British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy guidelines say that it “is important not to assume being a woman necessarily involves being able to bear children, or having XX sex chromosomes, or breasts”.

According to the guidance, “being a woman in a British cultural context often means adhering to social norms of femininity, such as being nurturing, caring, social, emotional, vulnerable, and concerned with appearance”, although “in some northern working-class contexts, femininity is associated with strength and aggression”. Women “on the autistic/aspergic/ADHD spectra ... may struggle to express emotions, or with social situations.” They are regarded as “exceptions to the standard definition”.

They have stopped short of advising that “women do have penises”. But Professor Kathleen Stock of the University of Sussex, who was described as a transphobe by the university student union after arguing against allowing self-defined trans women into women’s spaces, described the guidance as “terrible, internally incoherent metaphysics”. The guidance was later changed to remove references to “northern women”. But significantly, references to autism and other men’s and women’s attributes remained – even though a high proportion of those on the autistic spectrum report feelings of gender confusion.

As for the “typical woman” profile, columnist Melanie McDonagh now self-identifies as male, since as well as adhering to the BACP definition of masculinity – “competitive, ambitious, independent, rational, tough, sexual, confident, dominant, taking risks and caring about their work”, she loves “P G Wodehouse, which apparently women don’t; I used to like end-of-year exams as opposed to course work; I would rather eat my toenails than read Marian Keye”.  

She rightly concludes that “this is nuts”, but it is also the premise of the Gender Recognition Bill, which the Government is now studying. It will allow anyone to change gender with full legal recognition without the formality of a doctor’s certificate.

Already we are seeing the disastrous outcomes of embracing this philosophy as it was reported that most sexual assaults in changing rooms occur in unisex facilities. Furthermore, in the determination to prove that sexual differences are mere social constructs, women will be permitted to apply for close combat roles in Royal Marines for the first time. The BBC tirelessly promotes women’s football, although researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York found that the sport “could be more dangerous for women than men because their brains are more susceptible to damage from heading the ball.”

Moreover, with gender theory holding that psychology trumps biology -- that biological sex is meaningless, and that parents are responsible for shaping their children’s “gender” -- well-meaning parents are trying to shape their offspring, especially girls, to be more like the traditional view of boys, by emphasising their outgoing qualities and risk-taking attributes, while attempting to deflect their infant minds from a preoccupation with appearance. Columnist Celia Walden said that “like the writer Marina Fogle – who explained a couple of days ago why she won’t call her daughter ‘pretty’ – I have stuck to avoiding the ‘P’ word around my six-year-old.”  

She fails to mention whether, in order to even things up, boys should be called pretty, but it is becoming alarmingly clear that parents are being corralled into this Marxist-feminist inspired social engineering project, which bears a strong resemblance to what was imposed in the early years of the Soviet Union. In their obsession with equality, women were dragooned into doing heavy manual work, easy divorce was introduced and abortion reached horrifying levels; predictably, the country was soon facing the problem of exhausted women, irresponsible men and gangs of rootless children, and these policies were reversed after a few years as the negative implications for national defence became clear.

Strangely enough, Western Marxists have never expressed any fears about their own nations’ ability to defend themselves, from foreign threats but also from the threat posed by a degenerating society. As for the rest of us, we have historical warnings aplenty from every Communist experiment ever undertaken, but it seems we will be too busy avoiding calling our daughters pretty to notice that the way of life they promoted was really pretty ugly.

Ann Farmer lives in the UK. She is the author of By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign (CUAP, 2008); The Language of Life: Christians Facing the Abortion Challenge (St Pauls, 1995), and Prophets & Priests: the Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (St Austin Press, 2002).