I got Cancelled by the Woke Mob

And all I got was this lousy Unherd Column!

The year was 2012. The month was December.

Bath Christmas market avec les kids. The whole family was sat down tucking in to our Ras El Hanout Spiced Sausage rolls, with ‘posh chutney’. 

Julian was 14, so we let him have a small glass of mulled wine. I had been reading in the Sunday Telegraph the week before that the French have a better drinking culture because they let their kids binge drink from an early age. 

So, as a homage to our continental cousins, one glass followed another.

Soon, the young boy was quite drunk. Speaking candidly, he confided to me that he had been feeling some latent homosexual urges towards the other boys at school.

My heart soared. This was the height of the Big Gay Debate. Even Etonian Toffs like Cameron wanted the lot of them married.

And there I was. Pleased as pudding. Because Julian’s predilections provoked not even the slightest sensation of disgust. 

I mention this episode simply to present my impeccable, unquestioned credentials when it comes to supporting Gay rights. 

Even as the years wore on, and Julian’s brief moment of madness became but a distant, embarrassing and shameful adolescent memory, I still felt an enormous pride in how well I responded to this shocking, appalling revelation.

So it is with some surprise that over the past couple of weeks, a wizened old Trot like myself has drawn so much ire from the likes of Owen Jones over my contributions to the Trans debate on Twitter.

Look: if memory serves, I’m fairly sure fifteen years ago it was completely socially acceptable to insinuate that all trans people are sexual predators who want to ‘invade’ female only spaces. 

If I must be the first to invoke the name of…Orwell…on this topic, then so be it:

‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

So here I am. The first Middle-aged Centre-left voice brave enough to stick his/her head above the parapet and saying what you don’t want to hear:

I’m not so sure about this trans business. I wish we could go back to the 2000s when being socially liberal was just about encouraging young women to be sexually promiscuous and sometimes muttering darkly about Salman Rushdie and ‘Radical Islam’. 

And if I must be given a column at Unherd, and appear on Spectator TV for speaking That Truth.

Then so be it.