The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ and that living as the opposite sex at a young age means “you are changing that child’s brain, you are building a new identity and by the time you are 12, puberty is the enemy”.

      Her concern is that, with the help of social media, there might be more awareness around trans, but we’re ignoring the issue of social contagion. Davies-Arai argues that it’s become cool to be “trans”, more accepted than being a lesbian, for example, which is one possible reason why referrals of teenage girls have increased so dramatically. She has heard of clusters of girls binding their breasts and saying they are boys; that parents complain their children are coming home saying, “I’m not sure if I am a boy or a girl,” after a class talk about transgender. “Any kid who is like I was — outside the crowd, a bit awkward, the ones who don’t fit in — all ‘gender nonconforming’ kids are included under the trans umbrella now and they are being given no alternative way of understanding their feelings of distress.”

      But what would she do if her traumatised seven-year-old child announced he/she wanted to change sex? “I would say, be quite casual about it. Don’t make a big fuss. Take it away from gender. Parents are advised now to take it very seriously — and I think that is the last thing you do. Address the bullying instead.”

      If Davies-Arai does have an agenda, it is a feminist one. Almost 1,000 natal females were referred to the Tavistock last year. Might this be more about girls struggling with puberty and their bodies? “There’s nobody asking, why do so many teenage girls not want to become women? I think that’s what we should be asking, rather than accepting the least likely answer, that they are really boys. It seems a way for us not to seriously look at the culture we are bringing our girls up in.”

      To some degree, Carmichael might have sympathy with this last argument. What she and her team try to figure out, over months and years, is, “How far are the physical changes one seeks motivated more around feeling that you fit in and are accepted by others?

      “You might think, gosh, what are we doing?” says Carmichael. “But there isn’t a right and a wrong. No one has the answers. It is an evolving picture with many voices contributing. All we can go on is that people who have taken this route feel this was the right thing to do.”

      In the documentary, Beard, the director, says to Ash: “Some people change their minds …”

      “Some people. Not me,” she responds. Do you think you’ll be a girl for ever, he asks. “Yes,” she replies. And turns a cartwheel.

A BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHTER IN THE BLOODIEST CONTEST EVER

       Rhys Blakely

      NOVEMBER 8 2016

      IT BEGAN WITH a ride down a golden escalator in the marble atrium of a New York skyscraper. It was June 16, last year, and Donald Trump was announcing a run for the White House. America had no idea what was about to hit it.

      Some of the crowd had been paid $50 apiece to turn up at that first campaign event and Mr Trump made headlines with a 40-minute speech in which he praised his golf courses, promised to build a “great wall” along the southern border and called Mexican immigrants rapists. The most wildly unpredictable US election in living memory had begun.

      In the months to come, Mr Trump would feud with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier, a Hispanic beauty queen, the leadership of his party, and the Pope. Defying the pundits, this former reality TV star, whose divorces and sex life had kept New York’s tabloids entranced for decades, would become the first presidential nominee of a major US party to have no experience in office since Eisenhower and the very first to have boasted about the size of his manhood in a presidential primary debate.

      On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton would face another populist. The former secretary of state announced her candidacy in April last year. She set off on an image-softening road trip to Iowa. The path ahead was rockier than she imagined. The rivals she feared most — Joe Biden, the vice-president, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator — stayed out of the race. But Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist senator from Vermont, would electrify Democrats suspicious of Mrs Clinton’s ethics, her ties to big business and her support for free trade.

      She endured a bruising primary while the FBI investigated a secret email system she used while leading the State Department. In February Mr Sanders effectively battled her to a tie in the Iowa caucus, the first primary contest, and then trounced her in New Hampshire. Mrs Clinton was running to be the first woman president, but young women shunned her candidacy.

      As the primary race headed to the South, black voters saved her campaign. But questions lingered over whether she could animate Obama voters. She emerged as the second most unpopular nominee of a major US party since polling began. The silver lining? She was running against the first.

      It was often predicted that Mr Trump’s candidacy would fade. Seventeen Republicans had thrown their hat into the ring: it was a good year to run as a member of the Grand Old Party. A Democrat had occupied the White House for two terms, and rarely has a party kept it for three. Most voters thought the country was on the wrong track. There were six past and current Republican governors and five senators in the race.

      Few thought that a brash, twice-divorced celebrity could make a mark. Early on, though, Mr Trump displayed two skills. The first was for attracting media coverage. His mastery of Twitter and of insults bamboozled his rivals. It was estimated that he garnered “free” media coverage worth $2 billion.

      The second skill was reaching voters who felt overlooked and left behind, especially white men without a college education. His candidacy coincided with a new scepticism about what he called “the siren song of globalisation”.

      Mr Trump’s diatribes against political correctness, free trade and illegal immigration electrified a section of the right. Supporters quickly forged a consensus on what made him special: his outspokenness, his business acumen, wealth that made him immune to cronyism and his outsider status.

      At his first “town hall” event, in the critical early voting state of New Hampshire, Jim Donahue, 65, a maths teacher, thought that Mr Trump could be “America’s Vladimir Putin — a nationalist to make the people think that the country could be great again”.

      It was not until the first Republican primary debate, on August 7 last year, that his rivals realised that Mr Trump was a threat. He was leading the polls and placed at the centre of the stage. His demeanour was glowering, his tan a striking shade of orange. In the opening seconds, the moderators asked the ten men who had qualified to participate if any would refuse to rule out running as an independent in the election.

      A theatrical pause — then one hand crept up: Mr Trump’s, of course. The crowd booed this challenge to Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not turn on a fellow Republican. The atmosphere was somewhere between game show and a bare-knuckle boxing match. It was riveting television. The audience broke records.

      That evening, aides of Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whom the Clinton campaign feared the most, realised something: untethered to an ideology, unburdened by a respect for facts, and willing to say things no other candidate would dare, Mr Trump was unmanageable.

      But that first debate also highlighted his flaws. Megyn Kelly, a star presenter, confronted him on how he had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”. Later that evening he was swarmed by a mob of reporters. Amid the mêlée, Mr Trump fumed. “I think Megyn behaved very nasty to me,” he said. That night he retweeted a СКАЧАТЬ