After attracting both affection and abuse during a gender-bending photoshoot, Broadstairs writer and dominatrix Melissa Todd questions our “weird obsession” with identity...

Why must we all have an identity now?

200 years ago no one cared who anyone was. Nor, indeed, what they believed, where they’d come from, what lurked in their pants. Now we must click a zillion options before we access any service, define our sex, race, religion, and this is meant to be progress? Where has this weird obsession come from?

Identity is surely more about conflicts and conversations within ourselves, rather than confidently asserting we are this one thing, always. Race has no meaning, scientifically: our whole species came from Africa. Sociologically it may have a meaning, but necessarily that meaning must alter across cultures and epochs.

As must gender identity.

Last Sunday evening I went out with two photographers and another model to pose around Ramsgate’s many cobbled alleyways. I was dressed as a man, in suit, crisp white shirt, braces, floppy hat and cigar; Richard, the other model, was in miniskirt, basque, fishnets, thigh high boots and curly blonde wig. That is, we were dressed in fashions in contrast to our biologically assigned gender.

I like dressing as a man. Richard likes dressing as a woman. The two photographers, John and Glen, like taking photographs. All of us anticipated a jolly evening.

We got a lot of attention over the few hours we were out, but then, you tend to when you’re posing in the street. “What’s this for?” people like to ask, as if art needed a purpose.

But more unusual and unexpected was the abuse we received - proper old school abuse, from gangs of children, adopting language and attitudes you might associate with a 70s sitcom, certainly unrepeatable here.

Why, even John got called a “**** gay”, and at the time he was holding my hand to stop me falling over my six inch heels and doing myself a damage; I very much doubt anyone could have mistaken me for a man, even an absurdly girly one.

We staggered past the children, ignoring their abuse as best we could, to pose outside the Horse and Groom. Jolly good pub that. Recommended.

There was a band playing and the place was packed, but two women saw us cavorting outside and begged to be allowed to join in. We posed with them happily. Richard got hugged, repeatedly.

The children had followed us, hoping for more sport, but were repelled by the force of the noisy affection and attention we were generating: they’d have looked bigoted fools if they’d hurled more abuse. Love conquers all.

Richard went to the gents for a pee and I offered to stand outside to stop him being beaten up, but my position as trans-defender-in-chief was superseded by his two new fans, who’d gladly have carried him aloft on their shoulders were he not twice as tall as both of them, even without his heeled boots.

Tottering up the hill a man dragged Richard into a pub, screaming “I’ve brought the stripper along!” and when that ceased to amuse, asked him to pose for selfies, while muttering incessantly, “I ain’t gay, bruv, I ain’t gay!” Well who the devil said he was? Or cared either way?

Men dressing as women causes more of a stir than women dressing as men, much to the chagrin of my attention junkie self. Men dressing as women causes violent, hate-fuelled protests, and on occasion has actually been banned, as in Florida, a place I’m visiting next month, where drag acts have been restricted, the onus placed on venues to ensure children can’t witness the spectacle, which has proven difficult to enforce and resulted in several closing down. But what is it about men in frocks that’s considered so deleterious to children’s morals anyhow?

And why must we all reside in a category? It seems so odd. The movements for racial and sexual equality, and latterly sexual liberation, have been among the top social movements of the last fifty years, and at the end of it, what do we get? An insistence on ticking boxes to define one’s ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, in ever tinier categories.

Queer non-binary polyamorous bicurious Asian gypsy: well, so what? Tell me how you vote, your favourite book, whether you believe certain moral tenets are universal and absolute; that would be interesting and useful.

How you like to present your body, and whom you hope to attract with it, rather less so. These are the concerns of peacocks; you’d hope humans might have evolved a little further.

In lifting taboos on talking about sex and sexual relationships, we have obliged people to choose the labels they can live with publicly, gay, straight, bi, trans, whatever.

But most people aren’t that confident or that polarised, and more importantly, most of us like to play with different identities on occasion, try them on and discard them, as easily as a funky new outfit.

Why is that controversial?