Wildfires in France and Spain as blazes break out in 40C heat

Southern France is facing its largest wildfire of the year, while a fast-moving blaze in southern Spain has forced evacuations in tourist resorts.

The deadly fire in France erupted on Tuesday afternoon in the village of Ribaute in the Aude region near the Spanish border, destroying at least 25 houses and scorching 4,500 hectares of forest.

At least one person died and another is missing in the small village of Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, southeast of Toulouse, the Aude prefecture said.

The fire spread across 11,000 hectares of land over 12 hours, an area roughly equivalent to Paris, making it the largest wildfire in France so far this summer.

Nearly 2,000 firefighters were trying to tame the fire which the prefecture said was progressing “very quickly”. Around 2,500 households in the area were currently without electricity, it said.

President Emmanuel Macron said on X the fire was progressing and that “all the nation’s resources were mobilized.”

France’s meteorological service forecast that, after a cooler start to the week in the north, heat in the south will intensify over the weekend, bringing scorching temperatures of up to 40C and a high risk of wildfires.

Danger remains high across the Mediterranean coast with temperatures expecting to reach 35C in inland Mediterranean areas.

“In the Aude region, the risk of fire spreading remains very real, although less severe than on Tuesday,” Meteo France said, adding that national temperatures could peak at the beginning of the week.

Meanwhile in Spain, a forest fire spread from the Andalusian resort town of Tarifa on Tuesday afternoon after a motorhome caught fire, local media reported. It spread quickly and reached areas near Valdevaqueros beach and Estrecho Natural Park.

“It’s the fastest spreading fire I’ve ever seen,” Tarifa Mayor José Antonio Santos told La Sexta television channel yesterday. “There are lots of aircraft, everyone has been evacuated.”

Just west of Gibraltar, Tarifa is a lesser-known holiday destination but popular among kite surfers for its windy beaches and laid-back atmosphere.

Located at the southernmost tip of Europe, just west of Gibraltar, Tarifa is home to about 18,000 residents.

Homes, hotels, campsites and restaurants were cleared along a two-mile stretch between La Peña and Casas de Porros.

More than 100 firefighters were working to tackle the blaze, Andalusia’s firefighting agency Infoca said. Seventeen aircraft were also deployed in “record time” to help fight the flames, authorities said.

Spain’s weather service Aemet warned the heatwave will continue until at least Sunday. Temperatures in the Cadiz region could hit 38°C as much of the country is under yellow or amber alerts.

Mediterranean countries are in an area scientists have called “a wildfire hotspot”, with blazes common during hot and dry summers.

Scientists warn that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of the heat and dryness. They also say heatwaves arrived earlier this year, spiking temperatures by up to 10C in some regions.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing at twice the speed as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The burning of fuels like gasoline, oil and coal, plus deforestation, wildfires and many kinds of factories release heat-trapping gasses that cause climate change.

Eminem’s manager says ‘Stan’ portmanteau was ‘happy coincidence’

Eminem’s longtime manager Paul Rosenberg has confirmed that the portmanteau behind the Detroit rapper’s signature song “Stan” was a “happy coincidence”.

Fans have speculated for years over whether the artist born Marshall Mathers, 52, deliberately blended the words “stalker” and “fan” when coming up with the name for the obsessed fan in his 2000 single, “Stan”.

Over the years, the word has become part of the lexicon when describing overzealous or obsessive fans of famous musicians, actors and other celebrities. In 2017, it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, which noted that it could be used as a noun or a verb.

The lyrics to the original song tell of an obsessed fan growing more and more upset that Eminem isn’t responding to his letters, eventually accidentally driving his car off a bridge with his pregnant girlfriend (played by Dido in the music video) tied up in the trunk.

Rosenberg explained the title’s origins while speaking to The Independent alongside Emmy-winning director Steven Leckart ahead of the limited release of a new documentary Stans, which he produced with Mathers.

“[Mathers] says that it was coincidental,” he said of the “Stan” portmanteau. “It was just the name that rhymed with ‘fan’, and he just created it based on that. So that was a happy coincidence.”

Rosenberg, 52, signed Mathers in 1997, when the rapper was 24 and had just released his Slim Shady EP. “Stan” was released as the third single from Eminem’s third album, The Marshall Mathers LP. It famously samples Dido’s song “Thank You”, which late producer The 45 King was inspired to use after seeing it featured in the 1998 film Sliding Doors.

“I didn’t realise at the time how impactful [‘Stan’] was going to be, and certainly didn’t think 25 years later we’d be sitting here talking about a film we made based on the song,” Rosenberg said.

“When I first heard it, I felt like one of the most interesting things about it – especially back then in the pre-internet days, was [thinking that] people would for years question whether this was a real story, or parts of a real story.”

Rosenberg pointed out that it was “jarring” due to the uncertainty over whether “Stan” was inspired by a real-life fan of Mathers: “Was there really a fan like this, and did something like this really happen?”

He continued: “What I didn’t think about back then is just the vision that Marshall had at such an early stage of his career to be able to write a story that was so perceptive about fandom – when he was really just sort of still getting started – and to do it in such a fantastically meta way. You know, this is a guy who is a star writing about fandom, but specifically writing about a fan of himself, right? Which was, you know, just so brilliant.”

The Dido sample, which loops the first verse with the lyrics, “But your picture on my wall/ It reminds me that it’s not so bad,” apparently reminded Mathers of his own hero worship of artists such as LL Cool J.

“It made him think about him coming up and putting up pictures of his heroes on his wall,” Rosenberg said, “and listening to their music and absorbing the feelings [of] imagining what these people are like and what their lives are like. That’s where the inspiration came from. Like, ‘I can’t believe that I’m in a position now where people are thinking this about me, because I spent so much time thinking this about others.’”

In the same interview, Rosenberg explained how he and Mathers had been approached on several occasions by producers or studios hoping to make an Eminem documentary.

“Marshall never really wanted to do something that was a standard or traditional ‘look back at my career’-type of documentary – he thinks it’s been done to death, but also feels like that’s something you do when you’re at the end of your career,” he said.

“I just kept thinking about ways to do something unique, that people would enjoy [and that] wasn’t traditional. So obviously, throughout the time working with Marshall and being at his shows and being around his fans, we realised that there were a lot of interesting people we had met with unique stories.”

Instead of pointing the camera at Mathers, who still appears in the documentary, the team instead began interviewing superfans, such as Zolt Shady, whom Rosenberg described as “such a unique and interesting guy”. One woman had Eminem’s face tattooed 22 times on her body, while another spent 10 years working in the same diner Mathers once did – in the hope she might one day see him walk in.

“I was more intrigued about [the premise of ‘Stans’] than if it had been the other way, because, I think there is just a glut of [documentaries] out there that are super straightforward,” Leckart said. “There’s no risk to them – they’re awesome, I watch them all the time, but as a filmmaker, to get to do something different… yeah, I was very excited.”

Rosenberg said the “most surprising” thing for him in making the documentary was how much Mathers’ fans had connected to him through his music “in so many different ways”.

“I didn’t expect it to be quite as heavy and emotional,” he said. “I probably could have anticipated that, but I thought we would get some interesting stories from some interesting people… and it [turned out to be] stories about the impact that his music had on them, in a profound and deep way. I think it made the film have more depth than I anticipated, and that I think the audience is going to expect.”

Stans is launching in cinemas worldwide and exclusively at AMC Theatres in the US for one weekend only from Thursday 7 August.

Bill and Hillary Clinton ordered to testify in Epstein investigation

Bill and Hillary Clinton are scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee in October as the panel probes the investigations into pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted sex trafficking accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the Oversight committee, tweeted out a list of testimony dates on Tuesday for upcoming witnesses — including the former president and secretary of state — compelled by subpoena to appear.

A number of other top federal officials including former Attorney General Merrick Garland are also set to testify.

President Clinton’s friendship with Epstein makes his appearance one of the few called by the committee unrelated to the official duties of his office. Fox News also reported that the DOJ has issued a subpoena for records related to the investigation. The schedule of depositions includes former attorneys general who served through the first Trump term and dating back through the Bush administration.

Hillary Clinton’s connection to the case was spelled out in a cover letter released by the Oversight Committee indicating she’ll be questioned about why Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew worked on her presidential campaign and later at the State Department during her tenure in the Obama administration.

“Your family appears to have had a close relationship with both Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. For example, your husband President William “Bill” Jefferson Clinton, by his own admission, flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane four separate times in 2002 and 2003 on trips for your family’s foundation, the Clinton Foundation,” reads the letter to the former Democratic presidential nominee.

“During one of these trips, he was even pictured receiving a ‘massage’ from one of Mr. Epstein’s victims,” the letter continues.

“Moreover, your husband was allegedly close to Ms. Maxwell, while Ms. Maxwell’s nephew worked for your 2008 presidential campaign and was hired by the State Department shortly after you became Secretary of State.”

The committee is set to begin taking depositions from witnesses beginning with former Trump first term attorney general William Barr in a few weeks. The committee also voted to subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned and convicted co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, but that subpoena remains on hold pending Maxwell’s appeal of her conviction.

Attorneys for the imprisoned British socialite claim that she would be willing to testify to the Oversight committee in exchange for a clemency deal. Her lawyers said Maxwell would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights not to testify unless she was offered immunity.

The Maxwell angle of the Epstein case evolved into a new bizarre twist last month after the Justice Department’s memo claiming that a so-called “Epstein Client List” detailing the billionaire’s alleged accomplices, was not found in the troves of the FBI and DOJ’s files on the case. The agency also stated that Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019, committed suicide.

The statement about the client list’s supposed nonexistence contradicted statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi and others, while frustrating both the president’s MAGA base and millions of other Americans who expected transparency from the administration after it called right-wing influencers to the White House earlier this year to receive binders of documents pertaining to the investigations.

A resulting uproar led the Trump administration to look for a way out. At the Justice Department, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (who is also the president’s former personal attorney) conducted a private meeting with Maxwell at the Florida prison where she was being held, and declined to issue a statement afterwards.

Maxwell was then transferred to a minimum security facility, stunning the president’s critics and pouring gasoline on speculation around the idea of a possible cover-up.

President Trump, separately, has sought to distract his MAGA base by launching a renewed effort to attack Barack Obama and members of his national security team for the 2016 Russia investigation while he and members of his administration make vague promises about released information about the Epstein case.

On Monday, the DOJ confirmed that the grand jury transcripts it was seeking to release amid the uproar actually contained information that was already public. The DOJ claimed in its July memo that it would not release any further nonpublic information about the investigation due to concerns about releasing child pornography or identifying information about victims, provoking a standoff with Congress.

How the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ turned toxic

When Andy Hill started to engage schoolboys in masculinity workshops six years ago, he noticed that children didn’t seem to warm to one phrase in particular. “We were trying to address the concept of toxic masculinity,” he says. “It was very common language at that time. But the more work we did with young people, the more we found that when we use this kind of terminology, it just led to this immediate sense of defensiveness.”

Hill is the Creative Director of Voicebox, a charity that aims to help boys aged nine to 16 to thrive against a backdrop of declining school performance, increased scrutiny of misogyny and violence against women and girls, and a broader sense that boys are being left behind. Voicebox is one of several charities that have positioned themselves in recent years as mentors for young men, in part to act as a counterbalance to “harmful ideas of masculinity”.

Out of nine charities working predominantly with children that The Independent has contacted, eight of them say that they too now avoid the term. The charity sector’s re-evaluation of “toxic masculinity” may be a sign that something is shifting in attitudes towards boys.

“The aim of Voicebox was to engage boys in conversations to reflect on these harmful ideas,” says Hill. “But when they heard the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’, what they heard was, ‘You are toxic; you are the problem.’” Six years on, Voicebox has adapted its approach to “empower participants to promote and embody healthy masculinity”. “Boys are not inherently toxic, and they’re not inherently problematic,” he says. “They’re struggling, and we need to reframe the way we’re talking about them.”

Toxic masculinity is a loosely defined term that is used to refer to stereotypical norms of masculinity that are currently perceived as undesirable, such as domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, stoicism, aggressive competition and violence.

To Hill, many of the traits associated with toxic masculinity have a ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ expression – which is why he prefers to talk about masculinity in these terms. “Loyalty, courage, strength, bravery, competitiveness, aggression – all of these things are not inherently bad,” he says. “It’s about how they’re channelled.”

Voicebox is not the only organisation adopting a masculinity-positive approach. In May, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, invited several charities to attend a meeting to discuss “how to prevent young boys being dragged into a ‘whirlpool of hatred and misogyny’”. But every one of those attendees has since told The Independent that they avoid the term “toxic masculinity”.

“Forefronting the word masculinity with a negative adjective like ‘toxic’ is not something that we feel is a good way of moving these conversations forward,” said Kirsty Ruthven, from The Children’s Society, which works with teachers in primary schools to challenge gender stereotypes. “It’s important to label the harmful behaviours and outcomes for what they are. So if we are talking about coercion, if we are talking about violence, if we are talking about misogyny, we need to talk about that, and not this vague umbrella of ‘toxic’ that could mean different things to different people.”

Tender CEO Susie McDonald MBE says that the charity prefers to talk about “misogynistic behaviours” to separate these harmful traits from masculinity in general. “We need to support boys and young men in building confidence, compassion, and healthier attitudes, rather than demonising them,” she says. “Ultimately, they are part of the solution.”

Charities set up to tackle violence against women and girls have dropped the term too. A spokesperson for Everyone’s Invited, a charity established to “expose and eradicate rape culture”, said that they don’t use it either. “We were at a school a few years ago, and a boy shared with us how painful it was to hear masculinity constantly described as ‘toxic’,” they said. “Many of the boys we work with feel the same. The language we use is important. We want to open up honest dialogue, and we must ensure that we don’t alienate the people we need most in it.”

The phrase is “unhelpful, stigmatising and oversimplifies complex issues”, according to Rebecca Cant from relationship charity Brook, which works with children in schools across the country.

The charity sector’s re-evaluation of “toxic masculinity” may be a sign that something is shifting in attitudes towards boys. It’s a phrase that is easily applied to men like Andrew Tate; it’s less easy to explain to a classroom of nine-year-olds that their behaviours could be toxic.

In Westminster, however, the fervour around “toxic masculinity” has perhaps never felt stronger, thanks to the influence of Netflix drama Adolescence, which depicts a hypothetical scenario of adolescent femicide via manosphere radicalisation. Starmer said in March that he is “worried” about the influence of “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers” on boys. His intervention has been regarded as a double-edged sword by campaigners who have been trying for years to encourage empathy for schoolboys, who have slipped into a recession of educational performance, employment, pay and life expectancy relative to girls. That boys are now receiving attention over fears they could murder their classmates has not been well received by all.

The prime minister appears to have been careful not to use the exact phrase “toxic masculinity”. His key intervention – the publication of new guidance by the Department for Education for new school lessons to tackle misogyny – contains signals that the government is aware that it is contentious. The guidance does not use the term, and repeatedly stresses the importance of avoiding “stigmatising or perpetuating harmful stereotypes about boys”.

This may come as news to the chair of the education select committee, Labour MP Helen Hayes, who expressed concern about children’s “exposure to toxic masculinity” in a debate on the educational attainment of boys just days prior to the launch. The education secretary Bridget Phillipson, meanwhile, railed against “violent, toxic masculinity” as recently as 2023. In a parliamentary debate on tackling violence against women and girls in May, the Labour MP Fleur Anderson praised the work of charity White Ribbon, “which tackles toxic masculinity head-on in the school”. White Ribbon is another charity that says it prefers not to use the phrase.

“We don’t think the term ‘toxic masculinity’ is very helpful,” says Lynne Elliot, CEO of the 34-year-old charity established to prevent violence against women and girls. “Masculinity isn’t toxic, and many traits of masculinity are really positive. We work with thousands of men each year who work hard to change those gender stereotypes and who stand up and speak out for women and girls. They tell us that the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ can come across as blaming men, and alienates them.”

Parliamentarians who are otherwise sensitive to sweeping generalisations have been slow to pick up on the trend away from the phrase. The term remains ubiquitous in politics and media, and has been mentioned 31 times in parliament – but on only five of those occasions presented critically or unfavourably. The reality is, however, that almost as soon as it entered popular discourse, critics have argued that the phrase “toxic masculinity” perpetuates harmful stereotypes about boys, and that this harm has largely gone unexamined.

In 2023, researchers set out to examine the impact of positive and negative messages around masculinity on 4,000 men. “Thinking masculinity causes you to engage in bad behaviour (eg inclined to be violent towards women) was correlated with worse mental wellbeing,” says John Barry, the author of the study and the co-founder of the Male Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, and The Centre for Male Psychology. “But thinking masculinity causes you to engage in good behaviour (eg inclined to be protective towards women) was correlated with good mental wellbeing. A key question is where these beliefs come from, and my guess is the negative beliefs are being promoted daily in the media, academia, governments, NGOs, etc. And these messages impact men.”

Critics of the phrase “toxic masculinity” argue that it elides toxicity with masculinity itself. Even its logical opposite, “non-toxic masculinity”, implies that toxicity is the default state.

“No matter what people claim they mean by the term, it’s much too easy for it to sound negative, especially in a culture where negativity about men and masculinity is fairly common,” says Barry. “If you think about terms like ‘toxic Blackness’, ‘toxic femininity’ or ‘toxic Islam’, it suddenly becomes clear that it’s difficult to combine the word ‘toxic’ with any demographic without it sounding pretty damning of that demographic.”

It is important not to deny the realities of gender-based violence. The threat posed to women by men is grounded in a prosaic fact: almost all men are stronger than almost all women. Even well-trained, athletic women are weaker than average men. This is indisputable and exists outside of ideas about the mutability of gender. All boys, as they develop, face the question of whether they will use their strength for good or bad, and most boys are successfully socialised out of violence against women and girls.

Men nevertheless account for 96 per cent of the prison population, 99 per cent of rape convictions and the vast majority of violence against women and girls. The National Centre for Domestic Violence estimates that one in four women (compared to one in seven men) will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. Boys are much more outwardly violent than girls (and a great deal more violent to each other than they are to the opposite sex). Because these statistics demonstrate a clear gender disparity, it follows that they are in some sense downstream from masculinity.

But the majority of men and boys are not abusers. The major concern of researchers is that discussions about masculinity in schools risk demoralisation and alienation when they exclude positive framings of masculinity and focus relentlessly on the harm caused by a minority. “We shouldn’t talk about the statistical minority as if they are the majority,” says Barry. “There will probably always be a hard core of damaged boys that, for one reason or another, tend towards bad behaviour. But that doesn’t mean we should talk to all boys as if they are potential rapists.”

Barry argues that policymakers’ attention would be better spent on variables that predict criminal behaviour with higher accuracy than gender. “In saying that bad behaviour is caused by masculinity, the real causes of criminality in men (as in women) are overlooked,” says Barry. “The real causes are things like adverse childhood experience, such as childhood neglect or sexual abuse.”

In the meantime, there is a question mark over how children will respond to Starmer’s new school lessons. Throughout the 20th century, teachers warned children about smoking, casual sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and gender nonconformity. All of these things came to define the counterculture of their respective generations. Politicians who frame masculinity as taboo allow its definition to be shaped by people like Andrew Tate, whose resonant message of cynical self-interest feeds on the invalidation and alienation of young men. As the charities working with boys have suggested, this is not a desirable outcome. Tate’s advocacy of violence, misogyny, polygamy, and machiavellianism is the basis for a dog-eat-dog society of hostility, exploitation and fear. It remains to be seen how the kids will react.

Prince Harry criticised by watchdog over charity row

A watchdog has cleared Prince Harry of “over-reach” at the charity he co-founded – but criticised him and others for letting a “damaging” boardroom battle play out in the “public eye”.

The Charity Commission, which investigated Sentebale for four months, has condemned “all parties to the dispute for allowing it to play out publicly”.

The commission also says the then trustees’ failure to resolve disputes internally severely affected the charity’s reputation and risked undermining public trust in charities more generally.

Pointing to “a lack of clarity around role descriptions and internal policies” as the key cause for weaknesses in the management, the watchdog says the confusion inflamed tensions, which culminated in a row and mass resignations of trustees and both founding patrons, the commission found.

In March, Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, the co-founder, quit as patrons, saying the move was in support of the trustees – who also resigned – in a dispute with chairwoman Sophie Chandauka.

“It is devastating that the relationship between the charity’s trustees and the chair of the board broke down beyond repair, creating an untenable situation,” the princes said at the time.

Dr Chandauka said she had reported Sentebale’s trustees to the Charity Commission and had taken legal steps to prevent her removal. She also made claims of misconduct.

Prince Seeiso and Prince Harry founded the organisation in 2006 in honour of Harry’s mother, Diana, to help young people and children in southern Africa, particularly those with HIV and Aids.

The watchdog said the row began after 2023, when Sentebale’s then trustees tried to implement a new fundraising strategy in the United States.

A serious dispute then emerged between Dr Chandauka, some trustees and the Duke of Sussex.

Members of the regulator said that after conducting interviews and reviewing evidence, they found the delegation of certain powers to the chair, including consideration of an executive chair role, was a “confusing, convoluted and poorly governed” process, with a lack of clearly defined delegations.

The watchdog said the then trustees failed to have proper processes and policies to investigate internal complaints.

“More generally, a lack of clear policies contributed to the failure to resolve disputes,” they concluded.

And the commission said public statements made to the media and criticism made in television interviews, did not serve the charity’s best interests.

It found no evidence of widespread or systemic bullying or harassment, including misogyny or racism, but acknowledged “the strong perception of ill treatment felt by a number of parties to the dispute and the impact this may have had on them personally”.

Nor was there evidence of “over-reach” by either the chair or the Duke of Sussex, it said.

But the regulator concluded: “The failure to clarify delegations within the charity to the chair, and the failure to have proper processes for internal complaints, both amount to mismanagement in the administration of the charity.”

The commission has issued Sentebale with a regulatory action plan, saying the charity should have a clearly defined patron role set out in writing.

The plan also includes improving complaints and whistleblowing procedures.

The watchdog said all the charity’s then trustees contributed to a missed opportunity to resolve issues that led to the dispute.

Financial difficulties following the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to tensions, it added.

David Holdsworth, chief executive of the Charity Commission, said: “Sentebale’s problems played out in the public eye, enabling a damaging dispute to harm the charity’s reputation, risk overshadowing its many achievements, and jeopardising the charity’s ability to deliver for the very beneficiaries it was created to serve.”

Prince Harry’s spokesperson attacked the findings, saying the report “…falls troublingly short in many regards, primarily the fact that the consequences of the current chair’s actions will not be borne by her – but by the children who rely on Sentebale’s support”.

They added that Harry would find alternatives to helping the children supported by Sentebale in Lesotho and Botswana.

“”As custodians of this once brilliant charity, Prince Seeiso, Prince Harry and the former board of trustees helped grow Sentebale from the seed of an idea to – like its namesake – a flowering force for good,” they said.

“With the original mission of Sentebale firmly in mind – and in honour of the legacy he and Prince Seeiso began – the Duke of Sussex will now focus on finding new ways to continue supporting the children of Lesotho and Botswana.”

Dr Chandauka said: “The unexpected adverse media campaign that was launched by those who resigned on 24 March 2025 has caused incalculable damage and offers a glimpse of the unacceptable behaviours displayed in private.

“We are emerging not just grateful to have survived, but stronger: more focused, better governed, boldly ambitious and with our dignity intact.

“Despite the recent turbulence, we will always be inspired by the vision of our founders, Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso, who established Sentebale in memory of their precious mothers, Princess Diana and Queen ‘Mamohato.

“To all who believe in our mission: please walk with us as Sentebale recovers, renews, and rises to meet the hopes and expectations of the next generation.”

Of course I’d be happy for a trans employee to fit my daughter’s first bra

I remember going to get measured for my first bra in the 1990s. It was in Marks and Spencer, of course, the retailer has had a firm hold on that particular market for decades, and I absolutely cringed with embarrassment.

Honestly, I nearly died. I crossed my arms over my chest and huffed self-consciously; I counted down the minutes until it was over and acted every inch the recalcitrant teenager who hated both the experience and everyone around me, including my mum.

Fast forward 30 years, and when I recently took my daughter for her first bra fitting, I was peculiarly gratified to see that she acted pretty much the same way I did. Teenagers may have smartphones and TikTok and all the tech and street smarts we didn’t, but some things really do never change.

The one thing that has changed, on the whole, is Gen Alpha’s greater understanding and empathy towards those around them. And so much the better.

Half of my daughter’s friends school the adults around them in the right pronouns to use for their peers. “They/them” is second nature to most of these kids. Us dinosaur millennials and Gen X-ers, meanwhile, should stand happily corrected (and make an effort to get it right when we slip up).

Which is why, when I read the story about M&S – the same M&S who boast about being “Your M&S,” which presumably includes their own employees – reportedly apologising for “distress” over a trans member of staff asking a teenage customer if she needed any help in its bra section, I only had one question: what on earth were they apologising for?

The mother of the teenager in question, who complained to the store, said the retail assistant was “polite”, but that her daughter felt “uncomfortable” with the experience. M&S told her: “We deeply regret the distress your daughter felt during her visit to our store,” and that “We understand how important this milestone is for her, and we are truly sorry that it did not go as you had hoped.”

To which all I have to say is: show me a teenager who doesn’t feel uncomfortable in the lingerie section of Marks & Spencer, and I’ll show you a miracle. Of course, there’s more going on here – a lot more.

The mother apparently blamed the reason for her daughter’s discomfort on the fact that the staff member seemed to be “a biological male” – at 6ft 2in, it was “obvious”, she is reported to have said. To that claim, I will now quote my friend and colleague Kat Brown, who wrote after the Supreme Court ruled on the legal definition of a woman in April: “This ruling also means that any woman who doesn’t resemble some mythical feminine ideal also risks being challenged in loos and changing rooms” – and indeed, this has already happened to Kat, who stands at a statuesque 6ft 1in.

We don’t know whether the staff member who reached out to offer assistance to this 14-year-old child was trans, and it doesn’t even appear that they were offering to fit bras for her. But even if she were trans, she was just doing her job, and doing it well, by all accounts. Doesn’t every one of us deserve to be able to do that without discrimination or prejudice, let alone an apology from our employer related to us simply existing?

Had the person offering to help my 13-year-old daughter in the M&S undies department been trans, I would have had no problem with it – and crucially, neither would she. How do I know? I asked her.

My daughter’s exact response (with the inevitable bit of exasperated sighing) to being helped, or even fitted, was: “I’d hate anyone measuring me, Mummy. Why would it make any difference if they were trans?”

When I explained the nuances of this particular situation, she added a cutting: “Why is this a story?”

I understand those defending personal choice. In an ideal world, nobody would feel uncomfortable – especially children. But isn’t it our job, as parents (and members of society at large) to unpick this discomfort and name it for what it really is: prejudice. And to teach our children, just as we teach them to treat others equally, to be kind through our example.

What would you say if you heard, for example, that a person of colour working in M&S had approached a teenage customer and politely offered assistance, only for the teenager to feel uncomfortable, the parent to be outraged and complain about their “distress” – and the store to write an apology?

In 2025, trans people are under fire like never before. The most recent data from the Home Office shows that offences motivated by hostility or prejudice against transgender people or people perceived to be transgender have risen; at the same time that trans people have effectively been banned from using public spaces, including toilets, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex.

There’s only one person that M&S has let down here – and it’s not a customer. It’s their employee.