Emer O’Toole is a joyless bore compared with my heroine Caitlin Moran, says Julie Burchill

Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word ‘gender’, my heart sank. When I was a kiddy in the early 1970s, the word (especially when combined with ‘bending’) seemed full of fun and flighty possibilities — David Bowie in a dress, Marc Bolan flouncing about on Top of the Pops like a little girl at her birthday party, Danny La Rue making my mum snort Snowball down her nose on a Saturday night.

Now gender-bending appears to have boiled down to a bunch of hatchet-faced transsexuals demanding to use the Ladies, ‘no-platforming’ veteran feminists who have worked all their lives to better the lot of women and children, and generally telling born females what to do. Not so much bending as bossing, and definitely no fun at all.

But in the wake of the success of the Divine Caitlin, all feminism must show willing on the fun front, so the back-cover blurb of Girls Will be Girls insists that the contents are ‘hilarious’. I’m always a bit doubtful about this claim by a book about itself. Isn’t it rather like giving oneself a nickname? I must say I suppressed a shudder as I read on:

Emer O’Toole once caused a media sensation by growing her body hair and singing ‘Get Your Pits Out for the Lads’ on national TV. You might think she’s crazy — but she has lessons for us all.

Oh dear — as in ‘You Don’t Have to be Crazy to Work Here, but it Helps’,the bore’s eternal mantra.

You can’t blame publishers for wanting to have their very own Caitlin Moran, any more than you could blame record labels in the 1960s for wanting their very own Scouse pop-combo in the wake of the Fab Four.