AM I the only person who doesn’t understand what appears to be our current national obsession with being gender-neutral?

While it’s easy to comprehend the plight of transgender individuals who were born in the wrong body and to sympathise, the whole gender-neutral argument has me confused.

Of course Nature gets it wrong sometimes and some people are left in the hell of being born a boy when they are innately a girl and vice versa. If they want to change their gender, this seems sensible and society now appears to accept this situation better than it once did.

However, Nature generally works and gives males and females the necessary, and very different, physical and emotional make-up.

What worries me now, as a parent and grandparent, is that some schools appear to be taking active steps on the gender-neutral front. A church secondary school in Cardiff has just spent a large amount of money on creating a block of so-called gender-neutral toilets which both boys and girls can use.

Interestingly, as well as parents being very vocal in their condemnation of this move (especially these days when schools have so little spare cash), the pupils seem to have rejected it as well and the boys use cubicles on one side and the girls on the other.

Then there is the case of another secondary school in Lewes, East Sussex which has banned girls from wearing skirts. One national newspaper reports that it is teachers who want the gender-neutral uniform, to stop girls dressing provocatively and because of the apparently increasing number of pupils confused about their gender.

Surely, if you insist that all pupils look like boys you are bound to be calling gender into question for them? No wonder there is confusion, not to mention what some girls may feel is a hostile environment.

While it is very important to respect gender sensitivity, the problem with young people is that they are very open to undue influence and pressure both from society and from their peers.

Growing up is tough enough without insisting that they have to question their gender as part of some sort of rite of passage. For the majority, this will not even be something they think about – until they are forced to. We need to question just where we are going with all this, and perhaps back off a little to allow a more measured approach.