The leviathan advanced. The whole house shook. 

Motionless, we held our mutual breath. Air and breath and blood alike, time and space and Life itself were frozen in suspense; as were our petrified souls. Our crystallising veins. Our seizing voices.

A venomous yellow glow emanated from the dining room window, just beyond the hall.

I ventured to investigate. Slipped silently through the door. In deathly silence, I tiptoed round the dining room’s perimeter, spine and heels and head adhered to the wall, and concealed myself behind the window’s curtain. As I observed the scene without, I could feel my blood turning ice cold. My face curdling white.

“Get downstairs,” I stammered back towards the lounge, voice wavering. “Downstairs — now! Everybody get into the cellar. Keep the bloody lights off and don’t make a sound…”

Clambering under, over, through each other in their haste, they hustled, tumbled, clattered, scrawled and crawled their way along the hall and down the cellar stairs. My guests. My friends. My family. Here for a dinner party. To celebrate the birth of my child. To shower this ten-pound vaginal wrecking-ball of joy with love and adoration; and here they were. Here we were. Suddenly encompassed by ferocious conflagrations, tendrils, fearsome, flaming tongues of wicked, venomous vermillion, toxic orange, black and blue, licking, lashing away at every window, every door about our little London townhouse. Scrambling for the cellar door as walls and ceilings all around them started caving in, vomiting chunks of plaster, coughing dust. Together, in the deepest, darkest, sootiest corner of the cellar they huddled, terror-stricken. Body-in-body. Arm-in-arm. 

I followed them down, swaddling the baby, the little cause celebre, in my arms. I would not tell them what I saw. I could not process what I saw.

All I knew is that they were here for me. For us.

Freezing moisture drizzled down the blackened brickwork, trickling down spines like the touch of vampires skulking silently through the dark. Like someone was down here with us, biding their time. Ready to snatch. To pin us down and torture us until we exposed our secret to the world. A secret held in trust between none but myself and the precious little treasure in my arms.

“We have you surrounded now. Deliver us the child in the next five minutes - so that we might at last perform the assignment - and no-one will be harmed.”  

Above us, in the front garden, Action Men fired mortars at the living room wall. Cavalries of table football players bound in brotherhood by their broad iron rods turned battering rams thundered away at the front door. Giant Beyblades spinning, whizzing, whirling like enormous saw-tipped UFOs shredded, ground, devoured our wisteria-laced exterior. Legions of Bratz and Barbie dolls hurled Polly Pockets laced with volatile Molotov cocktails of cheap children’s make-up through the downstairs windows like grenades. The onslaught was relentless. It was like living through the end of days. Worse, even.

I never told you what I saw outside, did I. Churning through the cityscape. Ripping endless acres of metropolis asunder like the ravenous house-harvester it was. Parting undulating oceans, grey and brown, red and black, of brick and slate and mortar. washing district after district aside like waves against a monstrous prow. Toys. Bastard toys. Gendered toys. Millions of them. Animated. Giant. Superhuman. Mutant. Melting under the fearsome flames of their own torches. Coalescing into one enormous, towering beast of burning plastic, broad and monstrous as a mountain, wading from the west. Tearing through Tooting. Streatham. Dulwich. Lordship Lane. Liquid figurines and dolls whipping off its limbs with every sudden forward motion, raining down on London like great, searing globules of lava from Vesuvius. Cascading from the gelatinous plastic mass, myriad legs and arms and eyes swimming about the great beast’s body recombined themselves, encircling our little terraced townhouse, preparing for the final assault. There they were: the pink aisle and the blue aisle of Toys ‘R’ Us, manifest as the machines of Hell’s vengeful armies, attacking our home at the behest of a wicked-looking man wearing a fur coat that looked suspiciously like a vulva with an out-of-control bush, and a top-hat that looked very auspiciously like a penis.

And as they laid our house to ruin, they chanted their war-cry. Their demand. With every passing second, every tick-tick-tick of the clock, its volume swelling louder and louder.

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

thump-thump

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

GENITALS NOW!

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

thump-thump

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

GENITALS NOW!

But I never would. Never. I swear upon my life - cross my bleeding heart - they would never, ever get the satisfaction. 

“Honey, please,” that cowardly prick I call my husband begged of me. “It’ll take seconds. Three words. Or — or if you really, really can’t bring yourself to use the b- or the g-word, just — oh, God, I don’t know, Delia, just… Whip its nappy off just for literally a second, just until they’ve seen it, until they’re satisfied. Or — or, why not just imagine you’re a twelve-year-old boy who’s only just discovered what sex is, and scream out what it’s got down there like you’ve got genital-based Tourette’s. Please, just let this bloody crusade go. Throw in the towel. For all our sakes. Especially — i-if for absolutely no other reason, Delia — darling — for the sake of the safety of our newborn child-”

“No,” I interrupted sharply. “Fuck that. And fuck you. Fuck you, you absolute spineless fucking coward. Behaving like the classic thirty-something bollockless millennial middle-class twatty liberal south London gentrifier that he is, once again, my ever-supportive hubby. Perfectly willing to stand up for what’s right amongst all his obnoxiously pseudo-progressive beardy hipster cunts at his Shoreditch start-up or down the run-down, shabby-chic pub they slum it in every night for a seven-quid craft IPA, but the second it’s time to cut the frigging chat and stand firm for his supposed morals it in the face of actual adversity, all those steadfast convictions go out the fucking window, don’t they. Listen to me, Nathan” — and I want you all to know my razor-sharp eyes and their venomous, fear-of-God glare were gunning a thousand laser-guided glass daggers straight into that snivelling little bitch’s soul with every single word I spoke — “we are Staying. Down. Here. Until that lot up there piss off back to whichever circle of Dante’s Bleeding Inferno they came from.”

I took a pause. A breath. A well-needed one. It took a lot out of you, chewing out my pussy of a soy-latte-chugging husband.

“Bloody honestly. Threatening to raze the home of an innocent family to the ground, all because Mummy wouldn’t tell them if Baby has a hole down there or something he can stick in someone else’s. Why can’t people just get with the pissing times.”

“Delia—”

A roar from outside interrupted us. “We’re growing impatient, Little Miss Cordelia. You know as well as I do that the child must be assigned. It’s such a simple question we've had to resort to such extreme measures to coerce from you, ain’t it. Now, tell us, sweet-cheeks. What’s in Baby’s underpants. Will it make him a boy, or will it make her a girl?”

I saw him swaggering about through the skylight. Their leader. Penis-Hat. Posturing outside my front door, demanding my presence, my compliance, acquiescence, as meteor after meteor of molten Mattel rained down upon the slate of our roof. Splintering its supports. Setting them alight. Cratering the entire top floor of the house.

And still their attacks grew ever more vicious. Their rallying chants ever more deafening.

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

thump-thump

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

GENITALS 

NOW!

Perpetually chorused. Accompanied by thumping great thud after thud. The booming crunch of splintering wood and shattering brass, of brickwork crumbling to dust. The whole house shuddered; in unison we clenched each other tighter, our bodies almost foetal from fear. They were breaking their entry. Hammering away at our door as though it were some mediaeval castle’s monstrous, solid, yard-thick iron portcullis, and not a cheap plank of paper-thin pine straight out of the local B&Q, demarking the entrance of a three-bed terrace in fucking Nunhead. Fucking bloodthirsty lunatics!

Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

“Delia,” my husband stammered, heartbeat racing, shivering, shaking. “Delia, you’ve got to go out there and sort this. I know you like to think of yourself as a woman of conviction. Willing to die on just about any hill this morning’s copy of The Guardian tells you to. But - oh, for God’s sake, you can’t really be prepared to literally die on this one and take your entire family down with you, can you? Your parents? Your sister? Our child?”

In the darkness of the cellar, it was impossible to tell whose body in the huddle was whose. Every head, every face, every dull white eye was lost to the great black void. With the fearsome pinpoint accuracy of a crossbow bolt, I nonetheless shot my patented death-glare deep into its singularity, hoping it would find its target. Burn its way through the skull of my husband, and let them know just how ballistically pissed off his brazen cowardice had made me.

Make no mistake, I knew right from the start that there would be some out there who would be driven to insanity trying to expose us. Now, granted, I didn’t imagine in my worst nightmares it would come to this. But that it had somehow come to this made me even more certain of my convictions. Maybe — you know what — maybe I was willing to die on this hill. Martyr myself for the cause. If this is how the world would treat a proud parent defending future generations from the absurdity of the gender binary, then you know what? Bring it the fuck on! They could storm my house. slaughter my family and burn me to the bone. They could pulp my flesh to paste and drink my remnants like a rich Pinot bloody Noir, but know this: I would never surrender. For my sake. For the sake of my newborn child. For the sake of every single child in every single household in the world, I would never surrender!

“Delia, please-”

“This is your last chance, Little Miss Cordelia,” gnarled Penis-Hat. 

“Delia-”

“Bring the child out here, or suffer the consequences.”

“DELIA! For the love of all that’s bleeding holy-”

“ALL RIGHT!” I bellowed back into the blackness, ripping my shoulder free of the horror-filled hands that clutched them tight. “All right! I get the fucking message. I’ll go. Jesus.”

Suddenly emboldened, I rose. I marched to the skylight and cracked it open the tiniest touch. “Consequences?” I remarked snidely through the crack. “Consequences? Are you seriously going to come down here and kill us all over something as petty as this, huh? Put us all to the sword because of our exceedingly sensible choice to defend our child from the wild demands of heteronormativity?”

With a cocky slyness, Penis-Hat, stood upon the front path high above me, knelt down to meet my eyes, and unfurled a slow, malicious smile. “Now,” he whispered menacingly back through the crevice between glass and jamb. “Now, Cordelia, we both know that kill is a very strong word indeed. Personally, I prefer to call it performing a series of very late-term post-natal abortions.”

“Oh, har bleeding har, I am sure,” I snapped back. “You know, all I said is that I wanted to raise my child gender neutral. I didn’t think that was such a big ask. Don’t drown my baby in an overwhelming ocean of odious pink projectile vomit, just because some quack at the ultrasound clinic’s picked out the puniest traces of a pre-natal pussy in amongst the lumpen embryonic sludge of random body-parts swimming round Mummy’s uterus. And you know what? Don’t let’s have everyone in the whole world make out that my literal fucking baby’s flirting or being a ladies’ man the second he so much as glances at the midwife’s tits in the maternity ward, as though they might actually welcome it transforming into a sex-crazed, shag-anything, bar-crawling creep the second its sodding bollocks drop, just because it’s bollocks to drop. And don’t you fucking, fucking dare try and stuff my child into some adorable dinky little onesie reading ‘Future Trophy Wife,’ or ‘Lock Up your Daughters,’ or ‘Boys will be Boys, or, y’know, ‘Daddy’s Little Cumslut,’ or what have you. But oh, fucking no, you wouldn’t have that, now, would you. Whenever I tell anyone, ‘Well, frankly, what business of yours is it what configuration of reproductive organs my baby has unless you’re a grade-A nonce looking to use the poor thing as a frigging fleshlight,’ their eyes just flicker like they’re some sort of malfunctioning android, as though it simply does… not… compute that whatever the doctor discovers upon peering down at our crotches when we’re fresh out of the womb should have absolutely no inherent bearing whatsoever on who they are. On what they’ll grow up to be. It’s like the whole world thinks there’s some great big sensor smack in the middle of our cerebellums that goes ‘VAGINA DETECTED! VAGINA DETECTED! Quick! Switch on the pink brain chamber that’s addicted to glitter and sparkle and unicorns and not demanding orgasmic reciprocation in the bedroom. But it’s all complete bollocks. What is it? Pseudo-scientific, hoodoo-voodoo absolute fucking bollocks, the lot of it. Is whether my baby has a penis or a vagina really that bloody earth-shatteringly critical information for you to know? Is it? Will civilisation crumble if I don’t tell you? Will all God’s innocent creatures start spontaneously engaging in enormous, unholy interspecies orgies and birth humongous, human-devouring, million-fanged, fluffy, flying giant lizard-hounds of Hell sent to wipe us genderless heathens off the face of this patriarchal hellscape we call Planet Earth, if I continue to assert that the notion of gender is repressive fucking elephant shit, and  protect my child from ever believing that the part of the brain responsible for determining their ability to empathise or nurture, or fix a car’s engine, or help out with the fucking housework once in a while, somehow wormed its way down from their head, wriggled along their spinal cord, and took root squarely between their legs.”

Penis-Hat paused a minute. “Well, I don’t know about lizard-hounds of Hell, Cordelia.” he responded at last, “but I certainly have more than enough power to make your life a living Hell. After all, I am The Assigner. It is, quite literally, my job to assign all newborn children their gender in accordance with the Natural Order of Things. It’s my mission. The supernatural purpose for my immortal being. I don’t ever have to do much usually - most parents do my job for me - but you just had to be difficult, didn’t you. Now, I will say this one last time. Deliver the baby to be assigned, or you and your family will suffer a very. Bloody. Demise.”

My upper lip firmed. I nodded. “Fine,” I snorted. “Fine. I give up. You can see my baby’s genitals, if you’re so fucking desperate. Assign them however the sodding hell you like. Meet me at the front door in fifteen seconds.”

I slammed the skylight shut. Steely as you like, nostrils fuming fucking ferociously from the raging, rampant fire in my belly, babe in arms I marched up the cellar stairs, through a hallway smothered in crumbling plaster, and ventured upon a front door hanging on to its hinges by its absolute fingertips. With a firm blast from my block-heeled boot, I delivered one final blow to smash it aside, and held my child aloft for the Assigner and all his many minions to bear witness to in all its adorable newborn glory.

“YOU REALLY WANT TO SEE WHAT’S LURKING BEHIND MY BABY’S NAPPY?” I screamed aloud, loud enough that every single member of the torchlight-bearing riot surrounding us could hear my war-cry, loud and fucking clear as you like. “I WON’T KEEP YOU ANY LONGER - TAKE A GOOD LONG LOOK!”

I peeled the nappy from my baby’s crotch.

From the singularity into which my baby’s taint converged, exploded the beaming, burning, beautifully blinding light of a thousand supergiant supernovae, extinguishing their million torch-lights in a single blow. I could feel the child rumbling in my arms. A concerto of horns, loud as thunder, loud as the call that heralded the beginning of Time itself, erupted from my baby’s heart, its epicentre, the deepest depths of its immortal soul, as the black-hole void between its thighs devoured the Assigner, devoured the mass descendent on our south London home; devoured the pink, devoured the blue, devoured all trace and all memory of the concept of gender contained within our biological sex-obsessed world - leaving none but the paradise of genderlessness behind.

My baby… the chosen one… the one who vanquished gender, once and for all.

Wasn’t Mummy proud!

“Quick! Downstairs, now! Everybody into the cellar. Keep the bloody lights off and don’t make a sound. If anyone catches so much as a whiff of us down here we’re all done for. Everyone pack yourselves in the corner - as far away from the skylight and the coal-shaft as you can. Now!”

At every window pane and frame, and every door, wicked, venomous vermillion, toxic orange, black and blue licked and lashed away like the tongues and tendrils of thousand-head, continent-consuming dragons of doomsday, punching, blasting, battering away at brick and mortar, glass and slate, rapt with thirst unquenchable to penetrate our final line of defence and pluck our terror-stricken meat-sacks of bodies from the last place we had left to conceal ourselves - hoist us high, and flick us into the fire like a child would a sweet into their gaping, messy maw, and strip us to our bones. Mum. Dad. Dearly beloved. Brother and sister. Hustled, tumbled, clattered, scrawled and crawled their way under, over, through each other in their petrified haste, and huddled together, body-in-body, arm-in-arm, in the deepest, darkest, sootiest corner of the cellar - wide-eyed, shivering, yearning to scream but aware, all the while, that screaming aloud would mean certain death.

They were here to force us to expose our secret to the world. A secret held in trust between none but myself and the precious little treasure in my arms.

Freezing moisture drizzled down the blackened brickwork, trickling down spines like the touch of vampires skulking silently through the dark. Like someone was down here with us, biding their time. Ready to snatch. Ready to pin us down and torture us for the truth. A truth it felt, to all else but myself, less and less worth keeping locked away.

“Oh, Cordelia, dear,” Mother implored, “for God’s sake, see sense. This has gone far enough. Just give them what they want. What harm will it do?”

An enormous deal of it, that’s what harm it would do.

I couldn’t give up. Couldn’t dare bestow them the knowledge they had taken to storming my house and torturing my family for. For my sake. For my newborn child’s sake. For the sake of every single child in every single household in the world, the secret had to be kept hush-hush.

A mob a million strong had us surrounded. Had bunged up every street, every alley, every passageway for half a mile’s radius. With every passing second, every tick-tick-tick of the clock, the volume of their war-cry, their demand, swelled louder and louder.

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

thump-thump

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

GENITALS NOW!

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

thump-thump

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

GENITALS NOW!

But I never would. Never. I would do the impossible. I swear upon my life - cross my bleeding heart - I would never, ever give in to them.

“Honey, please,” my partner begged of me. “It’ll take seconds. Three words. Or if you really can’t bring yourself to use the b or the g-word, just - I don’t know, Delia - whip the front of its nappy off a second, just until they’ve seen, until they’re satisfied. Or imagine you’re a twelve-year-old boy who’s just discovered what sex is, and scream out what it’s got down there like you’ve got genital-based Tourette’s. You’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to realise this has gone far enough. Just let this bloody crusade go. Throw in the towel. For all our sakes. Especially for the sake of the safety of our child-”

“No,” I interrupted sharply. “We’re staying down here until all those moronic zealots up there piss off home. Until they finally realise that this - raising a bloody pitchfork army like it’s the days of Wat Tyler and threatening to raze the home of an innocent suburban family to the ground, all because Mummy wouldn’t tell us if Baby has a willy or a coochie - is absolute fucking coo-coo Bedlam-level insanity.”

“Delia-”

A roar from outside interrupted us. “We have you surrounded now. Deliver us the child in the next five minutes - so that we might at last perform the assignment - and no-one will be harmed.”

“Delia-“

In the darkness of the cellar, it was impossible to tell whose body in the huddle was whose. Every head, every face, every dull white eye was lost to the great black void. With the fearsome pinpoint accuracy of a crossbow bolt, I nonetheless shot my patented death-glare deep into its singularity, hoping it would find its target, burn its way through the skull of my great love, my partner in parenthood, and let them know just how ballistically pissed off their brazen cowardice had made me.

Their rallying chants grew ever more deafening.

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

thump-thump

SHOW US YOUR GENITALS

GENITALS 

NOW! 

Their leader’s bellows grew ever more thunderous. “The child must be assigned, Cordelia. It’s a simple question we’ve gone through all this needless effort to come seeking - that we've had to resort to such extreme measures to coerce from you, by hook or by crook - is it a boy, or is it a girl.”

“Show us your genitals! Genitals! Now! Show us your genitals! Genitals! Now!”

A thumping great thud. The booming crunch of splintering wood and shattering brass, of brickwork crunching, crumbling to dust. The whole house shuddered; in unison we clenched each other tighter, our bodies almost foetal from fear. They were battering their way in. Hammering away at our front door as though it were the final monstrous, yard-thick, reinforced iron gate keeping them from conquering the King’s Castle in days of yore, and not a cheap plank of paper-thin pine straight out of the local B&Q, demarking the entrance of a three-bed terrace in fucking Nunhead. The bloodthirsty lunatics!

Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

“This is your last chance, Cordelia,” gnarled their leader. “Bring the child out here, or suffer the consequences.”

“DELIA! For the love of all that’s bleeding holy-”

“ALL RIGHT!” I bellowed back into the blackness, ripping my shoulder free of the horror-filled hands that clutched them tight. “All right! I get the fucking message. I’ll go. Jesus.”

All of a sudden emboldened, I rose. I marched to the skylight and cracked it open the tiniest touch. “Consequences?” I remarked snidely through the crack. “Consequences? Are you seriously going to come down here and kill us all over something as petty as this, huh? Put us all to the sword because of our exceedingly sensible choice to defend our child from the wild demands of cisheteronormativity?”

With a cocky slyness, their leader, stood upon the front path high above me, knelt down to meet my eyes, and unfurled a slow, malicious smile. “Now,” he whispered menacingly back through the crevice between glass and jamb. “Now, Cordelia, we both know that kill is a very strong word indeed. Personally, I prefer to call it performing a series of very late-term post-natal abortions.”

“Oh, har bleeding har, I am sure,” I snapped back. “You know, all I said is that I wanted to raise my child gender neutral. All I said is that I didn’t want people determining my child’s looks, dreams, desires, behaviours, interactions with the world at large based solely by the organ sealed beneath the cotton of its nappy. I didn’t think that was such a big ask. Don’t drown my baby in an overwhelming ocean of odious pink projectile vomit just because some quack at the ultrasound clinic’s picked out the puniest traces of a pre-natal pussy in amongst the sludge of random body-parts swimming round Mummy’s uterus. Don’t let’s have the males of the family fling a thousand different football strips my baby’s way, whilst they each make their own impassioned case regarding why my new-born should be indoctrinated into joining their particular clan of brain-dead, bare-bellied, beer-swilling gorillas of the Premiership’s terraces right from the second it's finally sniffed the light at the end of the vagina. And you know what? Don’t let’s have everyone in the whole world make out that my baby’s flirting or being a ladies’ man the second he gets anywhere near a girl at daycare, as though they might actually welcome it transforming into a sex-crazed, bar-crawling creep the second its bollocks drop. Don’t you dare try stuffing my child into adorable dinky little tops reading ‘Future Trophy Wife,’ or ‘Lock Up your Daughters,’ or ‘Boys will be Boys, or ‘Daddy’s Little Cumslut,’ or what have you. Don’t try telling my child they can’t do science or maths, or play sports, or roll around in the mud and climb trees and skin its knees just because they were born with a uterus and ovaries; and don’t tell them they can’t do ballet, or wear flowers in their hair, or take an interest in fashion, or let it all out and cry whenever Life gets on top of them, just because they were born with a penis in their pants. But oh, fucking no, you wouldn’t have that, now, would you, huh. Whenever I tell anyone, ‘Well, frankly, what business of yours is it what configuration of reproductive organs my baby has unless you’re a grade-A nonce looking to get off with the poor thing,’ their eyes just flicker like they’re some sort of malfunctioning android, as though it simply does… not… compute to have to consider even an unborn child as sexless, genderless, unbound from all this gender role shit that’s had the rest of us bound in its chains since time immemorial. Can your tiny plankton-brains seriously not comprehend a world in which the path we’re all inexorably forced down in life is not determined with what the doctor discovers upon peering down at our crotches when we’re fresh out of the womb, huh? Do you really think there’s some great big sensor smack in the middle of our cerebellums that goes ‘VAGINA DETECTED! VAGINA DETECTED! Woo-woo! Nee-naw, nee-naw! Quick, switch on the pink brain chamber that’s addicted to glitter and sparkle and unicorns and not demanding reciprocation in the bedroom, huh? Is whether my baby has a penis or a vagina really that bloody earth-shatteringly critical information for you to know? Is it? Will civilisation crumble, terror and anarchy rule the streets, the dead start rising from their graves to terrorise the living, if I don’t tell you? Will all God’s innocent creatures start spontaneously engaging in enormous, unholy interspecies orgies and birth humongous, human-devouring, million-fanged, fluffy, flying giant lizard-hounds of Hell sent to wipe us genderless heathens off the face of this patriarchal, cisnormative hellscape we call Planet Earth, if I continue to stand by my principles, assert that the notion of gender is repressive fucking elephant shit, and protect my child from ever believing that the part of the brain responsible for determining their personality, their likes and dislikes, their ability to empathise or nurture or fix a car’s engine or help out with the fucking housework once in a while, somehow wormed its way down from their head, wriggled along their spinal cord, and took root squarely between their legs.”

Their leader paused a minute. “Well, I don’t know about lizard-hounds of Hell, Cordelia.” he responded at last, “but I certainly have more than enough power to make your life a living Hell. After all, I am The Assigner. It is, quite literally, my job to assign all newborn children their gender in accordance with the Natural Order of Things. It’s my mission. The supernatural purpose for my immortal being. As Father Christmas must deliver presents to all the world’s children, as the Tooth Fairy must sneak into little kiddies’ bedrooms every night and swap their dropped-out milk teeth for pound coins, so I am eternally responsible for ensuring that all the world’s babies are assigned their rightful genders. I don’t ever have to do much usually - most parents do my job for me - but you just had to be difficult, didn’t you. Now, I will say this one last time. Deliver the baby to be assigned, or you and your family will suffer a very. Bloody. Demise.”

My upper lip firmed. I nodded. “Fine,” I snorted. “Fine. I give up. You can see my baby’s genitals, if you’re so bloody desperate. Assign them however the bloody hell you like. Meet me at the front door in fifteen seconds.”

I slammed the skylight shut. Steely as you like, nostrils fuming ferociously from the fucking raging, rampant fire in my belly, babe in arms I marched up the cellar stairs, through a hallway smothered in crumbling plaster, and ventured upon a front door hanging on to its hinges by its absolute fingertips. With a firm blast from my block-heeled boot, I delivered one final blow to smash the door aside, slamming to the concrete of the garden path, and held my child aloft for the Assigner, and all his many millions of minions, to bear witness to in all its adorable newborn glory.

“YOU REALLY WANT TO SEE WHAT’S LURKING BEHIND MY BABY’S NAPPY?” I screamed aloud, loud enough that every single member of the torchlight-bearing riot surrounding us could hear my war-cry, loud and fucking clear as you like. “I WON’T KEEP YOU ANY LONGER - TAKE A GOOD LONG LOOK!”

I peeled the nappy from my baby’s crotch.

From the singularity into which my baby’s taint converged, exploded the beaming, burning, beautifully blinding light of a thousand supergiant supernovae, extinguishing their million torch-lights in a single blow. I could feel the child rumbling in my arms. A concerto of horns, loud as thunder, loud as the call that heralded the beginning of Time itself, erupted from my baby’s heart, its epicentre, the deepest depths of its immortal soul, as the black-hole void between its thighs devoured the Assigner, devoured the mass descendent on our south London home; devoured the pink, devoured the blue, devoured all trace and all memory of the concept of gender contained within our biological sex-obsessed world - leaving none but the paradise of genderlessness behind.

My baby… the chosen one… the one who vanquished gender, once and for all.

Wasn’t Mummy proud!