The NUS and the transgenderism debate that wasn't

What is missing from the discussion is the fact that what some are calling gender confusion is often a part of the normal development of a child's sexual identity.

Children and young teenagers experience a wide range of emotions and questions regarding gender identity and roles at different stages of their growth.

Psychologists have long known, for example, that children and teenagers will at one time or another feel physically attracted to the opposite sex. In most cases, though clearly not all, these feelings are isolated, intermittent and unsustained; they emerge as a natural part of the exploration of identity.

The same is apparently true of other core aspects of our personalities. The establishment of a sense of self, especially within children, is a process, not an event.

For certain children, this inner experimentation may express itself outwardly in forms of behaviour which don't seem appropriate to their gender. In these cases, little boys might like to dress up as girls and vice versa.

Some may even request that they be treated as members of the opposite sex.

Does this mean that they would benefit from gender reassignment? It may simply mean that they need empathy, patience and support from parents and carers who understand that gender identity is, to an extent, fluid in all children - at least for a time.

This fluidity, of course, may be prolonged, this confusion further entrenched, if the surrounding culture ignores it, telling the young – and their parents – that radical gender reassignment is the best and most celebrated option for them.

Might a perceived rise in the popularity of gender realignment among children be due to the fact that parents are confused about how gender identity emerges in the first place?

Yes, there will be individual cases in which children exhibit prolonged behaviour that breaks with the norm. These children will need to be treated with respect and empathy, their cases looked at with an emphasis on compassion.

They must not be used as stalking horses for one side or the other in a debate about public ethics or morality.

Yet a society that refuses to call anything 'normal' is self-evidently a society without norms, which are a core component of identity and culture. It is a society which weakens itself by, as a default, treating exceptions as norms.