Mal Fletcher comments on the need for the NUS to remain 'broad-church' and not practice intellectual fascism.

Psychologists have long known, for example, that children and teenagers will at one time or another feel physically attracted to the opposite sex. In most cases, though clearly not all, these feelings are isolated, intermittent and unsustained; they emerge as a natural part of the exploration of identity.

The same is apparently true of other core aspects of our personalities. The establishment of a sense of self, especially within children, is a process, not an event.

For certain children, this inner experimentation may express itself outwardly in forms of behaviour which don't seem appropriate to their gender. In these cases, little boys might like to dress up as girls and vice versa.

Some may even request that they be treated as members of the opposite sex.

Does this mean that they would benefit from gender reassignment? It may simply mean that they need empathy, patience and support from parents and carers who understand that gender identity is, to an extent, fluid in all children - at least for a time.

This fluidity, of course, may be prolonged, this confusion further entrenched, if the surrounding culture ignores it, telling the young - and their parents - that radical gender reassignment is the best and most celebrated option for them.

Might a perceived rise in the popularity of gender realignment among children be due to the fact that parents are confused about how gender identity emerges in the first place?

Yes, there will be individual cases in which children exhibit prolonged behaviour that breaks with the norm. These children will need to be treated with respect and empathy, their cases looked at with an emphasis on compassion.

They must not be used as stalking horses for one side or the other in a debate about public ethics or morality.

Yet a society that refuses to call anything 'normal' is self-evidently a society without norms, which are a core component of identity and culture. It is a society which weakens itself by, as a default, treating exceptions as norms.

Overall, the psychological or societal benefits of transgenderism may be treated as foregone conclusions by some, but these judgements are arrived at without informed discussion or debate in the wider society.

(A few split screen head-to-head yes/no segments on news shows hardly constitute wide-ranging and fully informed debates.)

As is often the case with ultra-liberal positions, advocates of gender realignment seem to have reached the puzzling conclusion that if only a relatively few people are taking up the option of gender surgery, it must be because there are thousands more who feel repressed by societal norms and need to be liberated.

This might suit a particular drive within ultra-liberalism to recast society in its own image, but it is hardly the basis for a social policy which will affect generations to come.

The NUS, which is a national network of student union groups, does some fine work among students across the UK. At its best, it seeks to give a collective voice to the concerns of students and issues affecting them. At its worst, perhaps its internal politics sometimes cause it to behave as a lobby group for broader liberal agendas.

However, on issues like transgenderism, organisations like the NUS, which ought to be broad-church, should at the very least acknowledge that no consensus has been reached and allow honest, though not intemperate, discussion.

To disallow open debate is to practice intellectual fascism, the core doctrine of which is to deny others a right that one demands for oneself - the right of freedom of expression and belief.