Trigger warning: This post contains serious content, which might shock readers expecting my usual flippancy.

Today I am a camel, and I want to tell you about the straw that broke my back last week.

Like all straws, it may seem, viewed in isolation, a wispy, lightweight thing, but I would suggest that, taken as the representative of the thousands of other straws in this particular camel-load, it is a very weighty matter indeed.

I want to explore with you the meaning of a good old Anglo-Saxon four-letter word: ‘safe’. Not much to get excited about there, you might think. It is, ostensibly, a fairly simple word with a straightforward meaning.

Come with me, if you will, to an unnamed private girls’ school in England where, a few months ago, a female member of the House of Lords was invited to speak to the sixth form (pupils in their last two years of high school). During the event, the speaker took questions, and one pupil questioned what she understood to be the speaker’s implication that (I quote the pupil’s words here): “critical theory took precedence over biological reality in defining women. When I questioned that, she said it wasn’t an issue of semantics. She said trans people don’t have basic human rights in this country.”

Without having been present, I can’t, of course, categorically state what the mood of the room was. However, I can offer you the assessment of the pupil who asked the question and the peer who answered it.

The pupil: “Afterwards I spoke to her and said I’m sorry if I came across as rude. We parted amicably.”

The peer: “I spoke about a wide range of human rights issues. One young woman challenged some of my views and was treated with the same courtesy as everyone else who took part. I was not aware of any consequences from our interactions and thought that we had parted on amicable terms.”

Later the same day, in the sixth-form common room, the pupil was surrounded by up to 60 other pupils who shouted, screamed and spat at her, accusing her of being transphobic. She escaped and collapsed, unable to breathe properly. Despite some initial support from teachers, the pupil was later told that she would have to work in the library if she said anything provocative in lessons, and she subsequently faced bullying and accusations of transphobia from pupils throughout the school. She spent break and lunch times in the library, rather than the common room. The girl left school in December and is now studying at home.

The story broke this week when a teacher at the school wrote an account of the incident for a blog published by Transgender Trend, a group whose website states: “We are an organisation of  parents, professionals and academics based in the UK who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender, including the unprecedented number of teenage girls suddenly self-identifying as ‘trans’ (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria or ROGD). We are also concerned about legislation which places transgender rights above the right to safety for girls and young women in public toilets and changing rooms along with fairness for girls in sport.”

The teacher wrote: “There was a time when the school invited in Christian and other religious speakers to address moral and ethical issues and to provide food for thought and contemplation. It was usually the practice to follow these up with Q&A sessions during which the students could share their own feelings and opinions on the issues, and even disagree if they wanted to.”

He added that it was the similarity of transgender ideology to religious fundamentalism that “alerted me to the danger of what has been going on in our schools over the last few years. It was the whispered and frequent use of the terms transphobe and transphobic during that after-school activity that alerted me to the depressing fact that these girls were going along with the narrative that our heretic was, as far as they were concerned, indeed a heretic — and that she was thoroughly deserving of the roasting that she had just received before caving in and running off in a panicked and hyperventilating state.”

All of this is very disturbing. However, it saddens me to say that, since I have been following recent developments in Britain, none of it is very surprising to me. What disturbed me even more is what happened next, which was that the school headteacher issued a statement apologising for the school’s failure to maintain a “safe space” for students.

I thought this was simply a rather lame reaction, until I realised that the school was apologising not to the girl who was attacked for asking a question but rather to the 60 screaming, spitting attackers who have effectively driven her out of school. It was claiming that allowing the pupil to ask a polite and reasonable question about the relative significance of biological reality and critical theory in determining the sex of a woman made the school an unsafe space for the 17- and 18-year-old pupils.

In exploring what is going on here, I would like to call three literary expert witnesses. My first is Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

So, when the school authorities appropriated the word ‘safe’ in the phrase ‘safe space’, what did they choose it to mean? I suggest they meant something like ‘a place where you will never be exposed to a view that challenges the orthodoxy as determined by mob-rule’. However, that is not what ‘safe’ means, and certainly not in the context of an educational institution. I will return to this point later to explore it further.

My second witness is George Orwell, in 1984.

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

So, the ‘safe space’ that the school wishes to create is actually a dangerous space, a space where independent thought and open discussion are risky perilous activities. The school authorities deliberately choose this phrase as an exercise in doublethink because of the effect it has on the minds and actions of the students.

The time has come, I think, for us to examine what the purpose of a school is. There are, of course, several possible answers to that question, not necessarily exclusive or mutually incompatible. Bearing in mind that this particular school is a private school, I would suggest that some possible answers are:

To prepare its pupils to be leaders of society.
To develop in its pupils the ability to think logically and critically.
To foster in its pupils independence of thought.
To prepare its pupils to make intelligent choices in their future lives.

An essential part of all that, I would argue, is exposure to a range of different ideas. That, surely, is what distinguishes education from indoctrination. We presumably want the younger generation to have principles by which they live, but equally surely we want them to understand what leads different people to hold different principles, to adopt the principles that they believe in consciously and after due consideration, and to be able to defend those principles through reasoned argument.

My final witness is John Milton, whose Areopagitica is a pamphlet arguing against censorship and licensing of printing. It is an impassioned philosophical defence of the principle of the right to freedom of speech and expression, and a beautifully wrought piece of prose.

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

It is no bad thing to be taken out of your comfort zone, and to have your views challenged. The action of defending those views can clarify them for you and can reinforce your own conviction in them, or, alternatively, lead you to realise that you do not hold those views as strongly as you assumed you did.

Now, I don’t for one moment believe that the headteacher or the school authorities believe in the position that they have officially taken. They are all people who benefitted from a liberal education themselves, who were trained in critical thinking and in engaging in vigorous debate in defence of their beliefs.

No, theirs is, I am sure, an act of craven cowardice; they believed (with considerable justification, it must be said) that taking a stand against the mob that drove a classmate out of school would create so much trouble that they preferred to take the path of least resistance. Rather than disciplining the wrongdoers, and asserting the true function of the school, they chose to allow one innocent to suffer.

This is precisely why this single small act has affected me so deeply. The path of least resistance taken by the school will, I fear, be echoed – indeed, is already being echoed – in educational institutions, and workplaces, throughout Britain. In this way, transgender ideology will become further entrenched as the new orthodoxy.

The only way that this can be avoided, it seems to me, is if, very soon, a critical mass of educators and employers all act together to reject this ideology. Some brave individuals are standing firm, but, unfortunately, as individuals, they can all be, and indeed are all being, picked off one by one. University professors, school teachers, other professionals and industry managers are all being dismissed and are finding themselves unemployable.

Within a short time, no school-leaver or university graduate who rejects transgender ideology will choose to become a teacher. Once that happens, the conditions will exist for an entire generation of schoolchildren to be officially raised in the ideology.

I am very happy that I am not the parent of school-age children in Britain, and I worry about the world that my grandchildren will grow up into. I try to live in their moment of innocence, but it is not always easy.