Transmitting straight from luvvie land, the actress Olivia Colman has taken it upon herself to hold forth on trans rights. It’s a necessary intervention, given that no one else in Hollywood ever talks about the subject.

“It’s really important to tell everybody’s story and to do it from an empathetic point of view,” Colman has claimed in a new interview. “But then someone who is anti-trans and against trans rights is someone who… I don’t know how you explain to them what understanding and kindness is and love.”

The actress further stated, in a separate discussion with LGBT magazine Them, that she has always felt “sort of non-binary”, and doesn’t consider herself “massively feminine”. Married to a man for 25 years, she says she has never felt comfortable in rigid gender roles, and even that she considers herself “a gay man”. Handily, these remarks were made during Colman’s promotion of her new film, Jimpa, which follows a mother and her non-binary teenage daughter on a visit to Amsterdam to see her gay grandfather.

It must be dull being a straightforward heterosexual, with a quarter of a century of straight marriage under your belt, during these compulsory rainbow times in which we live. Colman isn’t the first celebrity to take this approach. Pop star Miley Cyrus at various points labelled herself pansexual, gender-fluid and queer while she was married to a man. Meanwhile, the comedian and author David Walliams claimed in 2024 that if he were younger, he would identify as non-binary. And now, having never felt “massively feminine”, Colman — far from being a dreary middle-aged woman — is an elusive, glamorous non-binary person, or even a man.

Gay men — in other words, males with a sexual attraction to other actual males — have every right to find this nonsense bemusing. Does Colman ever worry about being attacked when holding hands in public with her husband? The stakes are far lower for these public figures: they reap all of the benefits from laying claim to these identities without suffering any of the problems. They do not have to worry about actual discrimination, or threats of violence, or stigmatisation, all of which many gay men and lesbians her age will have undoubtedly encountered. Wearing a sexual identity, like a costume at a fancy dress party, will give her a boost among the glitterati, and, she at least hopes, will make her more interesting.

If Colman recognised that the gay men she parodies often face negative consequences in the real world, she might also see why so many reject the gender ideology she embraces. It’s a pity she doesn’t identify as a lesbian, at least on Tuesdays, because that’s all about gender identity, not biological sex. As these trans activists she’s telling us to be “kind” about are forever reminding us, some lesbians have penises. To Colman, it’s just a bag of Allsorts. She can “be” whatever she likes without any disruption to her life at all, other than the brownie points she’s just earned for being both inclusive and gender/sex-fluid.

No doubt she’d think straightforward lesbians like me, with no days off to explore queerer climes, are very boring. But I’d rather be that than a posturing wazzock.

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Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Lesbians: Where are we now? She also writes on Substack.

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