Who isn’t genderfluid?

Even yew trees are at it. It seems the ancient Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, which everyone had assumed to be male, is bearing berries and is therefore, at least in part, female. Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, observed: ‘The rest of the tree was clearly male. One small branch in the outer part of the crown has switched and now behaves as female.’ Which makes this not just the oldest but the most socially progressive tree in Britain, the Caitlyn Jenner of topiary. Or perhaps it was just one transgressive branch making a bid for attention, having been trapped in the wrong trunk all this time.

You can’t go far this year without encountering someone in the process of transitioning between genders or who has already arrived at their gender of choice. As a woman supervising a drama group for trans actors put it on BBC Radio 4 last Sunday, ‘There’s a moment happening.’ And if you’re not easy with the whole genderqueer approach to the boys and girls question, if you’re stuck in the binary (bad) view that your gender is a matter of XX or XY chromosomes or the possession of something as obvious as a penis, well, you’re going to have to catch up fast and learn how to pronounce Mx — the non-binary alternative to Mr, Miss, Mrs or Ms. One could only applaud the blind man on last week’s radio programme for the visually impaired, In Touch, who confessed to panicking at a diversity training workshop because he wasn’t sure whether one of the contributors was male or female — the voice register was plainly male, but that was no guide. With admirable tact, he leaned over and asked what pronoun the speaker preferred; it turned out to be ‘she’.

The trend isn’t without its comic elements, as with the Guardian’s cookery writer Jack Monroe, who was presented with a ‘Woman of the Future’ award last week although she had just come out as transgender, as opposed to merely butch lesbian.