Rejoice! Ian McEwan has withdrawn his penis remark

He has recanted! The blasphemer, the thoughtless pricker of moral orthodoxy, has backtracked! Rejoice!

Yes, novelist Ian McEwan, who had the temerity to question the transgender ideology has now clarified his comments. He has declared that transgenderism is actually something to be ‘respected and celebrated’. He has seen the light. He has been corrected. He has ‘acknowledged the hurt’ he caused, says Stonewall, by which it means his foul mind has been given a moral spring-clean. If you want to see what illiberal times we live in, and how profoundly punishing the politics of identity can be, look no further than this mad McEwan story. His sin was to have raised a couple of questions about trans stuff during a talk at the Royal Institution last week. He said identity politics is becoming increasingly consumerist, where individuals pluck a readymade ‘self’ from ‘the shelves of a personal-identity supermarket’. And then he committed the mind-crime of the century, saying: ‘For example, some men in full possession of a penis are identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges, and the right to change in women’s dressing rooms.’