Our current monomania is that of transsexualism which, as with all modern monomanias, is like the dawn that comes up like thunder outer Berkeley ’crost the Bay.  Yesterday, for example, I read in the Times that the National Association of Head Teachers in Britain has issued “guidance” (the kind that communist dictators used to issue when they visited locomotive repair workshops or sausage factories, their words of wisdom on every subject being taken down by scribes), to the effect that there should be books in all schools for children under the age of eleven about “transgender” parents, and that “trans people, their issues and experiences”, should be “celebrated across the school”. This raises the interesting question of how exactly one celebrates transsexualism: dancing round a maypole hung with packets of oestrogen or testosterone, perhaps?

My first thought on reading this was, “What about the poor apotemnophiliacs?”, to say nothing of the acrotomophiliacs. The former are those who wish to have an amputated limb in order to achieve sexual fulfilment, and the latter those who can achieve such fulfilment only with amputees. (There surely must be an internet dating site to put them in touch with each another. If not, perhaps it will be the next Facebook.) Why, I ask, should they be left out of consideration? Is not the concentration on transsexuals yet another example of quadrilimbism, the unthinking and prejudiced assumption that two arms and two legs is the norm? Surely the teaching of the Battle of Trafalgar and Treasure Island offers splendid opportunities for the little ones to learn to be more inclusive in their thoughts? And surely offering early amputation to the tots who feel apotemnophilia coming on would help to save them years of preventable anguish and normalise the condition, if it is permissible to call something a condition which is, after all, both normal and to be celebrated like the summer solstice.

Then, of course, there is necrophilia. Surely it would be easy enough to adapt “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” so as to enlarge the infants’ worldview:

If you go down to the morgue today
You’re sure of a big surprise …

After all, it is beyond reasonable doubt that necrophilia harms no one, a dead body not being a person any longer susceptible to harm. Indeed, compared with sexual relations with living human beings, necrophilia is trouble-free, if the right hygienic precautions are taken; and there is by definition no need for contraception. Time for the six-year-olds to celebrate, then.

Anthony Daniels