Trans kids: the must-have accessory for A-list celebs

There are some points a society gets to on various issues and you think: ‘Yes! This is just right! This bit could stop right here and it would be perfect!’ And then some bright-spark no-mark goes and thinks: ‘I know what – let’s take it a bit further and see what happens…’ The results are invariably rubbish.

‘Anti-racism’ goes from colourblindness to DEI. ‘Equality of the sexes’ becomes lots of simple-minded babble about Strong Women who shout ‘Yas, Kween!’ at random intervals. The labrador and the poodle become the labradoodle, just for the hell of it. (The man who invented the breed has since noted that healthy labradoodles are ‘few and far between’ and most are ‘crazy or have a hereditary problem’.)

Think of reproduction. What could have been a better idea for couples having trouble reproducing than adoption, whereby a child languishing in an orphanage would be chosen by an infertile couple and, in the best version of outcomes, told every day how ‘special’ they are to have been picked from all those other orphans. But then some greedy and maybe mad scientist invented surrogacy. Suddenly, the orphans could go hang. Narcissistic rich people started seeking babies who look like them. Then the gays got in on it. So, women are good for something, after all!

Gay surrogacy reached critical mass some years back when a storyline in the Archers had the resident Lovely Gay Couple, Adam and Ian, hiring a Bulgarian fruit-picker to have a baby for them. Lexi, the surrogate mother, has two children she is separated from due to economic circumstances. At this point, she is in the early stages of a relationship with a man who was once a racist but now understands that love sees no passport. After initial hostility to the fact that his lover would be renting out her womb to a pair of polenta-bothering ponces, former racist Roy saw the light and came to believe that there should be no just impediment to a Lovely Gay Couple’s right to Complete Their Family.

One becomes immune to headlines like the one in the Daily Mail this week: ‘Scott Mills reveals why he “can’t imagine” ever having children as he discusses life with husband’ – the ‘reveal’ obviously being that the Radio 2 presenter is a gay man married to another gay man. There is something risibly mimsy about men who can’t bring themselves to have sex with women but want to enjoy the benefits of reproduction. Can’t they just grit their teeth and do it the traditional way, as the late Paul O’Grady did? ‘People ask me how I’ve got a daughter and I say: “The same way your mum and dad had you!”. Someone held your chips and you cracked on with it in the bus shelter.’

But our celebrity class always finds a way around biology, often by ‘educating’ themselves. As Tom Daley told the Guardian: ‘One of the things I was so mortified about when I came out was that I’d never be able to have a family. But then obviously I did more research.’ For rich gay men, hiring out the body parts of women in desperate need of money has become not just respectable, but almost holy. Our little miracles!

Adoption enjoyed a brief trend again in the earlier part of the century, when rich and famous women started taking children from limited lives and offering them luxurious ones. It’s interesting that those women, such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie, who have taken the trouble to adopt children from impoverished backgrounds and improve their lives greatly, are often criticised for their altruism. Indeed, they get a good deal more flak for ‘collecting’ children than gay couples who use surrogates to pander to their own looky-likey whims. But now having children from foreign cultures is no longer fashionable among the gated-community liberal establishment of American showbiz. Now having a ‘trans child’ is all the rage.

There’s a notorious school in my beloved adopted hometown of Brighton, the Dorothy Stringer School (praised by Tatler as ‘the coolest secondary school in town’, where the ‘liberal vibe’ causes ‘the perfect balance between work and fun’), where it was calculated that a whopping 76 children identify as either ‘genderfluid’ or do not ‘identify’ with their ‘sex at birth’. Quoth the Mail: ‘The NHS area of Surrey, Kent and Sussex – which includes Brighton – has sent more children to the NHS gender service than the whole of Greater London combined.’ A Brighton teacher told The Times: ‘What’s happening is worrying and many of us know it, but nobody wants to speak up and get shot.’

What do we imagine the numbers are like in, I don’t know, Hollywood High? Or in the notoriously woke (and expensive) Ivy League colleges? Vast, I bet, and getting bigger every year. And add to this the fame factor – children of entertainment titans – and you bet you’ll get a whole lot of nauseating narcissism going on. After all, aren’t becoming a film star and ‘transitioning’ publicly literally the two most show-offy things you can do in the world? Imagine the state of the egos involved when one spawns another!

Latest to reveal themselves to a waiting world is Aaron (now Airyn) De Niro (you bet they’re some relation). The 29-year-old ‘aspiring model and voice actor studying to be a mental-health counsellor’ recently took ‘a break from her daily grind’ to talk to Them magazine about his journey to womanhood. Daily grind! I’d love to have seen De Niro Sr’s face when the glad tidings were broken. But as he’s got seven kids, he probably gets the sexes mixed up anyway.

Airyn will surely be the beau / belle of the next Nepo Baby Come As Your Authentic Self Ball, outshining the nonbinary / trans / genderfluid cohort spawn of Sting, Cher, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jennifer Lopez, Warren Beatty, Charlize Theron, Naomi Watts, Rosie O’Donnell, Sigourney Weaver and Cynthia Nixon, among others. They’ve all seemed very happy with spawning such useful members of society – or useful to journalists, at least.

In the Telegraph, Nicole Lampert writes that the reasons celebrity kids transition are ‘of course, deeply personal and complex. But some say the choices may also be linked to the particularly strange positions they inhabit as the progeny of the rich and famous.’

Lampert goes on to quote the very perceptive-seeming Sascha Bailey, son of photographer David, who says nepo babies are particularly prone to sex-switching because: ‘By becoming trans, you can break out of the predefined role you were born into and create a new space for yourself.’ His own experience is intriguing. In an unhappy marriage, he was about to have the op when he met a new woman, fell in love and decided to stay a man after all. What a unique and extreme compliment!

The piece also quotes James Esses, psychotherapist and founder of campaign group Just Therapy, who says the children of celebrities have ‘the luxury of time and money to indulge in a never-ending fixation on their self-identity’, arguing the phenomenon is almost uniquely the preserve of the world’s most privileged societies. ‘There is a reason why swathes of children from war-torn regions or facing abject poverty are not coming out as trans’, he says. ‘It’s because they have more pressing issues to focus their time and attention on rather than their self-image and self-identity. The children of celebrities, who have safety and security in abundance, have the luxury of being able to engage in endless navel-gazing.’

What’s more, as Esses also points out, ‘We know that “coming out” as “trans’’ is often met with celebration and positive reinforcement, and with celebrity culture, these things are on steroids’. All the parents who’ve produced famously gender-flexible offspring do indeed seem proud.

The notable exception is Elon Musk, who once claimed that the ‘woke mind virus’ had ‘killed’ his son, who now wishes to be known as a girl. Mind you, if you’re going to name your male offspring X Æ A-XII, Tau Techno Mechanicus, Seldon Lycurgus, Saxon, Romulus and Griffin, you can hardly blame at least one of them for opting for the relative normalcy of Vivian…

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.