a single English football player.
But one thing that does make me genuinely proud to be British is that we are now known to trans activists across the world as “TERF Island”. And that’s important because the UK punches above its weight in terms of cultural exports.
What we are doing here is watched by the rest of the world. And what we are doing is standing firm against an ideology imported wholesale from the US; an ideology that has the backing of some of the world’s most powerful people.
And I’m not talking about elected politicians and peers who make the law in that building over there. I’m talking about the technocrats, those in Silicon Valley, with the power to shape minds. Social media has become a vector for body dysmorphia, and pornography has made the prospect of growing up female a sentence to sexual subservience.