"Many Photos" - TOM UTLEY: My heart goes out to those agonising over a gender change

As a firm believer in free-market competition, I suppose I ought to be a big fan of consumer choice: the more options, the merrier.

It’s only when I find myself faced with choices in real life that I’m not so sure.

For the trouble with choices is that they mean decisions — and I’m about the most indecisive man who ever studied a menu, agonising over whether to start with the whitebait or the soup.

You’ll see me at the butter section in the supermarket, clutching the shopping list written out for me by Mrs U, staring miserably at the dozens of varieties on offer, tortured by the fear of making the wrong choice.

What did she mean when she wrote: ‘Butter x 2’? Country Life? Kerrygold? Lurpak? Anchor? Sainsbury’s own-brand? Did she want salted, lightly salted or unsalted? All I can be reasonably sure of is that, whichever I pick, she’ll roll her eyes and tell me I’ve got it wrong.

At times such as these, I find myself musing that if there was one thing to be said for the Soviet Union, it was that there was seldom any choice to be had.

If butter was available at all, you took what you were given, like it or lump it.

I imagine life may be something like that under Jeremy Corbyn, if he ever gets the chance to put into action his ‘better way’ — the Socialist way (as he put it when he was praising the hard-Left government of now-destitute Venezuela).

'You’ll see me at the butter section in the supermarket, clutching the shopping list written out for me by Mrs U, staring miserably at the dozens of varieties on offer, tortured by the fear of making the wrong choice.'

Torment

But if little decisions torment me, how much more agonising are the big ones.

Take the pension pots I accumulated over 43 years as a full-time staff journalist before I gave up my day job on my 65th birthday at the end of November and sank into semi-retirement.

In the old days, if I’ve got this right, I would have had no option but to accept an annuity to keep me going until my encounter with the Grim Reaper, with monthly payments at a much reduced rate left over for my widow.

But then along came the then-Chancellor George Osborne with reforms that have opened up a whole world of choice, allowing people of my age to cash in part of our nest-eggs, tax-free, and spend the money on whatever we want.

Now, if I were sensible and knew the first thing about money, I dare say that I would invest the cash shrewdly in something that would yield a higher return than an annuity, while leaving a bit of capital for Mrs U to dig into when I’m gone.

As it is, I’ve made what must be the most reckless decision of my life, resolving to sink a fair chunk of my savings into buying a brand-new car for us to tootle around in during our dotage.

The thing is that my wife has never fully shared my love of our ever-dependable eight-year-old Ford Focus — the latest in a long succession of second-hand cars we’ve owned during our 39-year marriage.

Though she’s never made a fuss about it, bless her, I know she’s long had a yearning for something a little swankier and, ideally, something new. We could give the Focus to our second son and his wife, she said. They could do with a car to cart around our year-old grandson.

   

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Well, I reckoned it was now or never. How little I realised what I was letting myself in for.

Have you tried to buy a new car lately? Even when buyers have settled on a particular make from the dozens of choices on offer, the questions and dilemmas keep piling up. I don’t just mean petrol or diesel — an easy one these days, since no one in his right mind wants a lethally polluting diesel.

What size engine? Manual or automatic? Wheel trim? Interior trim? Which audio package? Parking assist? On and on the questions go, leaving this baffled layman in agonies of indecision.

And that’s before we’ve even got to the question of which colour we want — or whether we’re after standard or metallic paint? Stop, stop, stop!

Oh, where is the latter-day Henry Ford, the pioneer of mass production who told car buyers: ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black.’

Bewildering

And if I find modern life confusing, with its myriad decisions to be made, how utterly bewildering it must be for children, in this age, when they’re told they have a choice on a matter far more fundamental than what car to buy or how to invest a pension pot.

I’m thinking of the tiny, but increasingly powerful, lobby trying to persuade us that the young should be able to decide their own sex — or ‘gender’, to adopt their preferred term.

I know I must tread very carefully here, for although well over 99 per cent of the world’s population share my views, it is coming to be seen as deeply controversial to suggest that people born with male genitalia are male and those with female organs are female.

Think of poor Martina Navratilova, the former Wimbledon tennis champion and tireless campaigner for gay rights. Only a few years ago, nobody would have batted an eyelid at her remark: ‘You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.’

Yet when she dared to express this common-sense truth — so obvious, I would have thought, that it was hardly worth saying — she was vilified as ‘transphobic’ and driven to apologise and delete her comments.

But then, it’s a favourite trick of minority rights activists to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of suffering from a bigoted phobia, akin to a mental disorder. In this instance, I just wonder who the mad ones really are.

In Britain, the transgender lobby has risen to such influence that changes to the Gender Recognition Act are in the pipeline — apparently with the support of our Tory Prime Minister — which would allow any one of us to self-identify as male or female, without so much as a doctor’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Pressure

Meanwhile, criminals whom most of us would regard as men have been sent to women’s prisons.

It’s also fast becoming de rigueur to raise transgender issues in TV dramas, from Butterfly (about an 11-year-old boy who is determined to have a sex-change operation) to Call The Midwife and now, BBC 1’s Baptiste.

With all this pressure to regard choosing one’s sex as normal, it’s come to a point where no fewer than 40 children at one fashionable school in Brighton (where else?) say they don’t identify with their birth gender, while another 36 aged 11 to 16 say they’re ‘gender fluid’.

It seems to be becoming a craze, like the Pogo stick or Rubik’s Cube of my own youth. Isn’t life confusing enough for the young without this?

Logo of Mermaids — a charity set up to support transgender or ‘non-gender-conforming’ children

And now, to cap it all, the National Lottery Community Fund this week confirmed its decision to give £500,000 over five years to Mermaids — a charity set up to support transgender or ‘non-gender-conforming’ children.

This was in spite of complaints accusing the organisation of prematurely pushing for life-altering medical interventions, such as puberty-blocking drugs.

Isn’t it strange that some of the very same people who so rightly condemn female genital mutilation as hideously cruel, when it’s carried out for pseudo-religious reasons, seem relaxed about mutilating genitals in the name of transgenderism?

God knows, our hearts should go out to those very few who genuinely suffer torment from feeling trapped in the wrong body. And there is persuasive evidence that some who have undergone sex changes as adults are happier as a result.

But, for sanity’s sake, can’t we at least agree to leave impressionable children alone — and stop spreading the idea that gender is just another of life’s choices, like whether to start with whitebait or soup? 

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News Photo TOM UTLEY: My heart goes out to those agonising over a gender change
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