It’s so odd, isn’t it? Watching footage of a drag artist wandering around the BBC Look North office, going from desk to desk, gently scolding members of staff in a performance that doesn’t strike me as particularly funny, I couldn’t help wondering why this sort of thing is considered perfectly acceptable. Imagine someone dressing up as a crude caricature of a Chinese person and going around making racially stereotypical jokes. There would quite rightly be outrage. Blackface would be utterly unthinkable, and you’d probably be on rocky ground even putting on a kilt and pretending to be a drunken Scotsman. Yet dressing up as an exaggerated, often grotesque caricature of a woman is apparently not just acceptable but something to be celebrated. It genuinely feels as though women are the last group it’s still permissible to mock and degrade. And while misogyny is hardly confined to one side of the political spectrum, what I find particularly astonishing is that this sort of thing is enthusiastically embraced by the supposedly progressive left. Women are being attacked from both sides. On the one hand, there’s the familiar misogyny of right-wing incel lunatics. On the other, there’s a progressive movement that celebrates exaggerated stereotypes of femininity as portrayed by men while simultaneously treating the biological reality of being an actual woman as though it’s some sort of mutable, contested concept. And here we have the BBC, an organisation that prides itself on its supposedly enlightened values, apparently happy to indulge in precisely this sort of thing. I sometimes feel as though I’m trapped in a fever dream. How on earth did the modern left, which once regarded itself as the champion of women’s rights, become so spectacularly regressive?