What terfs get wrong

The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as drug-users instead snorted up cocaine’s great gift of untrammelled narcissism. And yet the desire to live in a weird fantasy land did not quite disappear – far from it. Today, if you tell people that you are a pink giraffe, they are compelled by society to believe you and not judge you as being a deluded lunatic.

We no longer need Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey or the ghastly Timothy Leary: we have created a counter-rational fantasy world for ourselves without the help of acid or psilocybins. This much is evident every day on social media and in our newspapers. Often it’s just the little things that convince you there is a general derangement at large – such as a talk given in Cambridge recently by someone called Leah Palmer of the Scott Polar Research Institute: ‘Queering the Poles: How queer voices are changing how we think about the Arctic and Antarctic regions.