The recent @TheBARPod episode, although very disappointing in its dismissive attitude towards women’s safety, did at least provoke some thought about legal fiction and its purpose. Both hosts invoked adoption as an equivalent to saying TWAW -

- so you wouldn’t be a dick and say that an adoptive parent wasn’t a ‘real parent’, you would accept the relationship of parent/child that they claim.

Which is all good and true on one level.

But ignores the massive changes that have occurred in adoption since the 1970s, when contraception and lessening stigma against the ‘shame’ of illegitimacy, vastly reduced the market in cute young babies.

We now recognise that pretending an adopted child is the ‘actual’ child of adoptive parents is harmful. Every child deserves to know their origins, every child will go to their adoptive home with knowledge of their birth family, possibly even on going contact.

We all now agree that any adoptive parent who lied to a child about his or her origins and tried to pretend a biological relationship would be an emotionally abusive and harmful parent.

That legal fiction doesn’t protect them from denying reality. Why so? Because denying reality is almost invariably harmful, destructive and corrupting.

That doesn’t mean we jeer at adoptive parents in the street and say they aren’t ‘real’ parents.

But we damn well don’t scaffold them in a lie that hurts other people.

‘Just be kind’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting for many. And whenever I hear it now, it sounds like ‘just quietly accept your fate and stop making noise’.