It may seem, at times, that the left has lost its mind when it comes to transgenderism – either blindly supporting its agenda or dutifully keeping council. But there have been a handful of leftist critiques over the years of both the reality and politics of transgenderism. These have been mostly from old-school feminists like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys. In the past month, there have been two – an essay by Lionel Shriver in Prospect and an article in The Antioch Review by the gay writer Daniel Harris. The latter has caused the literary left to fly into a tizzy.

“While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition,” Harris writes in the piece, “I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching one’s gender is a mass delusion.” It is impossible to change one’s gender, regardless of how many body parts one chops off. “Gender is not ‘assigned,'” he writes, and, therefore, cannot be “reassigned” by superficial plastic surgery. “It is revealed, first by the transducer of an ultrasound machine massaging a besmeared and distended belly and then by the obstetrician as he dangles the wailing infant by its feet… One can no more change one’s gender than one’s species,” pop psychology and postmodern theory be damned.