Or, at least, that’s how I assume such a toe-curling blunder must have come about. For the luvvies’ Favorite windbag declared, in an interview to promote her new film about the mother of a non-binary child, that she had always, in fact, “described myself to my husband as a gay man”. The feeling of being “sort of non-binary” herself had mysteriously derived from “arguments with people” (oh what dinner-table conversation her three poor children must endure). Shrugging off any specifics, Colman put it in a way so tantalizingly vague that headline writers could not resist turning it into “a big sort of title”, despite her pleas; “I feel like I have a foot in various camps.” This Colperson rejects your silly little boxes.

Under normal circumstances, a woman in a heterosexual marriage who had given birth three times declaring herself a gay man might have prompted the arrival of men in white coats. At the very least, her shameless appropriation might have ruffled feather boas at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. But these are not normal circumstances; we are dealing with acting royalty who has even acted as royalty, a beloved treader of the boards with clipped tones and a Cambridge degree, a Peep Show alumna and envoy to Hollywood. This is a woman whose lip-wobbling is Oscar-worthy; let her wang on about how having short hair makes her an exception among AFABs if it makes her feel better — it’s 2026, after all. 

Except it matters to point out what a load of credulous bollocks this all is. Colman has found herself in a hyperprogressive muddle: in an effort to waft away ludicrous stereotypes about femininity, she has reinforced them. Like most celebrities hoping to court the liberal vanguard, she has found herself a handmaiden in the contemporary rebirth of anti-woman logic. Not to mention the drive-by erasure of the homosexual male experience, of which Colman necessarily understands nothing. Decades on from the gay-rights movement, it’s all too easy to take for granted the hard-won privilege of being believed and accepted for your very real sexuality — which resists nebulous vibes-based self-identification. The fact is that owing to her inordinate privilege (remember when we were all so preoccupied with that?) Colman is insulated from the real-world consequences of pushing gender woo-woo; she is unlikely to find herself face-to-face with female inmates, for example, or women in rape crisis centers. No — the gender-critical cohort which is interested in the feelings of vulnerable women are dismissed with saintly bafflement: “I don’t know how you explain to them what understanding and kindness is, and love,” Colman said during the same media blitz this month.

Her inability to explain her position won’t stop her from trying. Luxury beliefs emanate almost exclusively from Colman’s haut monde; the more incomprehensible they are, the more valuable, because they reinforce the elite’s monopoly on moral and intellectual reasoning by shutting out the mystified lower classes. Colman has fallen victim to a process which the feminist commentator Jen Izaakson has anatomized: as absurd progressive politics trickle down to the “lumpens”, the elite opinion-formers must make ever-more bizarre amendments to retain their superiority. So it is that a woman who has never even made the effort to “transition” can call herself a gay man. Don’t get it? Well, you’re probably a bigoted chav. Leave the thinking to us, love.

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Realism and experience are not among the entry requirements for the luvvie club; all you need for that is an aristo drawl and an obsession with “empathy”. The only yardstick for intellectual coherence is whether a comment would spoil the cheese course at a smart dinner party. At home, purring British actors have rarely been taken seriously as moral arbiters; their power is principally global. For nobody so readily swallows the half-formed thoughts of a British actor than a Hollywood entertainment reporter; they seem unable to resist the charming accent, the big glasses, the Hugh Grant hesitations. Americans on X responded to Colman’s disclosure with raptures of delight: one wrote that it was “so unbelievably important to me” while another took it further: “Any tongue that rises against Olivia Colman shall fall.” What reads to an Englishman as unadulterated knobbery may sound, to the ears of a bronzed Californian, like the kindly warblings of a wise duke. Criticism in such a dynamic amounts to brutish cruelty, or worse, lèse-majesté. After all, aren’t the likes of Colman and Ian McKellen — who recently clambered onto his own soapbox with an immigration-themed monologue on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — just so bloody quaint? But this studied softness is in fact a steely ploy: what professes to be compassion is in fact a rigid defense against debate; courageous stances are in fact craven deflections. 

McKellen’s recitation of a speech from Sir Thomas More, attributed to Shakespeare, concerned the then-Sheriff of London’s attempt to placate crowds rioting against immigrant workers on “Evil May Day” in 1517. These were skilled weavers and dyers from the Low Countries, French artisans, Lombards and so on; prosperous, connected recipients of legal privileges granted by the Crown. The riots concerned ruptures in class, patronage and labor anxiety, not race. Nevertheless McKellen’s invocation of the “wretched strangers / Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage” drew somber applause from a studio audience who took it as a perfect analog for immigration riots in America and the UK today. Sounds about right, Sir Ian. Open borders it is!

Why are the éminences grises of the British entertainment industry so intent on sticking their oar into the culture wars? For the older cohort, militancy is the result of a political lag. The progressive battles of the Seventies to Nineties — skewering Thatcher, gay rights, non-conformity — have all been won. Other favorite causes such as Vivienne Westwood’s climate change crusade (the subject of years of commendable ego-pricking by Private Eye) have been absorbed into the mainstream, so have lost their iconoclastic power. Old templates for protest crave new complaints; gender identity and mass immigration just happen to be there for the taking, regardless of whether Colman and McKellen understand them or will ever feel their consequences. No matter that American politics bear little resemblance to those in Britain; as emissaries of an apparently more sophisticated and compassionate world view, these actors see it as their responsibility to set this young, naughty nation on the right path. In a world of nodding agents, producers, arts journalists, activists, these stars really can say any old rubbish. But really, must they?

But that is the kind of language the Church of England is considering. No more He for God. The pronouns of the Almighty are going to be They/Them.

First, let me state the obvious: no one thinks the Judeo-Christian God is a man. Father is a metaphor, as is burning bush, fountain, lamb, shepherd, rock, river…  Words are inadequate to describe the author of life. But they are all we have.

And language can play tricks. Many languages assign a gender to genderless things. In Hebrew, the word “table” is masculine and “door” is feminine. The same in Russian. In French, both are feminine. But no one believes the door has a gender identity, still less a sex. That’s just how the language works. The fact that, grammatically speaking, God in the Bible mostly takes male pronouns doesn’t mean God is male.

But I do get it: language matters. And gendered nouns do influence the way we think about the reality of the thing to which they refer. And this can easily be extended to how we describe the almighty. Given that people of faith think of God as another way of talking about ultimate reality, the gendered nature of God language could easily be a way of projecting male superiority in the very nature of things. Patriarchal assumptions are reflected and reinforced and then projected onto the stars.

Equally, the gender of certain nouns can often seem to reflect some of the basic dynamics of sexual politics. Take the Hebrew word for both “womb” and “breasts”. They are both male. By making these words masculine, might this reflect a subliminal sense of ownership — that the language is somehow exonerating, justifying even, the perspective of the male gaze?

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Should we take this to mean that God reflects the projection of the male perspective upon the universe? In the beginning, perhaps. But, today, children aside, does anyone really imagine God as a man. Judaism and Islam are especially clear on this. God is beyond gender. They/them in reality, even if He/Him grammatically. That’s just the way language works.

Which is why conscripting the impossibility of describing God with human words into the culture war about gender identity is just mischief-making. Only those with a ridiculously naive and anthropomorphic view of God as a man with a white beard can be in any way disturbed by the observation that God is beyond gender. And if they have such a view, they deserve to have it disturbed.

All those many different words to describe God do have a theological purpose. It is to undermine one of the cardinal sins of the Bible: making God into a thing of one’s own image. To call God both a fountain and a rock – He can’t be both – is a way of saying something about God and taking it back at the same time. It is how mystical, technically cataphatic, theology makes its raids on the unspeakable. Occasionally giving God she/her pronouns is a perfect example of the way cataphatic theology can rightly undermine some sort of idolatrous, fixed idea of what God is.

Of course, with Christianity, things are a little trickier. Because here, Jesus is God — he is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1.15) — and Jesus was a man. Clearly he/him. Yesterday at General Synod, the cheeky reactionary, my friend Fr Marcus Walker, averred: “I just don’t think we should be misgendering God. He’s made it clear what his pronouns are — especially in his incarnation — so maybe we should just use them.” Funny yes, correct no. The incarnation of God as male tells us no more about God than his incarnation as ginger or dark haired. There is no read across from Jesus being a man to God being one.

“God is our Mother as truly as he is our Father,” wrote Julian of Norwich back in the 14th century. It’s hardly breaking news.

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But this is not saying we need to change “our Father” to “our Parent”. Heaven help us. Once in a while, perhaps, very occasionally, such an ugly phraseology might be useful in shocking us out of an over identification of God with human categories. But the language of tradition stands because it is a valuable way of apprehending the divine. Words should not continually interject themselves into our worship demanding attention; mostly they should drop away as attention is directed to the beyond. “Our parent” keeps us stuck to the ground, mired in the messiness of all-too-human politics and division. Leaden culture-war politics dressed up in a cassock is a sure fire turn off for people seeking something transcendent.

I do feel a little sorry for the poor old Church of England. Whatever we say is bound to be misrepresented. The Church is not changing God’s pronouns from He/Him to They/Their. Who are you, Moses asks the burning bush? “I am what I am” comes the unhelpful reply. God prefers the first person subjective personal pronoun. Suitably inscrutable. God, I/me.

Feminists are outraged. Joan has long been treasured by the women’s movement, as a rare example of a woman who escaped her narrow allotted life and changed the course of history. One of the largest ever Suffragette marches, comprising some 40,000 women in 1911, was headed by a protestor dressed as Joan. For many in this camp, a “non-binary” reimagining of Joan isn’t “exploring gender”, but “an extension of the dull, patriarchal line that women don’t have a history”.

But it’s also true that — as Globe artistic director Michelle Terry argued in response to the uproar — reimagining and even fabricating history for new audiences is a noble tradition, with Shakespeare himself a leading exponent of the art. Shakespeare, Terry says, “did not write historically accurate plays… [but] took figures of the past to ask questions about the world around him. Our writers of today are doing no different.”

When Joan was born in 1412, France was roiled by the Hundred Years’ War: a bitter conflict with not only the English fighting for dominion of the country, but a parallel civil war between competing French ruling factions, the Armagnacs and Burgundians. The town across the river from Joan’s birthplace supported the Burgundians, while hers supported the Armagnacs. Children would come home bloody from fistfights over competing loyalties to Armagnac king or Burgundian duke. Meanwhile, most actual fighting was done by mercenaries, who prowled the countryside robbing peasants for food, fuel and treasure in lieu of the pay they seldom received.

The year Joan reached puberty, such a band swept through her village of Domrémy, stealing cattle and setting fire to the church. That was also when her visions began; three years later, she left home under a pretext and travelled to the French King, demanding to see him and offer her aid on the strength of her visions.

The broad outlines of what happened next are well-known. Joan, dressed in men’s clothing, was granted an audience with the French King Charles. Clad in white armour, she helped lead his troops to a number of victories, and marched with Charles through lands held by the hostile Burgundians to his coronation at Reims. She was eventually captured by the English and forced to recant, before changing her mind and proclaiming her beliefs, finally dying on a heretic’s pyre in 1431. Her mother Isabelle worked to clear her name; in 1456, she was declared a martyr; in 1920, she was canonised.

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Shakespeare’s three-parter on Henry VI, which gives an account of the later part of the Hundred Years’ War from an English perspective, includes the figure of Joan. And what Terry politely calls asking “questions about the world” might more cynically be called Elizabethan ruling-class propaganda. Even 150 years after her death, a political enemy of England as significant as Joan couldn’t have been glamourised on an English stage, any more than the BBC could glamourise Vladimir Putin in a docudrama today.

Instead, for Shakespeare, Joan is a “trull” (Elizabethan for “slapper”) or “puzzel” (“filthy whore”) who summons legions of demons to aid her quest for victory over the English. After capture, she denies her own father (a heinous act in Elizabethan terms) before trying to avoid execution by claiming to be pregnant.

So if Elizabethan elites were fixated on England’s geopolitical fortunes, and reimagined Joan negatively in that light, it should be no surprise that today’s reinvention of her aligns with another central modern elite fixation: pretending we can identify our way out of biology. And in this sense, the Globe’s new production is a continuation of Shakespeare’s propagation of ruling-class ideology.

But reading the Bard’s heavily sexualised hatchet-job alongside other literary Joans — including the one currently causing all this fuss — also points to a broader question she raises: over how, as a woman, you can juggle your own desire to have political agency, and men’s desire to have… you. Even today, a young woman simply existing in a public space seems enough to prompt (at least some) men to look past whatever she’s trying to do and focus on trying to shag what she is. But the problem is an ancient one — and acutely difficult to navigate if you’re female and want to get anything done.

Joan is unusual among medieval female saints in how active she was: a more typical female saint might wall herself up in a cell as an anchoress, starve herself to death, or become a literary and musical polymath while running a convent. Few such figures engaged directly with the world, let alone in as kinetic a sphere as the battlefield. So it’s no coincidence that literary depictions of Joan that cast her in a negative light often do so, as in Shakespeare, by questioning her chastity. Take Voltaire’s La Pucelle D’Orleans, a racy 1730 poem in which Joan is nearly seduced by a flying donkey, and which so scandalised the satirist’s peers that it wasn’t published until 1899. In brief: for women, to the extent that you’re perceived as fuckable, you’re neither a worthy opponent nor a feasible brother-in-arms.

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Middle-aged women don't want sex

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Among women on a mission, the response until recently has been to remain sexually unavailable. This strategy long predates the medieval Christian emphasis on chastity: in Greek myth, it’s epitomised by the Amazons, reportedly tattooed, pot-smoking Scythian warrior women dedicated to Artemis, goddess of hunting, chastity and war. The Amazons were said to wear trousers, cut off one breast to use a bow better, and keep men only for procreation and slave labour. And their unavailability was key to their power: when the Amazons are defeated it tends to be associated with one of them falling in love with a man. In the legend of Heracles, for example, the Amazon queen Hippolyta willingly gives him her “girdle”, only for the other Amazons to be roused to attack by the goddess Hera, in which struggle Hippolyta is killed.

Hippolyta appears, too, in Shakespeare’s work — except that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s been defeated by Theseus, stripped of her weapons and is now a charmingly submissive bride-to-be. The context has led some critics to suggest the Bard was dropping heavy hints that, as many at the time believed, the reigning monarch Elizabeth I should get married and do as her husband told her.

But Elizabeth never married, and — like Joan — instead made virginity a key part of her personal brand. Rather than risk the inevitable arguments about whether or not she should obey her husband, she danced nimbly across legal and social convention concerning sex roles, monarchy and authority, referring to herself as “queen”, “king” and “prince” as well as “woman” and “virgin”.

Historian Marina Warner has claimed that Joan was driven to angry tears by the taunts her English enemies flung at her, calling her virginity into question. She, like Elizabeth, understood the lesson of the Amazons: mixing sexual action with the military kind tends to go badly for the woman. But where Joan and Elizabeth solved this by building a public persona around chastity, I, Joan perfectly captures the 21st-century alternative strategy. Instead of safeguarding female agency at the cost of sexuality, we must now pretend that it’s possible to retain both sexuality and agency, by opting out of being female.

In two narrow senses, then, a “non-binary” Joan is profoundly conservative. Firstly, it’s the latest in a very long line of literary reworkings of an ambiguous historical figure, in light of contemporary high-status beliefs. (Here, too, Elizabeth has also now also been retrospectively rendered “non-binary”, for the skilful ambiguity with which she navigated her unusual constitutional role as female wielder of an authority exclusively reserved for males.) It couldn’t be more fitting that I, Joan should be staged at the Globe, modern replica of a theatre where Shakespeare himself re-imagined Joan to propagandise for a different set of ruling-class political priorities four centuries ago.

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Secondly, this reimagining is implicitly conservative in the downbeat answer it offers to a problem as old as recorded human history: that of war, sex and women’s agency. Can women both fight and fuck, without suffering the fate of Hippolyta? What we learn both from Joan, and later from Elizabeth, is that you can get some way with strategic androgyny. But the Amazons also teach us that wherever agency and femaleness collide, the key is in staying unavailable: if you put out, or are even perceived to put out, the game is up. And the miserable interpersonal chaos of #MeToo, along with its negative aftermath for women’s productivity, suggests that even today this remains somewhat true.

Opting Joan (and indeed Elizabeth) out of this mess by claiming to have transcended sex is, in effect, to stick one’s fingers in one’s ears in the hope that this asymmetry will go away — or at least in the hope that it’ll enable those females who opt for this strategy to enjoy personal agency without having to opt out of having sex.

Does this work? Well, maybe, in a way, but more in the sense of displacing or mystifying than abolishing sexed dynamics. I struggle to believe that “non-binary” Joan would be depicted on theatre posters naked from the waist up save for a dirty binder were she a male rather than a female “non-binary”. Even those officially committed to “queering” the past still know perfectly well which type of undressed body draws the eye.

And between all these lines today, we can just about read the real taboo: one that’s emphatically not about “queering” gender, a move that could not be more tediously Establishment in 2022. Rather, it’s the noble “no” at the heart of the Amazonian mythos, as well as Joan’s extraordinary blend of high spirituality and military action, and Elizabeth I’s political persona. It is the only form of specifically female power that’s truly culturally off-limits today: virginity.

Two new books aim to give a flavour of what it’s like to be non-binary. None of the Above, by performer Travis Alabanza, offers “Reflections from Life Beyond the Binary”. And Voice of the Fish is a “lyrical essay” that combines scrapbook-like quotes with autobiographical fragments and free-associative prose, to convey something of author Lars Horn’s self-experience.

In one sense, the books are starkly different: Horn is a skilled writer, while Alabanza is mediocre at best. But they share a number of common features — most strikingly, a distinctive blurriness. It’s an intentional feature of Horn’s writing, and in Alabanza’s case probably more a function of bad style. But these differing types of incoherence — intentional and unintentional — reflect the wider political implications of “non-binary”, inviting questions about just how far this idea can really be carried.

Both are, crucially, books about being misfits. Alabanza describes (with characteristic clunkiness) a “lack of ability to fit into the boxes they are trying to place you in”. Mercifully more succinct, Horn echoes this: “I did not fit.” For the latter, who self-describes as “Nonbinary, transmasculine”, gender isn’t easily categorised but “unseen, unintelligible”: “I sense myself as movement. As lake or late-night radio. As a thing that feels weighted, finds it hard to rise, break surface.”

Both writers express the same longing to inhabit the world in a more fluid, protean and self-created way. Water, swimming, tides, sea-life and blurring physically at the edges are recurring themes in Voice of the Fish, and Alabanza employs a similar aquatic metaphor: “A body of water, potential to do so much, yet eventually bottled.”

Unsurprisingly, then, both authors are ambivalent about boundaries and solidity: in other words, about their physical selves. Alabanza self-describes as feeling “like an imposter [sic] in my body”, elsewhere referring to “my body and its desires” as though these are wholly independent entities. And Voice of the Fish thrums with the tension between Horn’s sensual descriptions of the world, and dissociated, disembodied account of selfhood.

Accounts of swimming in a too-small wetsuit and nearly drowning, of an eerie encounter with a folk-healer, of walking across sharp barnacles after a freezing sea-swim, all have a bright, tactile immediacy. And yet Voice of the Fish is also littered with self-objectification, and a sense of bodies as things: references to “this body”, “one’s body”, “the body”, “bodies so often marginalised or written over”. For Horn, embodiment appears to be something abstract, experienced at a distance:

“I am grateful for my body, for how it moves me through the world, but I do experience it as distance, as transient shell that I will walk out of in the same way I walked in. I identify with the gazes put upon it. Their exteriority. To look at myself more than as myself. To experience oneself from within, but, also, crucially, from without.”

For Alabanza, this sense of disembodiment is everyone else’s fault, for inflicting the arbitrary “gender binary” upon the world. Horn’s account of growing up offers richer and stranger possibilities, recounting childhood with a heavy-drinking, indebted mother, a fine artist who called Horn’s school projects ‘bits of twonky shite’ and used her child, from an early age, as the model for her work:

“I have modelled in baths, glass cases, on beds, beaches, in forests. My body covered in dead fish, offal, dried flowers, ashes. My body cast, photographed, filmed, watched by gallery audience. My mother’s instructions always: Look dead, Lars, look more dead.”

Never mind the stereotypical “always played with opposite-sex toys” narrative (though this is also, briefly, present in both). After such a childhood, it would be strange for Horn to have reached adulthood with anything other than a sense of being an object.

Both accounts also betray, albeit perhaps less intentionally, a father-shaped hole. Alabanza fondly recalls “Hangwolf”, a childhood-era German lodger who served as temporary father-figure, then later reflects on “the man who drove me to football because my own was too busy somewhere else”, and “how so many of us grow up with fathers playing hide and seek, so the wider community becomes our dads”. Being called “son”, for Alabanza, could thus feel “like both a punch and a hug”.

Similarly, in Horn’s accounts of international travel, older men frequently appear as friends and protectors. Jean-Marie, a retired French railway worker, takes Horn to visit a healer who uses what appears to be folk magic to cure a chronic skin ailment. Ivano, a Georgian mechanic and driver, offers a son in marriage. Feodor, Horn’s host in Tbilisi, makes tea and shows photographs and quiet kindness. The sense the author describes, of tacit recognition and acceptance, evokes fatherliness in its warmest and least authoritarian form:

“Somehow, like Feodor, Ivano saw me, the pace and gesture of me. Even when what he was understanding came without cultural framework, he grasped it—understanding as physicality, as a texture between bodies, unspoken yet sensed.”

But the most striking commonality between the books is arguably a function of their central theme: “non-binary” identity. For inasmuch as “gender” serves as part of a broad pre-existing matrix of social meanings that shape our public selves, both authors seem to experience this shaping as a kind of violence.

Alabanza declares that “the initial act of deciding I am not man or woman was to gain autonomy for myself”. But the desire for total control over one’s own self-definition raises the question of  whether it’s even possible to have social meaning – after all, if no one else contributes, such meanings are no longer “social” as such. More troubling still, if definition is felt as violence in the context of gender, does the idea of definition-as-violence apply to language too? And what does this mean for our ability to communicate?

If these two books are anything to go by, the answer is: it becomes extremely difficult to say anything clearly. This works well enough in Voice of the Fish, provided you don’t mind a bit of arty meandering. Horn is a compelling writer, and the choice of arty meandering as a literary form is in any case appropriate for the material. Voice of the Fish drifts back and forth between the author’s childhood, youthful travels and present moment, interspersed with excerpts from a range of literary sources. The effect is of a mosaic, deliberately loose, where associations and impressions accumulate in drifts while avoiding precisely those hard-edged ‘this’ or ‘that’ definitions that both Horn and Alabanza seem to experience as painful in the context of ‘gender’.

“I have never enjoyed clean history, neat lines and traceable cause and effect,” declares Horn. “I’ve always enjoyed a more haphazard, more crustacean zigzag through the past.” The book’s meandering form encapsulates this approach, sidling crabwise at the strangeness of Horn’s worldview. The final passages describe flooded Florida streets: a blurring of marine and human terrains, the dissolution of hard edges. And perhaps such blurriness is the only way such strangeness could be depicted with any authenticity.

By contrast, I doubt the incoherence in None of the Above is deliberate: it’s more that in attempting to make a rigorous argument against clear-cut identities, Alabanza succeeds mainly in going round in circles on the topic of Alabanza. In fairness, where this is all that’s attempted – that is, where the book sticks to personal anecdote — the prose is relatively clear. Anecdotes about street harassment, or being rebuked by the local cornershop-owner for wearing lipstick, have an immediacy that draws the reader on.

Unfortunately, though, None of the Above doesn’t stop there, but attempts to theorise each personal anecdote to make wider points about “life beyond the binary”: for example, whether or not there’s such a thing as “proper” trans, or how such identities interact with race and class. And once away from personal stories, the prose is relentlessly awkward.

Examples are legion, but this serves to illustrate: “My existence supersedes any agreed social contract of how people are supposed to act.” It’s some distance from the “incisive” and “extraordinary” prose promised by Canongate’s editorial director when she acquired None of the Above. Nor can this be excused by Alabanza’s own (frequently referenced) position in the intersectional victimhood stack. There are plenty of excellent prose stylists out there who are queer, trans, black, all of the above, or otherwise not white or cisheteropatriarchal. It’s simply that Alabanza isn’t a very good writer.

Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about None of the Above is that, despite attaining neither argumentative rigour nor enjoyably arty meandering, it occasionally hits on something that rings true. “I am trans because of you,” Alabanza declares, “not because of me.” That is, outliers such as Alabanza and Horn have been shoved to the margins by social categories that refuse to make room for them.

And both clearly experience this as an unhappy, tiring state of affairs. Indeed, the one theme in None of the Above that feels sincere, rather than lifted from third-hand theory, is how much longer Alabanza can bear to keep resisting these uncomfortable categories. Having attained fame and attention via a jarringly ambiguous “non-binary” presentation, Alabanza spends the book going back and forth over whether to ditch this in favour of passing more straightforwardly as a “she”. It is, after all, “exhausting to sit outside of any box”.

One may sympathise with this dilemma while wondering whether a measure of pragmatism might not be in everyone’s interests. After all, it’s hard to see how we can accommodate those who experience every form of social meaning as violent impingement, short of abolishing all social meaning. And a culture stripped of both social meanings and the ability to think is no culture at all. Voice of the Fish enacts the least worst version of this perspective: radical subjectivism as an art form. By contrast, None of the Above is probably a more accurate reflection of what a politics of radical ambiguity means in practice, among those less literate than Horn: woolly thinking and self-absorption.

In terms of quality, then, this duo of non-binary books is as binary as it gets. If a highly unusual personal account of sexuality, illness, body-dissociation, marine life and the weird byways of classical literature sounds like your thing, even the most gender-critical reader may enjoy Voice of the Fish. But None of the Above deserves neither your time nor money.

The consultation itself came and went a year later in 2018 amid fervent campaigns by transgender activists eager to allow legal gender changes on demand, and women’s groups concerned that their boundaries would be rendered meaningless as a result. If men can identify as women — for whatever reason they might choose — how can they be kept out? It is naïve to rely on the argument that “men wouldn’t do that, would they?” Spaces such as changing rooms are most often cited, but also at risk are prisons, hospital wards, reserved places on committees and boards, scholarships and, indeed, every sex-based protection.

For the past two years, the hot potato never went cold — on the contrary, it ignited a social media inferno. The furore surrounding JK Rowling — condemned as a transphobe for reclaiming the word woman to describe her sex — is remarkable only because she is a public figure.

The plans leaked to The Sunday Times, and splashed across yesterday’s front page, sparked uproar. Many transgender rights campaigners were horrified. These were not the plans they were looking for. Nancy Kelly, CEO of Stonewall UK described them as “another blow to our community during a difficult time”, citing the huge amount of abuse they believe trans people suffer in their daily lives.

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Britain is not a transphobic country

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As a trans person, I take issue with that statement. I very rarely suffer hostility in the UK — there seems to be no a causal link between gender recognition legislation and social attitudes at large. When I am out and about, people couldn’t appear to care less that I am trans, if they even notice, and few would know anything about the rather obscure law under debate.

The plans were not even unexpected. On 22 April, Liz Truss — the minister for Women and Equalities — set out her priorities for the Government Equalities Office. As she closed her statement, she remarked,

“We’ve been doing a lot of work internally, making sure we’re in a position to respond to that consultation and launch what we propose to do on the future of the Gender Recognition Act. We will be in a position to do that by the summer, and there are three very important principles that I will be putting place.

First of all, the protection of single-sex spaces, which is extremely important.

Secondly making sure that transgender adults are free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining the proper checks and balances in the system.

Finally, which is not a direct issue concerning the Gender Recognition Act, but is relevant, making sure that the under-18s are protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future. I believe strongly that adults should have the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit, but I think it’s very important that while people are still developing their decision-making capabilities that we protect them from making those irreversible decisions.”

The Sunday Times report suggests that the Government plans to adopt these priorities, and move them forward through guidance rather than fresh legislation.

First, there seems to be no appetite to change the mechanism for legal gender recognition. Anyone wishing to change their legal gender will still need to produce two medical reports to support their application. But a proposed crackdown on “quack” doctors would close the loophole by which disreputable medics could write what the patient wanted them to write. Otherwise gender recognition would still be on demand, albeit on payment of an extra fee for sympathetic medical reports.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Second, women’s “safe spaces” will be safeguarded. Existing legislation — the Equality Act 2010 — was cited, so no change there either. What has been lacking is clear and unambiguous guidance over when women can maintain spaces and services according to their sex. Hitherto, there has been rather too much assumption and too little clarity. The current jargon — “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” — is easier said than applied. In July 2018, the Equality and Human Rights Commission set out to clarify the interplay between different pieces of legislation, but acknowledged that it was a complex area of law, and highlighted the need for further conversation.

The specific mention of toilets has been the lightning rod for concerns. It will never be workable to rigidly police who uses which toilet, but clearer guidelines are needed to empower women to challenge people who they think should not be in the women’s. Though rather than argue over who can have access and who should be excluded, let’s be truly progressive and campaign for additional unisex facilities for anyone who does not want to share communal facilities with their own sex. Good practice there is good practice for all, and not just those who might identify as non-binary. Long before I transitioned, I found them a godsend when out with my young daughter.

Third — almost as an afterthought — came a proposed ban on gay conversion therapy, mentioning “some church groups”.

Where does this leave transgender people? Some of my fellow transgender campaigners are in no doubt. Helen Belcher, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Chippenham in 2017 and 2019 urged us all to write to our MPs:

“Start writing today, and don’t stop until they drop this awful, discriminatory position”

while the journalist Paris Lees suggested that

 “trans people are scared and upset about our rights being rolled back.”

But I think differently. The problems we face as trans people are not based on a lack of rights, but a lack of confidence. Proceeding, as we have been, on assumption rather than statute, trans people have been taking and women have been yielding. That cannot go on indefinitely. Tensions have been rising — witness the toxicity of social media — and emotions are running ever higher.

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A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

We desperately need clarity, and these proposals are only a start. While self-identification of gender is off the table at Westminster, it remains a policy objective in Scotland. Dr Kath Murray of the policy collective MurrayBlackburnMackenzie tells me:

“The draft Scottish Bill would also allow people living elsewhere in the UK but born in Scotland to apply for a GRC under Scottish law, which means that change here has a potential impact outside Scotland.”

But across society organisations and institutions have already been captured. In an apparent rush to get ahead of the law, Marks and Spencer allow shoppers to use whichever changing rooms they wish, while Girlguiding UK allow male children to share tents and showers with female children. In business, Pips Bunce — a cross-dressing “gender fluid” man — won a place on the FT list of Top 100 Women in Business. While we should defend Bunce’s right of gender expression, it’s not progressive to displace a woman from a scheme to promote women. This all needs to stop. It is an affront to women and children.

It was notable that Truss referred to children in her statement, citing the dangers of inappropriate choices being offered. The Sunday Times did not elaborate on the proposed ban on gay conversion therapy. However, clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) — England’s only NHS gender clinic for children — have previously expressed concerns that “some openly homophobic parents sought transition for their children because they were gay”. If dogmatic churches might try to “pray away the gay”, this surely is an abhorrent attempt to “trans away the gay”.

In the short term, the future looks uncertain for trans people. Until the Government publishes its plans — reportedly at the end of July — speculation will be rife. But this is a debate we need to enter. Belcher is right: we should write to our MPs. But not to complain; we need to engage constructively with other groups, and campaign for long-term solutions that accommodate us in society without compromising the rights of women and children. Then we really will be able to live our best lives with confidence and security.

These were the opening words from the Labour Party leader at the Pink News Awards yesterday.

Corbyn hadn’t want to miss an opportunity to virtue signal — on International Pronoun Day, no less. He has impeccable trans-inclusive politics, even supporting the inclusion of men who identify as women on all-female shortlists. Corbyn’s self-appointed advisor on all things trans, Owen Jones, has made it clear to the Labour leader that in order to be on the “right side of history” one must put male-bodied trans women before actual women.

At the @PinkNews awards, @jeremycorbyn introduces himself by saying: “My name is Jeremy Corbyn, and my pronouns are he/him.” ??️‍? pic.twitter.com/WZcTy6VCoy

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) October 16, 2019

So, as the bearded, twice married father stepped up to the podium at the awards, Corbyn ensured that everyone knew that he identified as male, as opposed to either a woman (she/her) or non-binary (they/them, or ze/zim).

Most of my friends and colleagues block the extremely trans-woke Pink News site from their social media feeds because of the toxic levels of misogyny on its pages. But Corbyn’s words did make it through to the mainstream. They were widely reported by the wokeing class dudebros who were as proud as punch of their Absolute Boy.

But I don’t see anything to be proud of. Indeed, this obsession with pronouns is extremely worrying. Especially now the police have joined in. The same week that government statistics were released showing rape convictions down to a shocking 1.4% of those reported, Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke of Cheshire Police found the time to make a video to mark IPD, telling us that for many people, “Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing.” So can being raped, but let’s get our priorities right, shall we?

Today marks #pronounsday – seeking to make sharing, educating and respecting personal pronouns commonplace. @pronounsday pic.twitter.com/pe9x9GWTJj

— Julie Cooke (@JulieCooke40) October 16, 2019

For all those lesbians who are constantly told we “look like men” because we refuse to wear make-up, high heels and corsets, and dress for the benefit of men, it is offensive and deeply anti-lesbian to now get asked “what are your pronouns?” We have struggled for years to win respect and acceptance as women — why should we have to spell it out.

There are women I know that look absolutely nothing like men, but who are called ‘sir’ in restaurants or stores, for the simple reason that they reject femininity. The lesbians I know have developed a sense of pride to be able to assert that we are women, despite the fact that we do not exist only in relation to men. To then be asked whether we are he/him or even they/them is ridiculous.

One woman I know who is part of an LGBTQQI+ choir was even put through an arduous and upsetting disciplinary process because she refused to wear a pronoun badge.

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The trouble with being able to choose your own pronouns is that it can be abused. If men aren’t identified as men, then they can no longer be held accountable for patriarchy and misogyny. And whether we like it or not, men are the ones to blame for the oppression of women.

Women, on the other hand, are unable, however much some of us may wish, to identify our way out of being oppressed by the male sex class. We cannot escape atrocities such as FGM, forced marriage, rape, or domestic abuse simply by giving ourselves new pronouns.

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By Julie Bindel

My generation of feminists fought for the right of women to have single sex services in order to protect us from male violence. We also fought for equal pay, maternity rights and abortion rights, and we stand up against male violence. If men are freely allowed to identify themselves as ‘she/her’, what will happen to all those rights? Our ability to evidence our discrimination and oppression in relation to men will be slowly eroded.

Jeremy Corbyn, the man who took money from a regime that executes men for being gay can present himself as super-woke by telling us he, ahem, identifies as male. But let us also remember that this is the same man who made the ludicrous suggestion that a solution to sexual attacks on the underground was to assign women-only carriages. Does he not see the flaw in his logic? If such a thing existed, all a male-bodied sexual predator would need to do to gain access would be to wear a pronoun badge declaring that his pronouns were ‘she/her’.

My badge? Stop/This/Madness.

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Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

Today’s progressive discourse has determined that everything must be ‘inclusive’ of everyone – but, in reality, this change is both unnecessary and nonsensical.

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When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Toby Adams, executive director of the Intersex and Genderqueer Recognition Project and advocate for the bill, claimed it was necessary in order for “people whose gender is non-binary, neither male nor female… to get an accurate birth certificate” in order to validate “their reality”.

The purpose of a birth certificate, though, is not to record an adult’s feelings about their gender, nor whether their personalities align with society’s understanding of masculinity and femininity – it is to record a baby’s biological sex. Whether or not that baby takes a gender studies course somewhere down the line has no bearing on its physical body.

Adams also claimed that if a birth certificate “lists the wrong gender, you have to lie every time you fill out a form requiring you to show your birth certificate – registering for school, obtaining a ‘Real ID’, travelling”.

Again this misses the point. Gender is not the same as sex, and an individual’s feelings about their gender does not change their biological sex. Advocates of these types of policy change do not seem to understand that gender simply refers to social constructs of what it means to be male and female. Gender says a male should be a dominant, unemotional, adventurous football fan, while a female should be a polite, nurturing, delicate cry-baby with a deep desire to wear uncomfortable shoes and shave their pubic hair.

Sex, on the other hand, is biological, generally determined by a person’s reproductive anatomy. Unless born with a rare intersex condition, males have penises and produce sperm, females have vaginas and uteruses, and produce ova.

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The Left has forgotten what feminism looks like

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Even more troubling here, though, is the fact that the material reality of biological sex, which cannot be altered based on feelings, politics, or declaration, is framed as ‘a lie’, while one’s personal feelings about gender are framed as objective, inarguable truth, so much so that we may alter government records and data.

To misgender an individual, for example to refer to a person who is male as ‘he’ when he prefers to be called ‘she’, is now said to be a hate crime. But not only are people claiming they can change sex, and that everyone around them must play along, individuals who feel they don’t fit the stereotype of either masculine or feminine are identifying as “non-binary”.

This would all be fine – people’s personal identities are, after all, theirs alone – except for two glaring flaws in the argument. First, the idea that a person can be non-binary assumes that everyone else is, somehow, binary, in terms of their gender. But no one in the world fits all gender stereotypes. I don’t like pink, am not nurturing, and enjoy burping and swearing much more than I do stilettos. Does this mean I am not female? Of course not. It means I am a woman with a personality. And I have never once felt the need to express that personality on my ID.

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How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

Second, acknowledging that a person is male or female is neither an insult or an opinion – it is a fact. And an important one. Women and men have very different bodies and health needs. Pregnancy is an obvious difference, requiring specialist healthcare, but there are plenty of other differences. Cardiovascular disease, for example, is the number one killer of women in many countries, including the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK, in part because both symptoms and treatments have been tested primarily on men. Because our cells are sexed, diseases, treatments, and chemicals impact men and women differently.

Regardless of how you want to self-identify, scientists and doctors need to know people’s actual sex in order to treat them properly and conduct effective research.

None of this means, of course, that we shouldn’t be challenging society’s understanding of what a woman or a man should be. Pressure to stay within the rigid social boundaries of masculinity or femininity hurt us all — those expectations are difficult, if not impossible, to live up to. But this does not require us to reject our biological sex in the process.

What would be much more progressive would be to say, “Yes, I am female. No, that doesn’t mean I am inherently submissive”, or “Yes, I am male, but that does not mean I am inherently aggressive”. Birth certificates, or other forms of official identification, however, are not the place to air those opinions.