Brett Ellis admits to confusion over gender identity

It has been a ‘thing’ for a good few years now as those of my age and ilk, post boomer, spit feathers and portray themselves as incandescent with rage as to the dizzying number of genders now on the menu for homo sapiens.

I concur, but not in a furious slap a copy of the Daily Mail down on the glass-top coffee table way, of course, and it says a lot for mine, or anyone’s outrage, that this issue is supposedly so prevalent that I had to research what the differing genders are called.

Define yourself however you like - personally, I couldn’t care less, but, and this is where the issue lay, should you then demand others refer to you as you demand to be referred to?

To me it smacks of ‘control’ and this is where I have truck - if someone demanded I refer to them as AMAB (assigned male at birth) then I wouldn’t play ball, but to take us back to the start of this column, has this ever been an issue you have personally encountered?

Brett Ellis does not want to offend over gender identity A ‘demiboy’ is someone who identifies as masculine (now it’s getting confusing) whereas a ‘demigender’ is someone who uses ‘demi’ to portray their association to a particular gender albeit it ‘demitrans’ or ‘demigirl.’

Confused? Not much.

I recently met someone who identifies as ‘pangender’ and I was mocked when I asked whether it was someone who is attracted to kitchen cooking utensils?

I now know, having educated myself, that it is a ‘nonbinary gender identity’ to describe people who experience all or many gender identities on the gender spectrum. This is similar to ‘omnigender’ and, dare I say it, in old money, bisexuality?

Maybe you see yourself as a ‘stone butch,’ which sounds like an item you might pick up at the garden centre. It is someone who embodies traits associated with feminine butchness.

The confusion factor gets ratcheted up a notch when we encounter ‘trigender’ which means you can, over time, or simultaneously, have three genders.

An alternative is ‘maverique’ which sounds like a cool BBC afternoon detective series from the 1980s (a Rockford Files spin off perhaps?). It is where you have a core gender identity that is independent of existing categories, whatever the flip that means.

Today’s column was designed to clear the minefield of gender identity and stop us causing undue offence, not that we were in the first place anyhow, but has left me feeling more confused than I started out with if truth beknown.

Bring back men and women I say! But if not, and you must identify as polygender, don’t expect us to play along to your maverique tendencies if you’d be so kind as, well, it's all too confusing for my level of intellect!

• Brett Ellis is a teacher.