Misgendering rules are so complex we can only fall foul

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, has at the age of 58 decided she is “non-binary”.

- Sam Lister

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. 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.

“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”.