Once upon a time, a fox with a large bushy tail and a disingenuous smile changed his name from Reynard to ‘Chicken Little’ and applied for a post in a local hen coop. During the interview for the position, which was conducted by members of the Scottish National party, he wore red plastic wattles, which he had won in a Christmas cracker, sellotaped to his chin – although he needn’t have done so. Simply to identify as a chicken was more than enough for the thick-as-mince panel members.

However, it was pointed out that Reynard – to mis-species him for a moment – had used this ruse before and eaten almost an entire coop of chickens and given the rest as presents to close relatives. The chickens now awaiting the arrival of Reynard, and their fox-exclusionary supporters in the media, pointed this out with some alarm and the panel was forced to reconsider its decision. While Chicken Little was undoubtedly a chicken and definitely not a fox, he would not be allowed to take up new employment in a hen coop on account of his past record with regard to chickens.

It then became clear that several other foxes, all inexpertly disguised as chickens, were applying for the same position. As the furore grew, the thick-as-mince panel decided that they too would be excluded from the shortlist. But they still insisted these creatures were chickens. ‘If they are no different to chickens, why have they been excluded? Have any chickens who have been nasty to other chickens been excluded?’ a sharpish interviewer enquired. But even from the most senior of the thick-as-mince panellists, there was no coherent response.

Meanwhile everybody else in the country looked at this debacle and thought to themselves: ‘Nobody really believes Reynard is actually a chicken. Not Reynard, or his stupid supporters, or the panellists. They know very well that he is a fox. And that all foxes who have glued feathers to themselves and pretend to enjoy nibbling grain are also foxes and not chickens. But they can’t say so because that would destroy their ideology, an ideology which is of course insane.’

The morons in the SNP are not the first by some distance to suffer the shock and surprise of what happens when fantasy comes up against reality, as my colleague Alex Massie once accurately put it. (Incidentally, it was reading Alex’s excellent commentaries on this business that led me to refer to the SNP as ‘thick as mince’. He knows them far better than I do and I am willing to take his word for it about them being intellectually challenged.) While the politicians – and indeed much of the media – have been happy to go along with the absurdities demanded by the shrieking trans activists and the hyperbolic far left, when reality has reared its head organisations at the sharp end have suddenly been stricken by that most jejune of things: common sense.

Numerous sporting bodies, for example, have decided that trans women will no longer be allowed to compete against real women – because, of course, they realise that to allow them to do so will lead to the end of women’s sport in the not too distant future. But I dare say if you asked the corporate heads of these organisations if this meant that they did not consider trans women to be actual women, they would look appalled and say, ‘Heaven forefend, no we don’t think that at all.’ Well, in that case, why have you barred them from competing against women?

In other words, it is all a lie. A transparent and obvious lie. And yet almost everyone in a position of authority or who – like Sir Keir Starmer – wishes to be in a position of authority perpetuates it. Knowing that it is a lie.

I would go further and say that it is an evil and pernicious lie. What today we call trans women are not women at all, but men – except in a microscopically small number of cases where there genuinely is biological doubt. That doesn’t mean that they should be treated with unpleasantness and hostility, but it does mean that we should stop kidding ourselves. And by ‘we’, I mean ‘we’. Here’s a sentence from the BBC’s coverage of the Isla Bryson story: ‘A former classmate of transgender rapist Isla Bryson has said she feels “sick” after learning of her crimes.’ And here’s the Evening Standard: ‘The Scottish First Minister addressed the row over where Isla Bryson, 31, from Clydebank, should be imprisoned after being found guilty of two rapes carried out when she was a man.’

Pretty much every newspaper followed suit. They referred to Bryson as a ‘she’ or a ‘her’ – and have continued to do so. But Bryson is not a she or a her. He is a man in a cheap wig and some lippy. Aside from being a lie, this is also doublethink. And it is only by employing doublethink that the ludicrous agenda pursued by what is, in the end, a very small proportion of the population is enabled to advance. It is the old cliché: tell a lie for long enough and people will start believing it. How the media reports such stories is important – and the journos concerned should know that their first duty is to the truth. It does not matter how much they might wish we could all be whatever we want to be and be treated as such. That does not accord with the facts. There is no such thing as ‘my truth’ as distinct from ‘the truth’.

And one more thing. An individual does not own, or have control, over the pronouns used to describe him or her. Nor does the government, or the police, have any right to impose upon us a form of grammar which directly contradicts the truth. Address this issue and the madness might soon come to an end.