I’m standing up to the misogynist, ageist culture that’s trying to erase my sex

Sometimes it’s hard to be a person. It really is, Tammy, because although Aretha makes me feel like a natural person and Whitney was absolutely bang on the money when she sang I’m every person, now that living, breathing women are being erased by a load of uppity activists, a ruthless purge of art will surely follow. Science too; ladybirds? An affront to asexual entomologists everywhere! 

Farewell Lady Amherst’s pheasants. Be gone romantically evocative lady’s mantle, welcome angiosperm perennial alchemilla mollis. Whither The French Lieutenant without his woman? Or Louisa May Alcott’s bestseller Little Personages Assigned Female at Birth? Once our creative culture has been cleansed, who among us could begin to guess the genitalia of Roy Orbison’s “Oh pretty person walking down the street”? 

Is that really what any society would term progress? Life really will be a box of chocolates when all common sense classification is removed; you really don’t know what you’re gonna get, apart from a lousy movie title. Most pressingly this weekend who knows what will result – quite possibly a bonfire of the binaries – at the celebratory Coronation concert unless the playlist is scrutinised by the self-appointed censors at the University of the Arts London? 

This is where the wokerati first pompously, misogynistically, erased the supposedly deeply divisive and offensive word “woman” from their maternity policy because, actually, it’s not just women who give birth? Except it is. Nutters. And now this week they have axed all references to “women” (ewwwww!) from their menopause guidance, presumably because men are entitled to hot flushes too. Fruitcakes. 

No person, no cry, as Bob Marley never sang. Still, here’s hoping these gender ideologues and linguistic vigilantes lay down the law to the A-listers. It might just alert the silent majority to what’s happening as they go about their not always but sometimes highly gendered business. 

I for one am looking forward to tapping my toe along to Katy Perry’s California Fine Fresh Fierce but Not Necessarily Cisgender Persons. 

Or listen as Lionel Richie’s haunting ballad Lady is hastily repackaged as Themfriend. Maybe just maybe, that spotlight would throw into sharp relief the dangerous nonsense peddled by those who would redact women and womankind from the national conversation and render first our name, then our sex-based rights, invalid. I have no beef with the concept of self-identification. 

Why would I? Comedian Eddie Izzard wears a frock and wants to be called Suzy. Fine. He’s easy-ohsy about the rest, saying: “I prefer she/her, I don’t mind he/him. Nobody can make a mistake with me.” Which is perfectly reasonable given he’s not a woman. What I do object to is the juvenile distortion of biological reality and the troubling way simply saying “men can’t get pregnant” is treated as a hate crime. Ditto “blokes don’t go through the menopause” which is defined as the point at which a woman stops having periods. 

Not a person. Not an individual, a woman. Taking the word woman out, tinkering with terms and cynically refusing to recognise our collective experience doesn’t make fiction into fact. But it does undermine us. It signals there is nothing special or distinctive about being a woman; any man can be a woman and access our private spaces, simply by declaring it. Most men I know aren’t particularly bothered. 

Nor are my daughters, schooled as they are in the dogma of diversity and inculcated in the absolutist creed of inclusivity. 

Not until they come up against the aggression and arrogance of the militant trans lobby will they have any inkling of the war being waged against womanhood. There are signs of a fightback. Earlier this year a Policy Exchange report warned that NHS trusts were compromising women’s rights by providing intimate care based not on a staff member’s biological sex, but their self-declared gender identity. 

The authors warned that our health service is increasingly “compromised” by an ideology “which disregards the realities and immutability of biological sex” and “that is diminishing the rights of women and girls”. In response it was reported hospitals were set to be told they must guarantee single-sex care. 

What’s keeping them? I’m happy to draw up the guidelines myself, if it’s womanpower the Department of Health is lacking, rather than, as it appears, backbone. Until the pendulum swings the other way, I fear we will find ourselves increasingly pushed to the margins. 

So I’m all for tactically withholding the word “woman” from music until it’s restored to us in every other sphere. Later in the summer I’m looking forward tremendously to Billy Joel’s mammoth Hyde Park concert (even if I haven’t got a ticket and I’ll only be picnicking within earshot). 

But I have to take issue with his insistence that She’s Always A Person to me. Catchy yes, but it’s just lip service and, frankly, triggering. The six-time Grammy winner needs forcible re-education, possibly at the University of the Arts (who don’t know it from their elbows) London. 

Unless he starts singing “They/Them are Always a Person to me” he’ll be well and truly removed from the stage long before the opening chords of Uptown Not Necessarily Binary Young Person. As J K Rowling once said, “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people.” Give us back our terminology and we’ll return the tunes.