No, there really aren’t 150 genders.

It is hard to imagine that anyone could stand up in front of a group of people and say, with a straight face, that there are at least one hundred and fifty (that’s one-five-zero or 150) different genders. But someone does and has at the BBC. Just exactly what is going on is hard to fathom, but one thing is sure – it has to stop. Surely the woke staff development officers of the myriad inhuman resources departments that operate across our major industries and institutions have overstretched themselves now.

According to The Sun, “The BBC has hired non-binary inclusion consultants” to inculcate this garbage into a captive group of employees as they do across a wide range of workplaces. This goes hand-in-hand with the oxymoronic ‘unconscious bias training’ and the well-established industry of inclusion and diversity training. This stuff costs a fortune, achieves absolutely nothing and leaves employees terrified lest they misgender someone, exercise white privilege or accidentally open the door for a woman in a fit of misogynistic mayhem.

Having retired, I thought I had left all this nonsense behind me. But no. Even in my dotage I am required to fill in the occasional form and over the years, and increasingly in retirement, I notice that these just get longer…and longer…and longer.

Who recalls the good old days? How easy it was to fill in an application form, complete a survey or offer your views on how well someone or some company had done their job. Here’s a reminder of those halcyon and binary days when all we were required to do was offer our information on age, sex (NOT gender; male or female or that old favourite ‘yes please’), marital status (married or single), race (white or non-white) and employment status (employed or unemployed). Now, with the exception of age, each of these has become inordinately complicated and additional categories have been included. That said, they’ll get round to age eventually (e.g. “What age do you identify as?”).

At some point ‘sex’ became ‘gender’ and we all had to think that little bit longer as nobody knew what it meant. But at least the choice was still male or female. Then there was the addition of ‘sexuality’ which was a new one on most of us, and here we had to declare that we were ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’. Now both of these categories have become confused, conflated and expanded to such an extent that they cannot chop Amazon Rainforest trees down fast enough to make the paper needed to print the forms. With a possible 150 genders to choose from, filling in forms will become a full-time occupation for some people; especially if they are gender fluid. Their gender may change by the time they have read the list and change again by the time they have decided. And while we are here, just how many people actually identify as ‘two-spirit’ (a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit) and what possible difference can it make If we know this? Are we going to build two-spirit toilets where you can simultaneously sit down and stand up to pee?

It is barely worth starting on race (oops, ‘ethnicity’) as this is inordinately complex. In a country that is by a vast majority (80%) white and where ‘White’ used to top the list as that made it easy for us white folks, we now have to scan an increasingly long list of possibilities. Thus, you are no longer simply ‘White’ you might be ‘White British’ or ‘White Irish’. I am both so maybe I am ‘two-spirit’ in ethnicity, ‘three-spirit’ if you throw in the fact that I am also Scottish. This level of granularity over the finer nuances of gender and race simply cannot lead to any useful information, and gathering it is surely a complete waste of time. I would make a start on employment status, but we would be here all night.

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