This article is taken from the November 2021 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10.

Why do bigots find the concept of gender identity so confusing? It simply means the immutable yet totally fluid feeling that one is male or female or neither or both based on conceptions of masculinity or femininity that are natural and innate but also social constructs that don’t actually exist. 

This really isn’t hard. 

To be a woman or a man has absolutely nothing to do with biological sex. There is nothing particularly male about having a huge beard, broad shoulders and an enormous penis. My friend Belinda is hung like a shire stallion; that doesn’t make her any less feminine.

I was signing for a delivery from Ocado and all of a sudden I knew I was male

To be a woman is an indescribable and incontestable sensation, one that only a literal Nazi would question. For all their talk of “chromosomes” and “fallopian tubes”, what being a woman really comes down to is dressing like a prostitute and tilting one’s head coquettishly while being photographed. 

Anyone can be a woman if they say they are a woman. As I write this, I am a woman. But for approximately half an hour last Thursday I was a man. 

I was signing for a delivery from Ocado and all of a sudden I knew I was male. The deliveryman queried why I had signed my name as “Agamemnon Buckfast” and I immediately called the police to report this hate crime. 

Being a man was empowering and I felt proud to be a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. I immediately updated my social media profile so that everyone would know how brave and selfless I was. But deep down I also knew that as a male I was part of the patriarchy and deserved contempt. 

I have since transitioned back to female, with a brief stint as non-binary. For a while I wore earrings bearing my “they” and “them” pronouns so that I would not risk the literal violence of being misgendered. 

I can envisage no better way to celebrate diversity than to shun those transphobes who refuse to learn new pronouns, to seek out dissenters and punish them without mercy. It’s what Mahatma Gandhi would have done if xe were alive today.