What price free speech in Edinburgh? Six hundred pounds plus VAT, if you’re concerned parents who want to hire a room in their local library to discuss sex education in schools. A modest booking fee of around £50 if you’re anyone else, or so a group from Portobello found out earlier this week.

Settle down with a cup of tea while I recount a sorry tale of crude political censorship in our capital city – once home to the free expression of ideas that would change the world, now a place where it seems only council-approved views are allowed to be aired in public. In January, a group of concerned adults organised a public meeting in Portobello Community Centre to discuss the teaching of gender identity in schools.

Two years ago, the Scottish Government published guidance for schools on how best to support transgender young people in schools. The advice is not statutory, so schools aren’t obliged to use it, but for those that do, its standpoint is very clear.

For example, it advises teachers to be aware that “not every child will identify as the sex they were assigned at birth” – a controversial assertion given that the sex of an infant is observed at birth, not decided by the midwife. And in a section that still chills me every time I read the guidance, it asserts that chest binders used to flatten a girl’s breasts can have “a positive impact on a young person’s mental health so staff should allow a young person to decide for themselves about whether or not to wear a binder”.

Want to see more SNP fails? – Politics Matters