This gender policing leaves me quizzical

A quota for ‘non-binary’ contestants in a University Challenge team is lunacy. It’s your brain that counts

Iwas over the moon when Daisy Christodoulou, aka “Britain’s brightest student”, steered Warwick to a University Challenge victory in 2007. And equally delighted two years later when Gail “the human Google” Trimble, captained Corpus Christi Oxford to repeat triumphs, scoring more points en route than her three team-mates combined. Plus, when I appeared (swank, swank) on a Christmas Special edition in 2013, our St Hugh’s alumni team, comprising three women and one bloke, comfortably beat the Stirling team fielding three men and only one lassie.

Proof, if any were needed, that women can be as geekish as any bloke when it comes to retaining arcane facts and random trivia. Even so, if you were to guess which gender was more predisposed to sit down and memorise every number one chart hit from 1960 to the present, you’d probably plump for men. If I look at my circle of acquaintances, I can’t think of any woman who has had major quiz-show success, but I know a male comedian who stormed five Blockbuster goldruns in the 1980s (“I’ll have a P, Bob”), an accountant who won Brain of

Britain, several men who have done well on the Round Britain Quiz, while two of my female friends’ brothers won Mastermind. At least three of these quiz maestros have no social lives, but that’s another issue.

So, I can’t help feeling of all the equal opportunities issues I might fight to the barricades (FGM, equal pay, the right not to have your p---grabbed by the Leader of the Free World), gender balance on University

Challenge ain’t one of them. The Students’ Union of King’s College London takes a different tack. It has issued new quota guidelines for the college’s team, saying at least half must be made up of “self-defining women, trans or non-binary students”.

If you’re feeling confused, don’t worry; I hadn’t properly clocked the term non-binary either, until a year ago. That’s when a feminist author told me she had been at a conference, discussing her work with refugee women who have suffered unbearable atrocities, and an angry young woman had torn her off a strip for using “he” and “she”. By doing so, it was alleged, she was ignoring those whose gender identities weren’t exclusively feminine or masculine and who describe themselves as transgender, bi-gender, androgyne, genderfluid etc. No matter my friend had devoted her whole life to charity and the fight for equality: under this Orwellian orthodoxy, words count more than deeds.

I can’t help thinking of Monty Python’s straight, white, privileged Oxbridge boys when I think about the King’s College diktat. You could field a

University Challenge team with the modern-day equivalents of Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Co in their leastconvincing housewife drag and claim it was all-female. It’s absurd and means no “self-identifying woman” on King’s team will know whether she got there by merit, or as part of the quota. What happens, moreover, if a woman says she identifies as a man, because she’s obsessed with quizzes?

The lunacy is everywhere. I was part of a panel debating sexual identity at a philosophy festival. Diane Abbott and the radical feminist Julie Bindel declared there was no such thing as gender. I asserted while there’s clearly a sliding scale of masculinity and femininity, it’s wilfully blind to assert there aren’t some tendencies that aren’t broadly characteristic of one sex or the other. “Ask any primary school teacher,” I said, “whether it’s nature or nurture which makes small boys more inclined than girls to buzz round the classroom like a spinning top.” Many in the audience jeered, but afterwards three teachers came up to say they agreed. Meanwhile, Bindel, an impassioned champion of free speech, has been no-platformed by Manchester University Students’ Union because she doesn’t believe men who undergo gender reassignment should be considered women in the same way as those born with a womb and ovaries.

I’m sure sensitive souls might consider me bigoted too. No matter that I often feel determinedly nonfeminine, while my sister felt she was a boy until puberty, when she grasped she could be a lesbian instead. Many a male friend has borrowed my clothes and make-up. But unlike today’s student activists, few of my generation felt that discovering the self was less moored than previously imagined made one a special snowflake.

Despite this, I discern a rather glorious, time-honoured motivation in the new student-led gender policing. We all know it’s the young’s job to make parents feel like goaded dinosaurs. So it’s little wonder students now inform their baffled Ps they have changed their sexual identity. One friend’s son told his Home Counties Tory parents to address him as “they”. Another told me her formerly gay daughter has a boyfriend, while her stepson now goes by a female Christian name and has tumbling locks: “You may have seen her [the stepson] on University

Challenge,” my friend said. Indeed, I had: the only non-binary member of an otherwise all-male Oxbridge team. They did quite well. Even so, none were as smart and all-conquering as the cisgender Christodoulou and Trimble. You can change gender, but you can’t change your brain.