Part of the reason I moved my family out of London to the countryside was to get away from my woke friends and the general madness that pervades our cosmopolis, where people work in professions such as advertising and social media, which are a bit like fast-track doctorate programmes in ultra left-wing wokery.
I was sick of sitting in the pub listening to people saying that all Brexiteers are bigots, that gay marriage is the same as marriage between a man and a woman, that meat is bad for you, and that people who believe that an unborn child has a right to life are misogynists. It’s the assumption that there is only one view which I found almost more annoying than the view itself. The bottom line was that I did not want my children growing up in this kind of environment.
Before living in London I lived and worked somewhere even worse: Brussels and the European Parliament, where the people who are now condemning Vladimir Putin, are the same people who have been campaigning for abortion to become a human right – something which they finally achieved just last year. There was the odd person in the European Parliament who fought for truth, but they were inevitably drowned out by the mob.
In the country my children would be safe and I would be a calmer person knowing that there were fewer members of the global elite in residence, and that any that were in residence would be spread over a wider area and could be more easily avoided. My reasoning was that people who live in the countryside don’t have time to worry about being woke because most of them are too busy trying to keep their sheep alive. On the surface of it, my assumption has been correct and it is a joy.
My dairy-farmer neighbour, for instance – let’s call him Delwyn – is up every day at 4am to milk his cows, and does his final milking at 8pm before going to bed and getting up the next day to do the same thing all over again. What does Delwyn say when he reads on the front of his Sunday newspaper that, for example, a man with a penis posing as a woman has just won a women-only swimming race? He says “what a load of nonsense”, because Delwyn is a farmer and he knows about biology.
So my ears pricked up when, at a supper with some local girlfriends, the conversation suddenly switched from whether Massey Ferguson tractors or Series One Land Rovers would be on display at the keenly anticipated agricultural show this autumn, to the subject of “gender”, as it is called these days.
Apparently two boys at the local comprehensive are “identifying as non-binary”. I was shocked at first. I couldn’t imagine this in our small and wholesome town. But then I remembered that no matter where you are, city or country, there are schools, and schools in this country are run by lunatics who condone the practice of “affirmative action” when it comes to “gender”. This means that when a girl says she wants to be a boy, the teacher is obliged to express encouragement, all the while keeping the child’s parents in the dark if this is the child’s wish.
Still on the same subject, one of the women at the table, who works for the police in the area of child protection, says she spends half her working day fighting the practice that has become embedded in the Force whereby abused girls – who can be prone to say they wish they weren’t female because of the sexual nature of the abuse they have suffered – are encouraged to consider gender reassignment, when what they really need is counselling to help them to recover from their trauma.
If this isn’t pure evil, then I don’t know what is. And it’s happening in all our public institutions nationwide. Even the Church of England is on board, with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams declaring that “to be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole.
The general view among the sceptical is that this whole obsession with “gender” is just a fad and it will soon pass, so we might as well keep quiet about it if we don’t support it. But if there are two “non-binary identifying” children (that we know of) in a rural comprehensive three hours from London, imagine how many there are in our cities. I just hope too many children aren’t irreversibly harmed before this fad blows over. In the meantime, I think I am going to have to relocate somewhere such as Hungary or Poland to keep my children safe and me sane.
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