It was King Lear who said, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child’. I always think of it whenever I see the latest nasty little jibe at JK Rowling from one of the mediocre actors whom her novels shot to stardom. Now Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe has opined – more in sorrow than in anger, no doubt, with a caring, sharing smile on those sensitive lips – that adults concerned about children changing gender are ‘condescending’. More specifically, he ‘affirmed’ the beliefs of six trans and nonbinary children at a discussion organised by LGBTQ charity The Trevor Project this week, saying: ‘There are people who also have a slightly condescending, but well-meaning attitude of “People are young… and it is a huge decision”.’ According to Radcliffe, ‘We can trust kids to tell us who they are’.

Commenting on the difference between his childhood and the childhoods of da kidz he was gettin’ down wiv, Radcliffe said: ‘I always knew I was a boy because that was a thing I grew up knowing.’ Or perhaps this was because you were part of the last generation to grow up in an age when girly boys and boyish girls weren’t carted off to have any potential gayness transed away? What a loss to The Brains Trust this man is.

It sounds lovely to say ‘listen to kids’. And no one wants to say that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. (Of course not – it’s gender-critical women, the people who want single-sex spaces and single-sex sports, who should be seen and not heard, silly!) But there’s a reason that children don’t have the same rights as adults – why they can’t get a tattoo, have sex, get married, buy alcohol, fight / die for their country or drive a car. It’s because they don’t know who they are or what they’re doing yet.

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