Today is Intersex Awareness Day. I'm intersex and although I have worked for decades across a wide range of different human rights issues, I always find it startling how little understanding there is of intersex issues, even amongst people who want to help. Intersex people are those whose bodies don't fit normative expectations of either male or female due to the way we're born or develop spontaneously in adolescence. We're not as rare or as easy to spot as most people think.

The more I see people talking about Boris Johnson's comments on Ian Blackford's size, the more I think that the best response would have been simply "You're as skinny as a telephone wire." Everyone who grew with the same rhyme that I did would know what it meant. The House of Commons ban on calling someone a liar is getting increasingly unwieldy, and the term 'economical with the truth' doesn't really cut it when referring to a man who has never shown much understanding of economy on any level.

So today I got a letter from the Chief Medical Officer telling me about a new symbol (a yellow patch, no less) which I can wear if I want to signal to others that I'm extremely clinically vulnerable to the likes of Covid-19. Has no-one thought this through at all? Do they not know how common attacks motivated by disability prejudice are? Do they not realise how many people out there are already using this disease to intimidate others - some of them people who don't take it seriously, some of them people who do?

Ask yourself what it means to live, for instance, ‘as a woman’. Lots of women like to wear jeans or trousers, go to football matches, drink pints, work in manual jobs etc. But trans women worry that these things will make them seem too masculine to judges. If you are turned down by the judging panel, there is no right of appeal.