The Galileo story, as embedded in the general consciousness, is that Galileo looked through his new-fangled telescope at Jupiter, saw 4 moons orbiting it, and realised that he finally had proof that not everything orbited Earth… that we weren’t the centre of the universe. The overbearing church put him on trial for this heresy, found him guilty, and forced him to recant his views. Defiant to the last, Galileo tells them E pur si muove, normally translated these days as, “Fuck you, Mr Pope, you can silence me, but the truth remains true.”

In that form, it has become a parable for everybody who believes that they are the little guy, but with the facts on their side. 

In a way it’s a strange position to want to be in. Sure, Galileo is revered now and the four moons he discovered are collectively named after him, but he was hardly a winner at the time. After his trial he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Everything he’d ever written was banned by the church, with his final work having to be printed in protestant Holland. His parting quip, if it was delivered at all, almost certainly wasn’t delivered as defiantly as it is in the popular imagination. When the court has just commuted your sentence of imprisonment at the hands of the inquisition to house arrest, but absolutely has the power to reverse that, and throw a spot of torture or death into the mix, you tend not to leave the building yelling, “Urban warfare now!”

Nor was the church’s position as irrational as we like to think. They did support geocentrism – the belief that the Earth lies at the centre of the universe – for scriptural reasons, but there were scientific arguments for it as well. The one we commonly overlook is that it worked. It allowed astronomers to calculate, quite precisely, where planets would be.

If you’re puzzled as to why a fundamentally wrong model delivered correct results, the answer is that it had been wrong for a very long time, and had gradually been gamed to match observations. Because a simple model of everything going circles around the Earth wouldn’t fit with the motion of the planets in the sky, they had been modelled so that they not only orbited the Earth, but also went in their own little circular orbits, called epicycles, which matched predictions to observations.

Also, without geocentrism, there was no mechanism to explain why things fell down when you dropped them. Newton’s theory of gravity was still half a century away. In its stead the idea that everything fell towards the centre of the universe seemed to make some sort of sense.

It’s easy to laugh now, but just how sure are you that if you’d been alive in the 1630s you’d be calculating the gravitational constant, rather than olde-times tweeting, “Just what does everything fall towards, Galidildo?”

There are lots of other factors at play as well. Although we often think of the battle as being between the church’s geocentric model, dating back to Ptolemy, and the heliocentric model of Copernicus, there was a third system in play. Developed by Tycho Brahe, the 2nd most famous person to have an artificial nose, after Michael Jackson, this model still had the Earth at the centre, with the sun orbiting it, but now the other planets orbited the sun. The church was fine with this – geocentrism was what they were wed to – so presumably would have been fine with Galileo’s moons orbiting Jupiter, as it orbited the sun, which orbited Earth.

While it’s not exactly elegant it does skewer the simplistic view that Galileo had observed something orbiting a body other than the Earth, and this was concrete proof that the Earth wasn’t the centre of everything.

There’s also the matter of the timeline. The church ordered Galileo to stop supporting the heliocentric model in 1616 after, it must be said, a fairly disastrous work by him, that suggested the movement of the Earth orbiting caused the tides (which had to side-step its own conclusion that there should only be one tide per day, by hand-waving and suggesting the second tide was probably just the water sloshing around). Yet Galileo’s trial wasn’t until 1633. Just what had happened in the 17 years between?

The answer, rather fatally for the Church vs Galileo view, is that the Pope asked Galileo to write a book comparing the arguments for and against geo- and helio-centric models.

In 1623 Maffeo Barberini had become Pope. Although he believed the Earth was the centre of the universe he was a friend of Galileo, admired his intellect, and had opposed the church’s sanction of him, 7 years earlier.

The Pope laid down some ground rules for this new book; Galileo had to be neutral and not clearly favour the heliocentric model, and he had to present the Pope’s own views and arguments as part of the work.

This should have been the turning point. This was the motherfucking Pope sanctioning a book that could fully discuss an idea that had been absolute heresy only a few years earlier. Heliocentrism was a much simpler, more elegant, idea than the wheels-within-wheels of the Earth-centred models, Galileo had answers to many of the more obvious questions it raised, like How come it doesn’t feel like we’re moving, and it even explained phenomena, such as the newly observed phases of Venus (like the phases of the Moon, caused by the comparative positions of Earth and Venus in relation to the Sun) that the other models couldn’t. A side-by-side comparison of the two should have been an open goal.

So what went wrong?

Well, Signor Tides-Are-Splishy-Splashy-Water screwed it up.

Because the book was intended for the educated, but not necessarily scientific, audience it was not written as a dry textbook. Instead it takes the form of a conversation, over the course of 4 days, between two educated natural philosophers and a lay-person.

Salviati takes the side of the heliocentric model, while the Pope’s favoured geocentric system is represented by…

Simplicio.

He called him Simplicio.

Simplicio gets muddled by his own arguments, has his points against Salviati easily answered, and his own assertions disproved.

Which kind of brings me back to what my point was, 1,000 words ago – Galileo was cancelled, to use modern terminology, but he was cancelled because, given a platform, and with the facts firmly on his side,  he wrote a whole book to which the glaring subtext is The Pope is a stupid shit-head.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson of the Galileo story – not defiantly shouting that you’re right as you’re dragged out of the room, but remembering that, even when you’re right, powerful people who’ve been wrong for a very long time are still powerful people, and if you’re given a chance to change their minds it might be wise to avoid hubris.

After all, nobody really wants to be Galileo, and it’s better to be proven to be on the right side of history before it becomes history.

Midwifery is breaking my wife.

It’s breaking her physically, because it is a physical job and, because her NHS pension rests on it, it will keep breaking her until she’s 68, and still trying to lift patients onto beds, wading in a birthing pool or on her knees delivering a baby.

It’s breaking her mentally, because there aren’t enough staff and because responsibility is being pushed down the ranks rather than people being moved up them; senior clinical midwives are coordinating shifts, while ‘routine’ tasks are to be given to healthcare assistants.

(Fun aside: People having babies are, predominantly, young and healthy. Young and healthy bodies can, for a short while at least, compensate for things going catastrophically wrong. The gap between ‘Hmmm, this blood pressure is a little bit low’ and ‘Oh dear, this person is dead’ can be minutes. Training somebody to operate a BP machine and record the readings is like training somebody to read the fuel gauge in an aeroplane and telling them to give the pilot a shout if it says ‘Empty’)

(Less fun aside: Obstetrics is probably the only branch of medicine where a single mistake has a good chance of killing two people at the same time)

Anyway, my wife wants out, but prior to being a midwife her only real work experience was a series of admin jobs. She has a 1st class honours degree in midwifery, which is pretty vocational,  and she refuses to believe that her skills are transferable.

She gets paid less than I do, and is really just looking to match her current salary elsewhere, so to make it easy for prospective employers I’ve decided to do a side-by-side comparison of our skills…

	Me	Her
Education	6 GCSE equivalents, plus a grade-4 CSE in Religious Education, can nearly speak English (Geordie, y’knaa)	First class honours degree, 5 A-levels, including French
Management Skills	Can look after a team of 8 people, as long as they don’t bother me too much. Sometimes we get 2 pieces of work scheduled for the same time and I have to make somebody else decide what’s more important	Coordinates 11½-hour shifts of a dozen midwives, of different skill levels, plus healthcare assistants and other ancillary staff. Daily manages situations where the number of patients is greater than the number of rooms or staff available. Makes her own decisions, and decisions on behalf of others, in the knowledge that she will be held legally responsible for them. Any mistakes or misjudgements may result in death.
Dedication	Pretty much a 9-5 guy (even though I finish at 5:30). Do sometimes work out of hours, if it’s important (in my opinion, not the opinion of the person shouting for the work to be done)	Routinely works for 12 hours at a time, without a proper meal break. Frequently foregoes toilet breaks to get the job done. Often arrives home dehydrated, because she hasn’t even had time to have a drink of water.
People skills	Not one of my strengths, but I’m quite logical, so can generally explain why things have to be done the way I say. Not good with the ‘touchy-feel’ stuff.	Can sit with an 8-month pregnant mum-to-be and tell her that her baby is already dead.
Numeracy	Great at this, and world-class at spreadsheets	Demonstrable ability to calculate potentially lethal doses of class-A controlled substances in her head, while a woman in the worst pain of her life screams her lungs out at her. Spreadsheets nothing to write home about; ‘competent’ at best.
Coping skills	Can manage when a project goes wrong, data is lost or the wrong numbers are sent to a client. Some success in turning around a potentially client-losing situations	“I went into the room (to assist another midwife) and there was blood pouring off the bed. It sounded like a tap running. She’d lost 80% of her circulating volume” (nobody died, btw)
Handling responsibility	Generally OK to decide things in meetings (where nobody takes the blame)	Is a sign-off mentor (somebody who says trainee midwives are fit to practice). Like all midwives, she’s a primary carer, meaning she’s legally responsible for the lives and well-being of both of her patients. Works under intense pressure, knowing that everything she decides to do (or not do) may one day be scrutinised in a court of law, in far calmer circumstances, by somebody who has never had to decide which of multiple labouring women was the priority.
Miscellaneous	Tinkers with IT. Manages a few data-protection questions. Writes up some policy stuff. Quite a good poof-reader	Copes with women suddenly decorating her with blood, vomit, or shit, abusive partners, death, harlequin babies (if you don’t know what this means then do not Google it if you believe there is a merciful god and/or want to sleep again), delivers babies that died in-utero weeks previously, is absolutely amazing, puts up with me and all my nonsense in her spare time.

There’s a few other bits and pieces, but I think it’s pretty clear why my higher salary is justified, and she should be happy with her lot.

However, if you’re:

1. Based in the North-East
2. Have a decent job going
3. Think that maybe, just maybe, some of her skills may be transferable

Then, please, let me know, because I don’t want her broken. She deserves better than a job which constantly leaves her miserable, run-down, and stressed.

If you don’t have a job to offer and if, for some crazy reason, you think that her skills are worth more than mine, that the thousands of women who are in her position deserve an employer who has their backs, deserve a properly staffed team, deserve time to eat and wee, deserve a chance to retire unbroken, and deserve the respect due to those who made sure our first seconds in this world were not our last, then talk to your MP.

The question of trans inclusion in sport was a very difficult one, and it was difficult because the simple and clear answer, which had worked well since time immemorial, had been decided to be the wrong one.

This suggested that the question must be far more complex than it appeared to be. For this reason, people were encouraged not to ask the question at all, because they were obviously asking the wrong question.

Instead, scientific papers were written around the issue of why it was completely fair to allow transwomen to compete against women. This was a much easier question to answer, because all the scientists had to do was find data that suggested it was fair and ignore data pointing to the opposite. This is the very core of science.

Unfortunately, the ignorant masses kept choosing to believe the evidence that presented itself in front of their eyes, rather than the carefully cultivated and nurtured examples that far better educated people had chosen.

There was a brief vogue for suggesting that because, in any sporting discipline, there were some who were better than others this meant that all of sport was inherently unfair, and if some unfairness is allowed the all unfairness is fair game. Again, people who had no qualifications to their name, other than maybe having competed in some sport or other at the highest level, took the anti-philosophical view that this was a load of old horse shit.

The solution was the case-by-case basis, or individual assessment. This had two variants, Everybody Out and Everybody In.

In the Everybody Out variant, transwomen were only allowed to complete providing that they weren’t good enough to win. This meant that all women’s events could only be won by women, and never transwomen. This was clearly discriminatory, so the Everybody Out method demanded that women were also only allowed to compete if they weren’t good enough to win. It followed that only those who couldn’t win could compete and anybody who won should immediately be disqualified.

The issues with the Everybody Out method became apparent during the tragic events of the 1500m freestyle for non-swimmers.

Everybody In, by contrast, allowed transwomen to compete if they were only just good enough to win. Of course, if the first transwoman to enter is only just good enough to win then the second transwoman to enter has to be only just better if they are to win, and the third only just better still. Eventually the whole field was transwomen, with the worst of them being only the barest fraction better than the best possible woman.

This seemed much fairer.

Indeed, it showed that the real question was why the hell those women were holding back transwomen by not being better themselves. If the women just tried a bit harder then the bar could be raised for the whole trans community, to allow the really elite trans athletes into sports.

It turned out, then, that if you started from the position that transwomen should be allowed to compete in women’s sport then the real question was whether it was fair to allow women to ruin it for them.

This, fortunately, was a much easier question to answer, and women were duly banned from women’s sports. A solution which suited everyone who mattered.

Teenagers – and I speak as one who has experience of once being a teenager, albeit just within the range of living memory – are strange, and do strange things. Many of these things are centred around rebelling, and rejecting their parents’ values. It’s hardly a surprise that this happens at the time of life when they start spending more time away from the family home, expand their social circle, and become hormone-driven to be in an in-group. As I’ve written before (In defence of gender) the latest 112 genders thing doesn’t really bother me. If their rebellion is dyeing their hair and claiming that they’re a demisexual masc-presenting non-binary rotating queeroid then let them get the fuck on with it. The correct parental response is, “That’s nice, dear. Now, what would you like for tea?”

Where it gets weird, and weirdly fascinating, is when a sub-set of these gender people claim to have a serious mental health problem.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) was, until about 30 years ago, called Multiple Personality Disorder, which at least has the virtue of doing what it says on the tin. The sufferer has multiple, distinct personalities, which may be very different from the, usually passive, main identity. Stress is typically a trigger to switch between personalities, and the disorder is almost invariably linked to prolonged physical or sexual abuse in childhood. Some psychologists believe it may be a defence mechanism. The brain creates a separate person that the terrible things are happening to, allowing the victim to view the abuse as happening to someone else.

Whatever the cause, life for sufferers can be pretty dreadful. They may feel that they are watching someone else control their words and actions. Extended periods of memory loss, which sufferers typically feel compelled to deny or minimize, are one of the key symptoms. Anxiety and severe depression are common side-effects. The condition introduces enormous difficulties in terms of employment, home life, and relationships. The DSM-V reports that around 70% of diagnosed DID sufferers have attempted suicide.

Which is why TikTok has video after video of smiling teens claiming that they have DID, and doing little chats where they introduce their distinct personalities one-by-one.

Like any other teenage subculture, it has its own lingo. The personalities are called alters or headmates, the collection of them all is a system, the one currently in control is fronting. Searching for those terms on social media will bring up a load of people who really don’t sound like they’re trying to live with a debilitating mental health problem.

Now, this being the age of identity politics, it’s considered wrong to tell them that they’re lying, or at the very least mistaking something as mundane as being in a different mood with being a different personality. Nowhere demonstrates the tensions this causes more neatly than the Wikipedia page, and associated Talk page, for Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is a mess of trying to describe a real psychiatric illness, while simultaneously trying not to invalidate anyone who doesn’t actually have it, but has claimed it as their identity. It contradicts and undermines itself throughout, as it tries to present what a well-researched clinical handbook says alongside what a bunch of teenagers think will earn them social media kudos.

Where this gets interesting is when it gives us a bit more insight into a pretend sufferer than they perhaps intended.

Now, first off, this is an unsourced Reddit image that was shared on Twitter, so there’s a real possibility that everything in there is just made up. In case it’s not, let’s look at what it’s saying. This is a person claiming to suffer from DID, where their system contains multiple lesbians. One of these lesbians isn’t attracted to people born male (CAMAB = Coercively Assigned Male At Birth). Following this revelation, the poster had an argument with themselves, got that part of their personality to say they were sorry, but doesn’t know how to make that part fancy men who present as women, as is properly ordained for a lesbian.

Leaving aside the “It’s all made up” explanation, there are 3 others:

1. The original poster made this up to get attention. This is quite likely, after all they’re pretending to have a serious mental-health problem to get attention.
2. The poster is a man, and is making up an excuse why they won’t be having any sex with lesbians who aren’t actual women, thank you.
3. The poster is actually a lesbian and is trying to ask a real question in a way that won’t get her flamed to hell and back. She’s been taught to believe that transwomen are women, and is happy to say that’s the case in most situations (which is why the other lesbians in her system are cool with it), but just can’t bring herself to actually fancy them, because sexual orientation isn’t a choice.

Through the prism of possibility 3, it’s a desperately sad story. A young women doesn’t want to have sex with men, but is arguing with herself, and asking for help in the most submissive way possible, in order to try to perform conversion therapy on herself. In effect, DID – albeit faked DID – is her defence mechanism. It’s not her having these terrible thoughts about not seeing transwomen as women, it’s removed to one of her headmates. The cognitive clash between what she wants to believe and what she actually knows to be true has become an internal argument, that she doesn’t know how to resolve.

And that’s where, “That’s nice, dear,” is inadequate, because it can’t be healthy to live like that.

Act I – In an office. I can’t be bothered to described it. Just imagine a bloody office. Dave is greeting Anteros, who’s there for a job interview.

Dave: Good morning, Anteros, thanks for coming in today. Take a seat.

Anteros: Morning.

Dave: Now, just a little about how this interview is going to go. We like to keep it all fairly informal, so we’ll just be chatting about you, about the jo…

Anteros: I’m asexual

Dave: Sorry?

Anteros: I don’t feel sexual attraction.

Dave: Okaaaay, that’s probably a bit more informal than I had in mind. We’ll be talking about what you have to offer the company and what…

Anteros: It’s legal for you to discriminate against me.

Dave: What?

Anteros: You can refuse to give me the job and say it’s because I don’t feel sexual attraction. That’s completely legal.

Dave: Right, well that’s not one of the criteria we’re using to judge applicants, so let’s not worry too much about that, eh?

Anteros: Are you saying you don’t discriminate against asexuals?

Dave: No, why would we?

Anteros: Right, then how many asexuals do you currently have working for you?

Dave: I have no idea. That isn’t the kind of thing we ask staff here.

Anteros: So you don’t even do basic equality monitoring. You don’t know how many people you employ are ace-spectrum?

Dave: Sorry, what spectrum?

Anteros [sighing]: Ace-spectrum. Asexuals, aromantics, agender folx, demisexuals, semisexuals, apogender, double-non-binary…

Dave: Ah, we monitor the number of non-binary employees as part of our DEI, and our latest report shows…

Anteros [getting angry]: Not ‘non-binary’, you bigot, ‘double-non-binary’… Those of us who reject the concept of there being a non-binary slash binary binary to be non-binary from.

Dave: I’m sorry, what?

Anteros: It’s all a spectrum. A beautiful spectrum.

Dave: Right. Well. Moving on with the interview…

Anteros: What’s the point, when you’re so obviously biased against aces?

Dave: Biased against them? I didn’t know they were a thing until two minutes ago!

Anteros: Yes, because you didn’t put in the emotional labour to educate yourself. You waited and demanded I do it instead. Classic bigot behaviour!

Dave: Come on, be fair, how was I supposed to educate myself about something I didn’t… no, no, forget it. We’re losing sight of our purpose here. Let’s get back to the interview. Tell me a bit about yourself.

Anteros: Well, I’m asexual.

Dave: Yes, I got that. Can you tell me something else about yourself? Where are you working at the moment?

Anteros: Obviously I’m not working, because of the shocking bias against asexuals. Which isn’t even illegal!

Dave: Yes, you already said, but can we please talk about the job?

Anteros: How can I talk about anything else, when somebody could force me into conversion therapy at any time?

Dave: You’re worried that someone is going to try to convert you to wanting sex?

Anteros: Of course!

Dave: Has anybody ever tried?

Anteros: Not so far, no. [Beat] But they could!

Dave: I can see why you’re worried.

Anteros [not noticing the sarcasm]: Plus there’s the constant pressure society applies to have a partner, have kids, respond to sexual stimuli. We’re bombarded with sexualised imagery. It’s probably turned millions of asexuals into prosexuals [beat] against their will. Maybe you were one of them. You might have been born asexual and then converted!

Dave: Well, yes, I do remember getting convert to sexuality. Mainly between the ages of 13 and 18.

Anteros: Yes! You see? Forced conversion has ruined your life!

Dave: It really hasn’t. I’ve been happily married for 20 years.

Anteros: Twenty years? Well why didn’t you say so? You sound like just the kind of person the not-interested-in-sex movement is looking for! Let me tell you about the benefits. We’ve got a flag, and there’s marches, and activism meetings…

[Play full-time whistle, audience goes wild, tears are shed, everyone vows never to have sex again]

With violence against women having taken a bit of a sharp upturn over the last 10,000 years or so, it seems to me that it’s about time men started doing something about it. By this I mean a bit more than the helpful advice we’ve given them so far, such as not dressing provocatively, not going out alone, not going out at night, not drinking too much, not talking to strangers, not ignoring strangers, not laughing at us, not flirting if they’re not going to follow through, and, for god’s sake, to smile once in while. I’m not quite sure what the problem is, but for some reason none of that seems to have stopped men hurting them. Maybe they’re doing it wrong.

No, we need something that more actively involves men. I had a good old session thinking about it, and somewhere about the half-way mark on the fifth pint an idea came to me. What if we had some men who were known to be Good™. Men who could be trusted. Men who wouldn’t be abusive. Men who women could trust and turn to if they were in need. I’ve been hearing for ages that it’s not all men, so there must be load of these Good™ ones around.

Obviously, for these men to be placed in a special place of trust there’d have to be a lot of safeguarding in place. There’d have to be background checks, sworn testimonies from people who knew them, a lengthy and demonstrable record of doing the right thing, something to identify them, such as cards or maybe a uniform.

Then I though that all sounded a bit fash, so I scrapped the lot of it and decided just to let each individual man decide whether he was Good™ or not. Honestly, it cuts out loads of paperwork and it seems unlikely that more than a handful of men would ever lie about being Good™. Why would they need to? It’s not like men have needed to claim to be Good™ in the past in order to do bad things.

I did briefly wonder if we needed some way to take away this saintly, trusted, Good™ status from men who misbehaved in some way. I mean, supposing a man murdered a woman – which women are really opposed to – should he still be able to declare himself Good™? Initially this seemed like a no-brainer, but then I thought of lots of other things. That those men may still see themselves as Good™, or genuinely want to be Good™, or that maybe it was discriminatory to use past behaviour to predict future Goodness™, and that it might involve more paperwork for me somewhere. Then I decided it was probably best just to let them change their name or something and carry on being Good­™.

All in all, then, I think I’ve come up with a pretty watertight scheme. Women worried about accepting a drink from a stranger, or a lift, or about the man walking behind them at night, or wandering into their changing rooms, to check everyone is OK, can now just simply ask if he’s Good™ and know that they can absolutely trust his answer and relax, because it’s only Bad® men who’d ever hurt them.

And if you think you’ve spotted any loopholes in my scheme then just remember, the majority of Guardian and Observer journalists agree with me!