Ten years ago, my musician daughter asked me to deliver a parcel to a suburban address. Her dispatch note was precise: “Just say hello, this is a gift for Ronnie*, there’s a note inside, goodbye.” Ronnie, a young music fan, was transgender and going through an extremely tough time. The last thing that family needed was a journalist at the door in any guise.

The plan failed when the child’s mother recognised me as a journalist. Good manners obliged her to invite me in, though her anxiety remained painfully obvious as she called her mannerly child to come and thank me. My last memory is of mother and child standing tightly together at the door, and behind them a protective older sibling.

That memory of an ordinary family driven to constant fear and hypervigilance by the struggle to protect their child’s safety and sanity returns every time a chorus of voices echoes across multiple mainstream media channels, claiming to have been “terrified” into silence on the subject. It returns every time schoolteacher Enoch Burke rears his unfeasibly angry head to claim that addressing a schoolchild by their preferred pronouns offends against the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The late bishop Willie Walsh once told me amid people’s despair of the clerical abuse scandals that he too had struggled with his faith, to the point of wondering, “Well, could it [life] end with a hole in the ground?” To such a man, a faith without compassion, forgiveness, patience and kindness (not to be confused with a vacuous pleasantness), a faith without those costly daily acts of grace, was........

© The Irish Times