Solzhenitsyn said that the line separating good and evil runs through every human heart. The line separating freedom from censorship, pleasure from licence, and knowledge from corruption, is often harder to define. No society in history, though, even the most liberal ones, has allowed sexually explicit knowledge to be propagated to all sections of the community. And the ultimate no-go area in societies throughout history – those with pretensions to decency, anyway – is violating the idea that children’s psychological development and naivety should be protected. Indulging in philosophical argument about childhood innocence is seen as something reprehensible.

This is no longer the case, because an unusual debate, sotto voce, is happening in liberal democracies across the world, and the controversy, can, in almost perfect form, be encapsulated in a book, which has both vociferous defenders and ardent critics, called This Book is Gay by the transwoman Juno Dawson, who is formerly a gay man named James Dawson.

The book’s target audience is LGBTQ+ young adults aged between twelve and fifteen. Knowledge is power, and teenagers’ learning about sex and sexuality is a vitally important part of becoming an adult. What information should be included in such a book, though, is where the problems arise. And it’s at this juncture that commonly held beliefs about childhood innocence come in contact with entirely new conceptions of logic, epistemology and ethics.

The view, unfortunately, from this new and only recently fashionable philosophical vantage point, is troubling, ideological and, at the very least, situated on a dividing line that blurs the distinction between necessary sexual knowledge for adolescents and ideas that are definitively unsuitable for the artless sensibilities of children.

The book, for example, contains explanations of ‘rimming’ – licking a person’s anus; ‘scat’ – eating faeces; ‘douching’ – washing out your anus before sex; ‘golden showers’ – urinating on someone; a ‘glory hole’ – a hole in a wall, usually in public, where a man ‘pokes’ his penis and where – the author does not mention this – fellatio is performed by an unknown man or woman; ‘bottom/passive-top/active’ – the partner who ‘receives’ or ‘gives’ during gay sex.

Should adults or older teenagers, sixteen and above, have access to this information? Yes, absolutely. What adults do in private is nobody’s business. Should children be exposed to this material? The answer is no. The problem, though, is that ‘transgressing’ or ‘blurring’ the boundaries of commonly accepted morality is a central feature of both queer theory and postmodernism.

One ironic aspect of this debate is that the people who most advance the contemporary craze about mental health are zealous ideologues in favour of explicit sex education. Everything that exists, remember, triggers these people. Informing a thirteen-year-old, for example, about ‘rimming’, according to the self-identified psychological standards of woke ideology, should be the mental health equivalent of a thermonuclear explosion. But it’s not, because mental health has been weaponised as a tool to further a political agenda, and if you’re on the wrong side of the debate, the issue of mental health does not arise.

The problems lie, as they usually do in contemporary debate, at the crossroads where language and reality meet. How, for example, do we define ‘young adult’? In the publishing industry the term is a hazy concept. Young adult can be categorised as, depending on the context, adult, young adult, junior fiction or junior non-fiction. The classification is continually and arbitrarily blurred. To be clear, it’s immaterial, in a free society, whether an adult reads about kinky sex; but children or adolescents below the age of sixteen, in sex education classes, do not need to know, and shouldn’t be taught, about ‘golden showers’ or ‘glory holes’, irrespective of their sexual orientation.

Another problem with This Book is Gay and hence with the philosophy underlying the book’s message is the absence of a coherent understanding of truth. This is not accidental. The usual feminist, postmodern shift between the real and the subjective is used throughout the book to advance its agenda. When biological facts can be marshalled to give heft to the ideology, they’re grasped with the enthusiasm of the elect, but when real, not activist science undermines the agenda, then subjective feelings are paramount. Also, the logical fallacy of making a part represent the whole is used liberally throughout the book. ‘Sexual preference and gender are fluid, meaning just because you feel one way now, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel the same in five years’ time.’ This is true of a minority of the population, and good luck to them, but it isn’t true of most people. Another problem is the deliberate equivocation between the term’s ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. One minute you’re ‘born this way’ and the next it’s a ‘choice’, the latter of which is always valid. Nowhere is a controversial idea stated clearly in the book that is not refuted or ironically undermined on another page. Logical consistency, remember, is an imposition of dead white heterosexual males.

Then there’s the subtle but deliberately deceitful use of citing positive claims about a favoured constituency as absolute truth while decrying criticism as discrimination. According to the author, in one of the few, unintentional, I should stress, hilarious sections of the book, gay men have ‘thicker’ and ‘longer’ penises than straight men. How a study could be devised to prove such a contention is beyond the powers of Zarathustra. The sample size in such a survey would have to be gargantuan. Men, as is commonly known, become strangely innumerate when measuring their genitals. Moreover, doctors’ surgeries or scientific establishments are not usually places where erections are commonplace. Also, men eager to have their penises measured are not normal, in more ways than one.

What do free speech advocates, though, who abhor censorship, do when faced with a situation where rights and duties are in conflict and a stark line must be drawn between childhood innocence and adult responsibility? The answer is a simple one: demarcate in a clearly defined legal way the acceptable knowledge that children, adolescents and adults can access in books, entertainment and exhibitions. This has been a commonly accepted idea for decades. Also, question the motives of anyone who breaks this convention. At the very least, the person’s judgement is impaired; at the very worst, well, I’ll leave that to the reader’s discretion.