(The title comes from this Radiohead song)

I’ve used the phrase “when they’re done with us, they’ll come for you” a few times in this blog: my theory, for which there is tons of evidence, is that trans people are often the canaries in the coal mines. The people that are hateful towards trans people are usually hateful to other groups, such as gay people, women, or ethnic minorities. The organisations that fund or promote anti-trans views are usually against LGBT rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

The organisation responsible for this week’s Trump anti-trans memo is the office of Health and Human Services, HHS for short. It’s a huge part of the US government: it controls the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Health, Medicare/Medicaid and much more.

And as Rolling Stone reports, it’s been slowly but surely populated with extremists.

It was a coup, then, when Trump installed pious orthopedic surgeon Tom Price as secretary, who, with the help of the office of Vice President Mike Pence, began stocking the department with an army of culture-war veterans plucked from the country’s most radical religious organizations — the archconservative Family Research Council, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Americans United for Life, and the National Abstinence Education Association among them. By the time Price was forced to step down over a spending scandal last September, HHS had already been transformed into what the Family Research Council called “a virtual promise-keeping factory” for Christian conservatives.

Some of these organisations will be familiar to trans people: The FRC in particular is driving the wedge strategy that attempts to build bridges with feminist women against transgender people in order to split the T from LGBT. If you’re in the UK and puzzled by the sheer volume of anti-trans coverage in recent months, follow the money. A lot of it comes from the US.

These organisations aren’t just anti-trans, or anti-gay. They’re anti-women.

As Shannon Royce, an alum of the Family Research Council and current head of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at HHS, told a gathering of evangelicals in January, Trump’s HHS “is absolutely a pro-life team, across the spectrum, and that is playing out in many ways.” The “team” has found ways to codify its agenda in corners as disparate as the annual budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where the words “fetus” and “transgender” were banned, to the Administration for Community Living, which eliminated questions about sexual orientation from a survey of seniors and people living with disabilities. Royce herself was particularly proud of wedging into HHS’ strategic plan a sentence that redefines life as starting at the moment of conception..

Evangelicals have essentially bypassed the courts. By taking control of HHS, they can deny abortions to women without having to wait for Roe vs Wade to be taken down.

Rolling Stone describes the way things are working in ORR, the part of HHS that puts foreigners in camps and splits children from their parents.

It’s not unusual for girls to arrive at an ORR shelter already pregnant, many as a result of their journey. According to a 2010 Amnesty International estimate, six in 10 female migrants are sexually assaulted at some point during their crossing.

Scott Lloyd is the director of ORR and compares abortion to the Holocaust.

During the Obama administration, requests for abortion were only elevated to the director’s office if there was a question of funding. (Under the Hyde Amendment, the federal government can pay for abortions only in cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is at risk.)

…Before Lloyd was even sworn in as the head of the ORR, he ordered an accounting of all pregnant girls in the office’s custody. Internal e-mails show an ORR staffer had to cross-reference reports looking for indications of a possible pregnancy and call each shelter to verify the information before coming up with a tally of 38 girls in 18 shelters. After that, Lloyd began receiving a spreadsheet on a weekly basis listing every pregnant underage girl, her location and number of weeks gestation.

As this crisis has been unfolding on his watch, Lloyd has been micromanaging pregnant minors — in his own words, a “tiny fraction” of the population ORR serves. But he has not approved a single abortion. Not even for a young rape victim who threatened to kill herself if she was forced to remain pregnant. “It will not undo or erase the memory of the violence that was committed against her, and it may further traumatize her,” Lloyd wrote in his official memo denying her the procedure, annotated with links to pro-life literature he said he found on the Internet.

If I were a woman in America right now, I’d be terrified.

I was in the pub the other night, and two men were talking loudly about feminism. They were early thirties, clearly well educated – one was a teacher – and both parents of young girls. And they felt that feminism in general and the #metoo movement in particular had gone too far.

People like Harvey Weinstein were abominations, monsters, they said. But they were incredibly rare. And because of their monstrous behaviour, all men were being unfairly accused. Most men are not monsters. Most men are good men. Good boyfriends. Good dads. Good husbands. Good friends.

They were right, while also being dangerously wrong. People like Weinstein are rare, but it’s not because abusive men are rare. It’s that most abusive men with that kind of power and privilege aren’t usually stopped. One of them, you may have noticed, is in the White House.

And yes, most men are not monsters. But every day women are harassed, exploited, abused or controlled by people who are not monsters. Good boyfriends, good dads, good husbands, good friends. Every single woman I know has endless tales of abuse: some of it in the street, some of it at work, some of it in their homes. Often by people they thought they could trust.

The guys at the bar were essentially arguing that now the likes of Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Louis CK have been exposed (although not necessarily punished: CK is making tentative steps to return to his millionaire comedy career; many other people identified in the #metoo campaign don’t seem to have suffered anything beyond bad publicity) it was time for women to stop. The problem has been solved.

The problem hasn’t been solved.

In the UK, a nine month inquiry by a government select committee has confirmed what every woman already knows. Sexual harassment of women and girls is “relentless” in bars and clubs, in universities, in parks, on public transport, on the street and on the internet. The stories my girlfriends tell me would break your heart.

Men don’t see it because they don’t experience it. And because they don’t see it, otherwise intelligent men like our two bar patrons choose to believe what they have, or rather haven’t, experienced. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’ve never made a girl or woman feel uncomfortable, pressured someone to do something they didn’t want to do, had a sexual encounter where consent was murky. Because they aren’t bad guys, no guys are bad guys.

For as long as men won’t listen to women, for as long as women’s experiences are dismissed by men who think they know better, women will continue to feel unsafe. Because they are.

Update: there was a discussion about this very thing on Radio Scotland this morning shortly after I wrote this post. As contributor and retired policeman Graham Goulden put it, “some men are the problem, all men are the solution.”

This isn’t about demonising men. It’s about recognising that the world is different for men. Men are never told to walk without wearing headphones, as women are currently being told to do in London while a serial attacker remains free. Men are never told to stay home at night when there have been a series of attacks. Men don’t have to worry about people spiking their drinks. Men don’t generally get sexually harassed at work, or fear sexual violence.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell our daughters to be careful. But we should also teach our sons not to be, associate with or defend the kind of men our daughters need to be careful of.

Incredibly, you can still buy these from the Trump campaign’s online shop.

I have some other suggestions. Turkeys for Christmas, perhaps. Women For Weinstein. Gypsies for Hitler.

We’re a selfish species, by and large. If something doesn’t directly affect us we tend to take the approach that “I’m all right, Jack.”

Sometimes that means we resist changes that would make the world a slightly better place for other people. Sometimes we choose to believe the lone voice against the settled science because it tells us what we want to hear. And sometimes we sacrifice long-term safety for short-term comfort.

Here’s an example in microcosm. The UK government is scrapping the subsidies for hybrid cars and reducing subsidy for electric ones.

It’s penny pinching of the worst kind: while we’re chucking away billions on Brexit, we’re taking money from something that’s a little but important part of the battle against climate change.

The latest depressing evidence of climate change’s terrible effects comes from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report, which isn’t called “Jesus fucking Christ! We’re fucking doomed!” but should be.

Climate change is already killing thousands of people, with previously freak weather events becoming depressingly familiar. We’ve got about 12 years left to do something before everything starts getting really out of control. If that happens, millions of people will die and millions more will have to leave their homes in order to survive. Huge parts of the world will become uninhabitable. Some will disappear underwater. Others will suffer murderous heat.

This isn’t lefty, liberal, Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing scaremongering. Scientists are, to use a scientific expression, losing their shit. We’re past the point where we can stop climate change. Our best hope is to slow it and prevent it becoming a global catastrophe.

The thing is, it’s not really affecting people who aren’t black or brown yet. So we’ll do nothing.

Australia’s going to miss its emission targets. Ireland too. Most of Europe’s going to miss the Paris Agreement targets; Trump wants the US out of that altogether. We can’t even commit to subsiding electric cars, let alone the massive changes to our infrastructure and way of life – from farming to housing – that are needed to prevent climate change at its most catastrophic.

There are some reasons to be optimistic. China has U-turned from believing climate change to be a Western hoax to understanding it as an existential threat (China is one of the regions likely to suffer the most devastating heatwaves by around 2100 if global temperatures rise much more).

But by and large the people creating climate change are the ones most isolated to its effects. We’ll complain about petrol duty and demand the right to pollute our cities, we’ll moan about recycling and put climate deniers on TV. And when the world burns, we’ll turn the air conditioning up a notch.

Some people think UKIP is just a party of racists. Nope! It’s a party for bigots of every kind. Whether you hate the blacks, the gays, the muslims or the trans, UKIP is the party that’ll tell you the problem isn’t you, it’s them.

I’ve been reading the latest UKIP interim manifesto – yes, this is what my Saturday mornings are like; yes, I’m amazed I’m single too – and the whole thing is of course a horrific pile of shit. But there’s a new addition to it this year: the blatant anti-LGBT bigotry previously limited to stallholders at the UKIP conference is now official party policy.

The phrase “Cultural Marxism” is always a giveaway: it’s right-wing shorthand for “boo hoo we’re not allowed to be bigots all the time any more”. UKIP says cultural Marxism “seeks to close down discussion and alternative views, so that only one extreme left-wing ‘politically correct’ viewpoint is allowed.”

You can see their point of view. You can’t turn on Newsnight or pick up the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Sun or the Daily Telegraph without being subjected to nothing but one extreme left-wing politically correct viewpoint.

The proposed solutions are the usual pie of guff: repeal of all hate speech legislation and guidelines, the end of Public Space Protection orders, repeal of the Equality Act 2010, and a free golliwog and Roy Chubby Brown DVD for every pure-bred Englishman, woman and child.

In a sane world we’d just laugh at these clowns. Sadly it’s not a sane world.