The manufactured trans storm over Eddie Izzard’s pronouns highlights the ignorance destroying young girls’ lives

The trans comedian can choose boy or girl ‘mode’, but adolescent girls struggling with gender don’t have it so easy, as numbers rise of those choosing irreversible double mastectomies, phalloplasty, and a life of drugs.

The most unsettling TV of the year so far, even more so than those Downing Street press conferences, was watching a string of morning show presenters tie themselves in knots over the use of pronouns when referring to comedian Eddie Izzard’s latest charity challenge of running 31 marathons in 31 days on his home treadmill.

Suddenly a bog standard, lightweight morning television fluff piece became ground zero in the transgender culture wars, when woke warriors leapt into action on social media fabricating a storm of outrage that whirled above the three TV hosts as they discussed Izzard in the masculine third person.

The grammatical missteps lay there like dog poo on the carpet at a cocktail party. But the ever-alert trans brigade was on the job. Oh, the self-righteous outrage of those patrolling the airwaves on behalf of victims everywhere.

“Eddie Izzard has asked to be referred to as female, please stop mis-gendering her.” stomped one such crusader. “Every presenter on @GMB has spent an entire segment misgendering Eddie Izzard,” flounced another. You get the flavour, no need for more.

For those who missed the great reveal or are not subscribers to ‘Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story’, the comedian apparently told the audience at a recent awards ceremony, “I would quite like to be known as she, because I'm in girl mode.” But then, like a modern-day shapeshifter, the comedian informed Lorraine Kelly, “I am gender fluid, I do all my dramatic roles in boy mode.” Rrrrrrright.

Without meaning to offend, of course, how the hell is anyone expected to know what mode Eddie’s in at any specific point? Is there a light on her/his forehead? Any run-of-the-mill conversation runs a 50-50 chance of causing upset, such are the vagaries of gender fluidity. And whatever happened to freedom of speech?

The incident, while of itself a particularly British comedy of manners, highlights the most disturbing adult culture war of modern times: the transgender craze. While Izzard is certainly no newcomer to the issue, having appeared on stage in make-up and women’s clothing for decades, taking part in the current debate over gender fluidity brings attendant responsibilities.

The comedian’s glib admission of he-to-she-to-he transition will have rung alarm bells among concerned parents and brave souls like Keira Bell, the now-23-year-old who, as a depressed isolated girl aged just 14, was given puberty-blocking drugs and testosterone but later regretted her decision.

To Keira, gender is not about pronouns, it’s about the irreversible damage the drugs she was administered as part of her now-reversed transition have done to her body. Those drugs cause irrevocable side effects, including facial hair, a masculine tone of voice, infertility, and impaired sexual function. To Keira, and to others just like her, who decide that they prefer the gender they were born with after all and will stick with it, these rash indulgences of youthful discontent have lifelong consequences. Eddie’s ‘gender’ may very well be ‘fluid’, but double mastectomies, hormone blockers and phalloplasties are not.

It’s not about bigotry, hate speech, or misgendering. It is about a global spike in the number of teenage girls who believe they have been ‘born in the wrong body’. When Eddie Izzard first took to the stage 35 years ago, this gender dysphoria was a condition predominantly affecting males. Now females comprise three of every four cases, with patient numbers having soared by 3,000 percent in a decade, according to journalist Abigail Shrier in her must-read investigative masterclass, ‘Irreversible Damage’.

Meanwhile, liberal activists and the media in the US and the UK cheer this supposed ‘enlightenment’, while adolescent girls exhibiting record levels of anxiety and clinical depression – expressed in spiralling rates of self-harm, anorexia and suicidal thoughts – undergo mutilating surgery and become lifelong patients thanks to the greed of medical capitalism and the ignorance of trans campaigners.

This chills any parent, like me, with a child in the highly vulnerable 11-to-18 age group, but it’s encouraging that we are not alone. JK Rowling has fallen foul of the transgender posse, which continues its attempts to discredit her, and so too has former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore, who was disgracefully ambushed by her own colleagues and subsequently quit the newspaper she had worked at for decades in disgust.

They have become embroiled in a very adult argument, dominated by trans women and gay men, in which questioning the rise in number of ‘trans children’ would mean fewer resources allocated to trans adults. And that cannot be allowed.

There is a long way to go in this battle, but Eddie Izzard’s magical gender switch which allows him to magically swap between girl and boy mode is not a part of it. Not everyone is enchanted with the idea of a showbiz celeb in the sunset years of his career welling up on TV having successfully insisted on being called ‘she’ and chalking it up as a ‘trans’ win.

It’s nothing of the sort. It’s childish ignorance masquerading as gender activism that ignores the incredibly complicated issue at the centre of this cultural debate and shames those who choose to argue grammatical semantics when the lives of teenage girls are at stake.

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