And remember, ladies, when a male bedlamite pushes his phone camera under an occupied bathroom stall in order to livestream to his admirers a woman who is unhappy about a male bedlamite’s presence in a ladies’ toilets – and when said bedlamite’s phone is kicked away and he then claims victimhood, specifically injury to his penis, which he mentions quite a lot – this is totally normal and nothing to worry about. It’s just how things are now.

Apparently, it’s outdated and oppressive for a young woman to be walked down the aisle at her wedding by her father. And so she can insult him and embarrass him by taking away that role. But of course it’s not outdated or oppressive for that same father to be expected to pay all of the bills for the wedding at which he’s being so pointedly sidelined and insulted.

Providing the sperm. A joyous and maternal turn of phrase. Also of note, the idea of wanting a baby, but with only a third or a quarter of the responsibility. A kind of low-commitment parenting. Bodes well.

Readers are invited to ponder the appeal, for any gentleman with fatherhood in mind, of effectively becoming a sperm donor who is also expected to perform household chores, for many years, and to pay child maintenance. In a sexless relationship with random lesbians who may find him barely tolerable, a necessary complication. But this, it seems, is “the ideal parenting setup.”

The NatWest bank, we learn, “allows staff to identify as men and women on different days. The bank offers double-sided lanyards to non-binary employees so they can alternate between personas when they please.” This is part of an “LGBT-friendly diversity measure,” endorsed by Stonewall, the cutting edge of corrected thought. And employees who aren’t sure who or what they are at any given time must be encouraged to enact their “masculine and feminine” personas according to mood and medication. Hence the double-sided lanyards, obviously. 

This goes on for quite a while, longer than seems strictly necessary. Droplets on chins, alluring eyebrows, lemon wedges being squeezed. Yes, the situation was “hot and vulnerable,” and “profoundly intimate,” with the object of intrigue covering her face, leaving her breathless and gasping. She was “performing the act for the first time” – and in public, no less.

Should readers need a moment to steady themselves, I quite understand.

“My memory of that first time,” writes Ms Maratha, “echoes that special frisson of noticing your femininity.” You see, “Something about the discovery of the oyster’s flesh, the patience needed to harvest it from its shell, and the fortitude required to enjoy it, feels intrinsically feminine.” We’re told, by an obliging editor, that Ms Maratha’s “love of oysters grew alongside her queer identity.” And that, “For her, the act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.”

A woman who wants to pretend she’s a gay man is thwarted by her male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps.

To which, Mags adds, “He she didn’t use her his pronouns.” Indeed. A notable omission. One that results in finger-wagging from fellow Reddit forum regulars: “You do have to respect that SHE is the expert on her own gender, not you.”

It’s a bold claim. Despite which, the person being scolded – a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man – can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. There’s no she or her, just a grudging them. Which does rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.

Nora doesn’t think that a third conviction for car theft should result in incarceration. Because, and I quote, the victims “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” says Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

Apparently, the word collision is, for Dr Madrid, much too brutal and masculine when referring to the unstoppable convergence of two galaxies, and the ultimate merging of the supermassive black holes at their centres – an event that will entail the sling-shotting of countless stars and their orbiting planets, and which may release energy equivalent to around 100 million supernova explosions, and subsequently be detectable halfway across the universe.

It’s all terribly oppressive – for the implausibly faint of heart, I mean. And should a colleague carelessly refer to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a catastrophic gamma-ray burst, this is obviously “misogynistic language” and a basis for the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding.

At which point, readers may wish to ponder whether the best people to be doing astronomy, or teaching astronomy, or to be making workplace rules for astronomers, are the kinds of people who mouth dogmatic assertions without any trace of supporting logic, and who are distracted, even distressed, by hearing the word collision being used to describe a collision.

Ms Gonzalez, who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is, also tells us how she, “just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.” Say, when being a late-night annoyance to roommates and neighbours, a thing that by her own account happens repeatedly, or when playing music in a library. Where other people are trying to study:

“One day, when I accidentally sat down to study in the library’s Absolutely Quiet Room, fellow students Shhh-ed me into shame for putting on my Discman… I soon realised that silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.”

A bold admission. One, I suspect, that reveals more than intended. Also, the claim that one can sit down in a library accidentally.

Inevitably, Ms Gonzalez blames her own moral shortcomings on other people’s race and class, as if, by expecting politeness, they were imposing on her in cruel and unusual ways. Because – magic words – “of colour.” But the common variable, the one that’s hard to miss, is the author’s own rudeness and self-absorption. And so, she blunders into the library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” and fires up her music.

A person doesn’t just happen to be born into a context that their parents also just happened to be born into. I could not have been born to Mr and Mrs Jeong in South Korea, any more than I could have been born to a Yemeni peasant couple, or a Californian billionaire. Much as I – the person talking to you now – could not have been born in 1652.

The newborn me was a result of a particular lineage, of choices made by specific individuals and the genes of those individuals – who can of course say the same thing about themselves. To imply that anyone’s birth is a random thing, as if it could have happened anywhere, at any time, as if the particulars were immaterial, is, it seems to me, a little odd. Indeed, arse-backwards. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some random occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events. I’d imagine it wouldn’t seem random at all.

Unless you imagine a queue of souls waiting to spawn in some small but arbitrary body on a continent chosen by the spin of a wheel. Or cosmic bingo balls.

As we’ve seen, many times, some teachers and educational bureaucrats do seem rather titillated by the prospect of actively deceiving parents. As, for instance, when middle-school teachers in Missouri were urged to fabricate and publish a false curriculum, purely to hide from parents the details of their activism and what they were actually up to in class. A move pre-emptively described by its proponent, Natalie Fallert, as “not being deceitful.”

It occurs to me that when your solution to such complaints [from parents regarding classroom indoctrination] includes the words “so parents cannot see it,” it may be time to revisit your assumptions.

It seems that the ladies and gents who feel compelled to announce their revolutionary ambitions, and their pronouns, and various mental health issues, aren’t meeting quotas for finding each other attractive…

Ms Isser’s indignation at the thought of socialist women being romantically shunned, even by fellow socialists, was aired in December in a Twitter howling session, during which extensive use was made of exclamation marks. After much exasperated rumbling, Ms Isser concluded that the fault must lie solely with men, and that “straight men are shallow and sexist even when they’re socialists.” Thereby proving that, contrary to legend, ladies of the left are in no way high-maintenance or difficult to please.

“Our politics reflect who we are!!!!!” said she, loudly. Which is rather the problem, I think.

The above is, we’re told, “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” And so, while claiming to give exposure to the supposedly marginalised and unseen, the virtuous by default, the curators are expecting visitors to be enthralled by objects of mass-produced banality that are, by their own admission, utterly ubiquitous…

“Queer stories are so seldom told in museums,” says Jennie Grady, who has worked on the exhibition.

Regarding the aforementioned seldomness, I briefly scanned recent listings and found that the museums and galleries busily “queering” their content include the British Museum (“Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories”), the Victoria and Albert Museum (“A Queer History of Art”), Tate Britain, Tate Kids, Queer Britain (“A riot of voices, objects, and images from the worlds of activism, art, culture, and social history”), Brighton Museum, the London Art Fair, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Museum of Transology, the Museum of London, National Museums Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery.

So seldom. So terribly seldom.

Other vigorously “queered” content can be found at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and the Wellcome Collection, London, which among other things offers a “queer life-drawing workshop… focussing on queer bodies.” I have, due to space concerns – and the fear that readers may lose the will to live – omitted many more.

Despite this seemingly intermittent maleness, Mr Sonia has launched a lawsuit against staff at both the Washington Department of Corrections and his previous male prison, citing “cruel and unusual punishment.” Specifically, a failure to provide, at taxpayer expense, “breast augmentation” and “hair removal of the face, neck and jaw,” which is, we’re told, of “paramount importance.” And a lack of which allegedly results in “severe emotional anguish.”

Depending, one assumes, on whether Mr Sonia claims to be a man or a woman on any given day.

The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.

It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth…

The supposedly corrective fretting starts with a dubious, arbitrary assumption – that all racial groups should be visiting the museum in some given ratio, even though they choose not to. Those doing the fretting then set about insulting the people who do visit the museum by claiming that the things they have travelled to see, and with which they may feel some affinity, may result in “dark… nationalist feelings” and other unspeakable beastliness. By liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption.

In the comments, Liz notes the unhappy combination of baby products and bondage harnesses, and asks, not unfairly, “What the hell were they thinking?”

Well, quite. I was in John Lewis recently, buying towels, and at no point did I feel a need to know about the cross-dressing bondage activities of the sales staff. Whether the person bagging my towels likes to dress up as a pantomime dame while brandishing instruments of torture was not, it has to be said, foremost in my mind…

Whether female customers, the backbone of John Lewis’ customer base, will be inspired to shop harder and more often by the thought of employees bringing their autogynephilia to work remains to be seen. Ditto bondage fantasies and wearing rubber dog costumes. Perhaps well-off ladies in search of posh frocks and upscale furnishings will be dazzled and enchanted by the thought of sad, cross-dressing men in thigh-high boots who like to share photos of themselves smeared with unspecified white substances.

Needless to say, the accompanying prose is quite extensive. The words “sustainable heterotopic space of discourse” crop up, obviously, and which, as you can imagine, is an enormous help. Quite how one might “exchange ideas” with a plant is, alas, not divulged. 

I’m tempted to ask how these target percentages relate to any actual expressed interest or aptitude – say, among school-leavers – or to any tactical utility, according to which an unusually high number of women and racial minorities would somehow confer a military advantage. Or are they, as seems to be the case, entirely arbitrary?

The paragraph immediately above was posted as a comment on the Personnel Today website. It was held for moderation, then disappeared. 

And so, the preferred, progressive trajectory entails a more demoralised, more dangerous, low-trust society. In which pretty much anything one might wish to buy will be out of reach or shuttered away, and in which every customer will by default be treated as suspicious. Because apparently, we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are.

We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.

Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.

Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?