Daily Mail

Gender quiz put me in a subatomic spin

- G.BELL, Eastleigh, Hants.

A little data for our files, to help us care for you, Are you gender fluid/LGBTQ, Masculine presenting/drag queen (straight or gay), Intersex cisgender/ cryptosexu­al — eh? Asexual/androgynou­s/some different kind of love, Or anything you can think of which isn’t covered above? I was taught with form filling, just name, serial number and rank, And there wasn’t a box for ‘Can’t remember’, so I left the rest of it blank. I had no desire to be troublesom­e, I’ve got no axe to grind, But matters of that nature were the last thing on my mind. The grief from a rogue bicuspid was very hard to take, And teeth are neutral, surely? What difference did it make? Next I’m in the X-ray suite, prostrate with the pain, Till a timely shot of opiates released my troubled brain. Unshackled from its moorings by a long word ending in ‘...ine’, My mind now wandered freely and entered the X-ray machine. I drifted down inside it, in curiosity, And felt like a deep sea diver, adrift in an alien sea. Into the atomic world where everything fizzed and popped, Spinning, spinning, spinning, then I shuddered to a stop. Deep inside the nucleus, suddenly out of thick air, A sheet unfurled before me. It was a questionna­ire. Tick here if you’re a lepton, or one of its mirror twins, Boson/meson/tachyon — which way did you spin? A heavy right-handed neutrino, or a different kind of bird, Gravitino/antiquark/is your charge + or -2/3? A superposit­ion of mass eigenstate­s . . . I gave a nervous cough, Then smiled and made my excuses, the drugs were wearing off. I woke from my delusion, but it made me think, you know, About the ancient dictum, ‘As above, so below’. We’ve come a long way down the road, from Mr, Miss and Madam, I reckon it’s been inevitable since they split the Adam.

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