Melanie McDonagh

There has been an equivocal reaction, wouldn’t you say, to the Church of England’s pronouncement that little boys should be allowed to wear tiaras and high heels at school, while issuing a helpful form to encourage teachers to report transgender bullying; the new rules, it says, are designed to 'challenge homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying'; (the second is new to me). Stonewall – which has changed its remit quite a bit from the old days when it campaigned just for gay rights – has welcomed the move. But as you’d expect, Christian evangelicals have taken a more dusty view. It’s hardly new for the CofE, though.

We all know, I think, what we’re meant to make of the Cambridge don who sent round a memo to his students to tell them they’ve got to do some work only to find the snowflake undergraduates calling his remarks 'extremely damaging' with mental health activists getting especially worked up. Most sensible people will feel that he deserves some sort of award. Personally, I’m with the students. Anyway, to flesh out the details, Professor Eugene Terentjev, plainly a scientist of the old school – he’s Russian – has sent an email to his undergraduate natural science students at Queens’ College to tell them that: 'You can ONLY do well (i.e.

Brian Sewell once wrote an article about abortion headlined: ‘Women, the killers in our midst.’ He got an awful lot of flak for it, which he took in his stride. He came to mind during the screening of Abortion On Trial, the documentary hosted by Anne Robinson and screened this week to mark the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act. In it, one of the participants described abortion as murder. ‘Are nine of us here… murderers?’ asked Mrs Robinson with a flourish, to which the only tactful answer was no, of course not. Brian would unhesitatingly have said yes. Abortion is one of those issues about which dissent is not normally socially permissible right now; see what happened to Jacob Rees-Mogg.

My old college, formerly known as New Hall, is women-only for its undergraduates. But now the term is expanding, as so often these days, to include anyone who, at the time of application, 'identifies as female', as well as the non-binary, those who really can’t make up their minds. During my time in college, I shared a room with another girl; quite what it would have been like to share with someone aspiring to being a woman I don’t know…presumably entirely non-threatening but a bit odd. The point about this women-only college is that it was meant to provide a bit of gender balance to the male majority in the overall university population – which must by now be getting near parity.

Is it possible that London commuters are now unable to tell the difference between the cry of God is Great, Allahu Akbar - a sentiment that unfortunately accompanies every IS atrocity - and the actual Bible? It seems like it from the reaction on the Shepperton to Waterloo service at 8.30am yesterday. As one report put it, 'a man with a rucksack began reciting what seemed to be passages from the Old Testament. He apparently declared homosexuality and pre-marital sex to be a sin.' Or as one commuter put it, 'Some nutter starts reciting verses from the Bible… and causes such panic that some people have forced open the doors and jumped onto the tracks. He recited lines about homosexuality and sex outside marriage being a sin. God gave his only son for our sins etc.

You have to try really hard to get any idea of what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby actually said in his interview for the BBC Today programme, the one where he said the BBC had acted with less integrity than the Church of England or the Catholic church when it came to the abuse of children by Jimmy Savile. You may well have heard that part because it is what the BBC itself reported on its own news broadcasts and duly, every other news outlet followed its lead. And the reason you can’t put the remarks in context is that the interview itself hasn’t yet been broadcast – it’s part of a series of interviews with prominent people for the 60th anniversary of the programme next month.

Last December, Lavinia Woodward threw a laptop at her boyfriend and stabbed him in the lower leg with a breadknife, and injured two of his fingers. She then tried to stab herself with the knife before he disarmed her. For unlawful wounding, this medical student at Christchurch Oxford, could have got a three-year prison sentence; instead she got a 10-month sentence suspended for 18 months on Monday. The judge, Ian Pringle, when he first heard the case, observed that a custodial sentence would harm her career. Quite. And he declared, as he handed down the suspended sentence, that there were 'many, many mitigating factors' in the case, and the injuries inflicted were 'relatively minor'.

There are any number of reasons to feel irritated about the reaction to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s frankly expressed views about abortion – which hold that it’s wrong in all cases, including rape. One is the entirely characteristic, reflexive intolerance of his opponents: see Suzanne Moore’s piece in the Guardian to the effect that the abortion stuff is all of a piece with being a quasi fascist, that being a Catholic pro-lifer is part and parcel of being 'a neoconservative bigot', and that his views on benefits and zero hours contracts are more of the same package. Except of course they’re not; they’re separate issues. But part of my own irritation is to do with the nature of the debate itself.

Which, do you reckon, is more repellent – the decision by Tower Hamlets, a borough rotten to the marrow, to place a Christian child with two successive Muslim foster parents of uncompromising Islamic views, or its reaction to the Times’ coverage of the story yesterday, with a council spokesman saying that its fostering service “provides a loving, stable home for hundreds of children every year”? Both, I’d say, are par for the course.

Getting agitated, are you, about declining sperm counts? The Guardian called the fall in numbers 'shocking'; for the Telegraph, never one to underplay these things, 'Sperm count collapse could spell doom for humanity'. Really? It feels like one of those stories about species extinction, helped by the undeniable resemblance of spermatozoa to tadpoles. You may have noticed that women are markedly less agitated about all this than men, at least the three I spoke to. For once – hah – it’s not women who have all the angst about procreation. All the Bridget Jones business about body clocks, biological sell-by dates and egg freezing was formerly the preserve of women. Now men can share the grief…welcome, progenitors.

God, she’s on a bit of a run, Justine Greening, isn’t she? A day after it turns out she wants to let people change gender merely on their say so, without regard to their possession of wombs or gonads or XX chromosomes, she’s set her sights on the CofE and its retrograde attitude to gender – actually, come to think of it, she’s probably got the entire Christian communion in her sights. All in her capacity of Education Secretary and Women and Equalities Minister. She observed in an interview on Sky: 'I think it is important that the church in a way keeps up and is part of a modern country. I wouldn’t prescribe to them how they should deal with that.

Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook could be to its users what churches are to congregations: it could help them feel part of ‘a more connected world’. That got a dusty response. Facebook as church, eh? So the man who helped an entire generation to replace real friends with virtual ones and online communities is sounding off about people feeling unconnected? Cause and effect or what? He wasn’t quite touting Facebook as an alternative church.