Some women have penises. If you won’t sleep with them you’re transphobic

I’m bored with writing about politicians and Brexit so this is an article about genitals instead.

Feel free to make your own jokes about the sentence above, but I promise what follows is not funny. You could not, as the old phrase goes, make it up.

Most of us, I think, like to see ourselves as tolerant and open-minded. Live and let live is the prevailing social attitude of our times. For all the division and acrimony in political debate and online, British society is, by international and historical standards, strikingly liberal and tolerant.

This is a good thing. People should not face abuse or exclusion or hostility because of who or what they are; we all should be judged on what we do.

The eternal question of tolerance is how far it extends. We are all familiar with the old debates about whether toleration requires accepting acts of intolerance that you find distasteful, but that’s not what this article is about.