We’ve finally hit peak insanity over trans… haven’t we?

I thought we’d peaked last year, when Always, the sanitary towel company, agreed to remove the ‘Venus’ symbol from its wrapping after the trans lobby complained that “not everyone who has periods identifies as a woman”.

I thought we’d peaked when the police were forced to reveal that convicted rapists were allowed to be logged as female when arrested, “if that is how they choose to identify themselves”. When the BBC promoted an educational short film telling nine-year-olds that there were “over 100” genders, that had to be it?

Surely we peaked last January, when former policeman Harry Miller was visited by police after tweeting “transphobic” comments (such as: “I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me”)? Miller claimed that the Humberside Police officer who interviewed him had said he’d committed no crime, “but we need to check your thinking”.

Which is Orwellian enough – but after Miller discovered his “tweet incident” had been entered onto his police record, as a “non-crime hate incident”, he launched legal action so that a court might establish once and for all that he had not broken any law. The police probe was decreed unlawful by the High Court on Friday…

But all of this pales in importance beside an easily missed news item tucked away in this weekend’s Sunday papers. One headline ran: “NHS endorsing guide for transgender patients that approves puberty blockers and declares anatomy ‘is not always a good guide’ to determining a child’s sex.”

The NHS has already tarnished itself over matters of gender. More than once, the scandal-hit Tavistock Clinic, the country’s only NHS gender identity service for children, has found itself in the eye of the storm after accusations that it was “fast-tracking” young people into changing gender and offering children as young as 11 hormone-blocking drugs. But at least this shockingly proactive approach has been limited to patients within the clinic – until now.

A number of NHS trusts across the south west are to send out a “Supporting Trans People” toolkit, written by trans campaigners and branded with NHS logos, that declares that anatomy “is not always a good guide” to determining a child’s sex. It also condones the use of puberty blockers on adolescents, drugs that are, at present, licensed in the UK only to treat children who start puberty abnormally early, not those just questioning their gender identity.