The transgender obsession: Has anyone got a spare time machine handy? I'm just not sure I belong here.

This is an actual story from an actual newspaper - specifically, today's Independent. You can read it here. It's worth it just to enjoy the terrible tangle the journalist gets herself into by insisting on using the pronouns "her" and "she" while writing about someone I suspect the majority of us would regard as a mentally ill man. This example of political correctness renders much of the piece incomprehensible - but not nearly as incomprehensible as why anyone would indulge "Stephoknee" (FFS) in his ridiculous fantasies. As one tweeter put it: GIVE.ME.STRENGTH.

I've written several times recently about our seemingly growing obsession with transgenderism.  First there was a video showing American police being given "transgender awareness" training (here); then there was an item about the BBC flooding its output with transgender stories (here); this was followed by Parliament looking at introducing transgender toilets (here). I had decided to give the subject a rest, just in case anyone started wondering whether I myself had caught the bug and was becoming fixated on the topic As a result, when I read in the Telegraph last weekend that schools were being offered £30,000 extra funding from the the Leadership Equality and Diversity Fund run by the National College for Teaching and Leadership to hire and promote  teachers from the "protected characteristics" community, which (inevitably) includes gays and transexuals, I decided to pass on (full story here).  Then there was a programme about transgenderism on BBC3, and an item on Radio 4, and the above item about "Stephoknee" and, well, here I am returning once more to the great media-political-academic hot topic of our age.

Charges from Labour and Conservative MPs that this example of positive discrimination militates against teachers unfortunate enough not to possess any "protected characteristics" were loftily dismissed by the Department of Education: “This programme encourages able teachers with potential, who might otherwise not have the confidence to compete for such roles without targeted intervention, to move into leadership roles." Well, I reckon that if an adult doesn't  have the confidence to compete, he/she/it shouldn't be encouraged to do so - especially if it means that those who do have the confidence to compete suffer discrimination as a result: I should have thought that natural confidence is something we should reward, especially when it comes to state school teachers, who no doubt often have to control children from home backgrounds where they will never have encountered any form of discipline whatsoever, and who might find it hard enough to concentrate on lessons without having the added distraction of teachers with protected characteristics (depending, of course, on what the characteristic might happen to be). To be frank, teachers can go hang: it isn't about them,  it's about the quality of education being received by the children. Or have I got that wrong?

We really must stop unaccountable cultural Marxists in government departments, quangos and schools turning our education system into a nightmarish "prizes for all" Michael Wharton sketch or an episode of South Park. We all know that the vast majority of tax-payers don't want to pay for this sort of social engineering nonsense, and yet on and on it goes. If only we had a Conservative government to put a halt to it. Oh, hang on...