What kind of warped teacher brands a toddler transphobic?

The nursery school number comes up on your phone and you panic. Of course you do.

The worst-case scenario is quickly discounted. Your three-year-old hasn’t had a close encounter with a concrete step or fallen off the climbing frame. He or she is, however, in trouble. A lot of trouble.

Your mind’s running wild. Little Johnny can be rambunctious. He doesn’t always adhere to the “sharing is caring” mantra you’ve tried to instil in him. But it’s not about either of those things. No, your three-year-old is to be suspended – suspended – for “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity”. He’s not a tantrum-thrower or a rough-player: he’s a little transphobe.

As with so many scenarios in the age of extremist gender ideology, you couldn’t make it up. I wish I had, but Department for Education data seen by The Telegraph clearly show that this incident actually happened. In 2022-23, a child, aged either three or four, was indeed suspended from a state nursery in this country, after being accused of being transphobic or homophobic. And if that child’s parents are reading this now, please get in touch and tell us what particular form your toddler’s “abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity” took? Because I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’re struggling to understand.

Did he or she call a female classmate a “girl”? Did they ask Mr Davis, the expressive arts teacher, why he was wearing a skirt or query the theme in Michael Hall’s Red (a trans parable masquerading as a children’s story in which a red pencil identifies as blue)?

Transphobic tots aren’t as uncommon as you might think, as it turns out. According to the same set of statistics, 94 pupils at state primary schools were suspended or permanently excluded for transphobia and homophobia in 2022-23. These included 10 pupils from Year 1 (five- to six-year-olds) and three from Year 2 (six- to seven-year-olds). And to think that all this bigotry took place within the confines of the school day! Goodness knows what these menaces to society got up to in their spare time. They were probably out with their neo-Nazi gangs smashing windows and spray-painting hateful messages across LGBTQ+ community centres.

Then there are the miniature sexual harassers, the pocket-sized Harvey Weinsteins. You may remember a parliamentary report last November prompting the double-take-worthy headline: “More and more schoolkids being sent home for sexually assaulting classmates.” I certainly remember baulking at the first few statistics. How could cases of children being sent home for sexually assaulting or harassing their classmates have more than doubled in a year? Then I reached the part where I was informed that “even in primary schools, there were 618 suspensions for sexual misconduct in 2023, with some as young as four displaying disturbing behaviour”.

What’s “disturbing” here – what’s disgusting, disgraceful, shameful and warped to the nth degree – is not the three-year-old “transphobe” or the four-year-old “predator” but the adult capable of projecting these concepts, narratives and beliefs onto our children. And how can there be more than one of these freaks out there? These people are so far gone they’re on a par with the cult members who insist newborn babies must be purged of evil. So unquestioning is their loyalty to “the cause”, so blinded are they by their own ideology, that they are members of a cult.

For that reason, they won’t understand how damaging this latest story will be to the cause. Remember that children – and children’s mental and physical wellbeing – are supposedly at the centre of their argument. Hence the despicable question levelled at parents querying the necessity of so-called “gender-affirming treatment” for their child: “Would you rather a dead daughter or a living son?” (Never mind that the treatment has been proved not to alleviate suicide risk in the youth who seek it out – this lot doesn’t get stuck down in the weeds with facts). What, out of interest, does branding a four-year-old “transphobic” or expelling a six-year-old for “sexual harassment” do to that child’s mental health?

Yesterday, Lord Young – the director of the Free Speech Union – said: “If your ideology is so rigid it justifies you punishing toddlers for not complying with it, that’s a powerful argument for discarding it in favour of something less dogmatic.” I’d go a step further and say that once you start punishing toddlers for ideological non-compliance, you’ve not just lost the room but your integrity – and any hope of regaining it.