Family

Can you think of anything more cruel than telling a five-year-old boy who likes Lady Gaga that he might have gender dysphoria? Or telling a nine-year-old tomboy who hates Barbie and loves Beckham that she might really be male – in spirit – and therefore she should think about putting off puberty and possibly transitioning to her ‘correct gender’? Saying such things to kids who are only doing what kids have done for generations – messing about, discovering their identity – turns playfulness into a pathology. It convinces boys who aren’t boyish and girls who aren’t girly that they must have some great gender problem, a profound inner turmoil that

‘I love my new kitchen heart of the home let’s fill it with friends happy.’ So says the thought bubble in the current ad for the estate agents Rightmove, part of their ‘Find your happy’ campaign. Don’t even get me started on the lack of punctuation — or the use of ‘happy’ as a noun. What I’m worrying about is the kitchen itself. Glimpsing Ed Miliband’s second kitchen last week, we came face to face with the drabness of today’s hyper-hygienic kitchen. Is the kitchen really ‘the heart of the home’ in Rightmove’s imaginary domestic paradise, or is it in fact one of those spotless, minimalist, metallic kitchens, all hard

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/the-death-of-childhood/media.mp3″ title=”Melanie Philips and Sarah Green discuss the end of childhood” startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]In all the sound and fury about historic sex crimes against children, one crucial factor has been generally ignored. Last week, a review of the agencies dealing with the phenomenon of ‘grooming gangs’ in England said that more than 370 young girls in Oxfordshire had fallen victim to them over the past 15 years, and called for an urgent national debate into these ‘indescribably awful’ sex crimes. But the most shocking and overlooked aspect of the review was that, in Oxford, police and care workers dismissed evidence that girls as young as 11, 12 or 13

Last week I went to the exhilarating English National Opera production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers — five hours of wonderful music and singing whizzed by without a moment’s boredom. But there was one odd and perturbing factor, I thought. In place of a curtain, there was a huge ‘frontcloth’. It was covered with a collage of 103 faces of well-known artists. These same faces appeared again, during the finale, this time in the form of portraits held aloft by members of the cast. They included Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Weill, Billy Wilder, Richard Tauber, Oskar Kokoschka, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Lotte Lenya, Max Ernst, Marlene Dietrich. According to

Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if we want to preserve Europe. That is not why I have bred like a rabbit, but it is the brutal truth. I have five children aged 11 down to three — because until the age of 40 I thought I was infertile and did not think I could breed at all, let alone like a rabbit; and because though I am a devout agnostic, I am married to Carla, a devout Catholic, who is much younger than me and refuses

The end of the year seems a good time to think about lasts. Not many of us ever do. Firsts are always landmarks: the first time you taste alcohol, drive a car, have sex. Then the first time your child talks, walks, goes to school. All are noted at the time, stored away in the mental file marked ‘life events’. But when do we ever notice, much less remember, a last? We’re doing them a disservice — in many cases they’re even more poignant than the firsts. One problem, of course, is that we often don’t know it’s a last at the time. You’ll register your last day in a