A choice must be made. Either you stand with the censors or you ally yourself with those who appreciate the importance of liberty. It is beyond depre… - Alex Massie

But as this case – and its portents for the future – demonstrates, those concerns could scarcely be more pertinent or more valid. Ultimately, this is a disagreement between fantasists and realists and it is deplorable to realise that the majority of Scottish parliamentarians are signed-up members of the fantasy club. Well, they cannot pretend they have not been warned of the likely consequences which flow from their delusions. This is meagre comfort but in mad times such scraps of consolation are all that is available.

Like other ministers, [Shirley-Anne] Somerville is keen that voters forget what the Scottish parliament's gender recognition reforms actually meant. They would rather you ignore the reality that the bill created a situation in which, as a legal matter, someone might be one sex in Dumfries but a different one in Carlisle. If Scotland were an independent state, a rump UK government's disinclination to recognise gender recognition certificates in Scotland might not matter much but — at the risk of saying something dangerous here — it does seem sensible for the definition of a "man" and a "woman" to be consistent within and throughout a single nation state.

Cherry is accused of "transphobia", a term now so broad it has become functionally meaningless. If Cherry is transphobic then so is reality. The expansive definition of transphobia favoured by trans activists now decrees that lesbians who do not wish to sleep with natal males are bigots. Suggesting that homosexuality means same-sex attraction is — apparently — a transphobic "dogwhistle". This is a very modern kind of madness but there we have it.