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       Two celebrities have shown in the last few days just how far reaching the madness around gender identity is. Shobna Gulati, a former Corrie favourite, at the age of 58 has decided she is “nonbinary”. It means she does not identify as a man or a woman and her personal pronouns are “she/they”. This is because the actress (actor/actrex?) sees herself as a person and gender is not important to her.

       Welcome to the human race! Gulati was a much-loved soap star for many years after first capturing viewers’ hearts in dinnerladies. In recent years her star has waned. Last year she admitted feeling “rejected” and said she was questioning her career choice after losing out on another audition.

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       Shobna Gulati, actor, writer and dancer, after being awarded an MBE (Image: Getty Images)

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       But after fading from public view, her new life choice has made her newsworthy again.

       “The sound person said to me that they were non-binary and I said, ‘What is that?’ So, then they explained and I thought – ‘Well, I feel like that, but I didn’t ever have that vocabulary,” she told Kaye Adams on her How to be 60 podcast.

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       “They said that they saw themselves as a person and that the gender – the he or the she – wasn’t important to who they are. And I thought: ‘That’s all I’ve ever thought.’ Gulati said she has “learnt from our younger generation what that might look like in terms of a word, because I know what it feels like in terms of being me”.

       Which cuts straight to the heart of the rows over sex and gender because everyone can only ever feel what it is like to live a life “in terms of being me”.

       So when a man says he “feels like a woman” he has no possible way of ever knowing what that is.

       Often what it appears to mean is “I like wearing women’s clothes” and clothes do not maketh the woman.

       Gulati added that she did not have the words before to explain who she was, adding: “I was just accepted as a person who fell out of the tree and equally the person who put on all this makeup and did a dance.”

       What was the problem with that? It is perfectly fine to do both. It does not mean you have to deny your womanhood.

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       The announcement came a few days after the BBC got into trouble over an item on Radio 4’s PM programme where “Suzy” Eddie Izzard was referred to as he.

       Anita Anand said she was “very very sorry” after referring to the comedian as “the man” on the show.

       Izzard, 63, is “gender fluid” and uses the pronouns she/her. The comic has previously said he does not mind if other people refer to him as male. But that makes no difference and Izzard must surely know that. After announcing he is gender fluid – which means he feels male some days and female others – the national broadcaster is left tying itself in knots to accommodate this. If Izzard changes his mind frequently, how is anyone else supposed to keep up?

       But so-called misgendering is a terrible sin under the rules set by the extremists, which are so complicated that most people can only fall foul of them, making them some form of “phobe” and the other person a victim.

       So we have a situation where a dedicated nurse is under investigation for referring to a burly 6ft trans-identifying paedophile, who called her the N-word three times, as a man while discussing the removal of a catheter from his penis.

       Izzard can live however the hell he likes, it is not my business what he wears or how he refers to himself.

       But a line must be drawn when institutions have to bend to his whims. The licence-fee funded corporation and other publicly paid for institutions are left twisting and turning to meet the ever changing and utterly nonsensical demands around the issue.

       Izzard also represents another fundamental problem with identity extremism.

       At its heart, it is based on sexism. When asked how he moved from girl to boy mode, Izzard replied: “I take off my heels”, reducing womanhood to shoe choices. Perhaps if we no longer boxed men and women into such stereotypes, Gulati would not feel the need to disown her sex.

       Gender is based on cliches. Biology, however, is absolutely fundamental to how a life is lived and cannot be changed.

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       Failing to live up to, or rather live down to, stereotypes, does not make someone special or different.

       It would have been so much more powerful if instead of changing their pronouns Izzard and Gulati had told young people they can be whoever they want without having to deny they are a man or woman.