She was born what she remains, a woman. Her own wishes on the matter are irrelevant.

We know that many people feel that that they have been born in the wrong sex, and it is only right their misery should be alleviated, and as humanely as possible.

Thomas Beatie is different.

Deciding she wanted to be a man, she had her breasts surgically removed 10 years ago, and also started taking testosterone. But she left her genitals intact — still female, though with all those male hormones stimulating the follicles, I should imagine more badger than Brazilian. So there wasn't even a surgical pretence that this human was actually a man: she remained physically and biologically a woman.

Yet despite this, the state of Oregon recognised her as a male. On what basis? Aspiration? And does Oregon choose its surgeons and its plumbers and electricians on the same vacuous grounds of ambition over qualification?

Five years ago, she married Nancy, who was already a mother of two adult daughters. Then the bliss of the wedding night! Two vulvas side-by-side in the bed, one of them owned by a woman, the other by a 'man'. Ridiculous, meaningless twaddle.

The couple then decided to make the she-husband pregnant, and so they went out and bought some sperm. Nancy impregnated Thomas with a syringe.

Where did she put the syringe. Into his scrotal sac? No, up 'his' actual vagina.

The happy couple recently appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, where Nancy said that their roles would not be reversed once the baby is born.

"He's going to be the father and I'm going to be the mother." But this gibberish is precisely the very reverse of what is happening.

She impregnated 'him' with sperm. 'He' is going to have the baby.

The person who actually is going to bear the child is then going to be called the 'father'. As nauseating as the sentimentalised obstetric falsehoods central to this freak-show is the overall response of the media. They have universally referred to the mother as a he, though she has never for one second ceased to be a she.

The nadir was reached by Oprah Winfrey who joyfully described the entire affair as "a new definition of what diversity means for everybody" .

Is there a single part of that imbecilic observation which has any meaning whatsoever?

At its witless core stands the most evil word of our times: 'diversity', at whose ideological command all principle is abolished, all decency ridiculed, and all scientific fact abandoned.

Diversity obliges us to admit the cultural enemy and call him friend, to declare that all sexual activity is equal and of the same merit, and to celebrate the counter-factual idiocy of calling a woman a man, and then to express astonished joy that this person who is only a man through the media's ideological fantasies — miraculously! — is about to give birth. Thus have our notions of language, gender and reality been utterly corrupted by postmodern sexual politics, an intellectual farrago which is governed by posers, bigots, charlatans, fools, quislings and cretins.

So, academic feminists would probably argue that there is no such thing as a human reality without language, and that gender is a purely cultural construct, blahdee-blahdee-blah.

And only the utter victory of feminist/queer/transgender political cant across a largely unquestioning and supine media obscures or even eradicates the truths that every nursery-maid has always known about pre-socialised, pre-speech children.

Boys and girls are profoundly different.

No doubt the personnel of the Department of Intergender, Queer, Feminist, Black and Post Imperial Studies Department at UCD are ecstatic that Thomas Beatie is going to have a baby: proof to their minds that it is only patriarchal social conditioning which prevents men from getting pregnant. And maybe they have a point.

Why should the accidents of birth prevent any of us from being what we want to be?

The Eskimo on his floe might want to be the first Zulu woman to win the Nobel Prize for Nuclear Physics, in recognition of his poetry about Jane Austen.

And, of course, anyone can be a Zulu woman, even a North Pole walrus-hunter, provided he feels sufficiently Zuluesque. And when I say Jane Austen, I mean anyone who thinks, deep-down, that they really are Jane Austen.

And that could include Thomas Beatie, the male mother from Oregon who is — as Winfrey put it — "a new definition of what diversity means for everybody."

Coming soon: Thomas Beatie, The Tank Engine, whoo whoo. Or perhaps, who, who?