This crusade against parents, being waged in the name of transgender children, erodes the distinction between adulthood and childhood. Parents are treated like children – deemed in need of discipline and re-education – while children are treated like autonomous adults, capable of making life-altering decisions. In this way, what begins with a professed desire to protect trans children readily morphs into an all-out war on families.

Elsewhere, we’re told that we should avoid ‘automatically fetishising [the] family’ and that families pose a threat to children. As author Sophie Lewis explains in her book, Abolish the Family: ‘The family is where most of the rape happens on this Earth, and most of the murder. No one is more likely to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than family.’ From this relentlessly grim perspective, parental love is no more than, ‘a shitty contract pretending to be biological necessity’.

With the biological family unit cast as a source of abuse, the path is cleared for other adults, especially those with views more aligned with transgender activists, to fill the gap. For adults, this might mean rejecting relatives in favour of a ‘family’ composed of random friends. But for children, it means swapping the unconditional love of parents for state functionaries with an agenda.

[It takes a village to seize your child. It takes a community to protect the family. We need more “community” and less state authority in these matters. — Ed]