Honestly, the young people I speak to seem to take it all in stride. Gay, non-binary, transgender... they just have friends, and some of those friends present differently. On the one hand, I’m a little envious because I grew up in a time and place where things could become unpleasant if you showed yourself to be different... but when I see unconscious acceptance it makes me smile. Not the enforced political correctness of the radical left, but the indifference to conformity and nonconformity.

Haven’t you wondered why our community is ageing out and there are so few teens and twenty-somethings in the TG fiction sphere? It’s because they don’t need the fantasy: they have the real freedom. Not everywhere, of course, but it’s certainly becoming the norm in the liberal West. The moral panic of the conservatives is their own problem. I remember when playing Dungeons and Dragons was going to make us all satanists; when killer bee swarms were going to make swathes of the south uninhabitable; when communists (or perhaps homosexuals) were going to wreck our way of life. It’s all clickbait: the upcoming generation are actually very cool.

Bx