1/ Thread: You are not “non-binary” and you have a dick between your legs. Do not be chased from your biology because some fool in a gym says that this is what a man is. Do not flee the word “man” because a bully says you must play football or like girls or play rough.

2/ Do not give to these fools the power of deciding what a “man” is. A man is the man who carried his dying mother upstairs because she is old and withered and he is father to quiet children downstairs but strong in his arms.

3/ A man is what cried when his second born son says he is gay but drives him to work and talks to him in stunted tones where the pauses say more than the word do. Speaking in looks and actions and movements more than words.

4/ A man is a person who deals with the fourth born overdosing on heroin because the mother cannot sign the paperwork and file the forms. He does the grim things men have to do. The regularity. The order. The thing that has to be done.

5/ A man is the professor in a wheelchair with motor neurone disease. He is a shrivelled thing now but his mind blasts from his chair as wide and vivid as the stars he describes and analyses. This great cartographer of meaning.

6/ A man is the nice boy at school who is a mental health nurse. He may not have GCSE’s and A levels but he has the compassion and physical strength to help troubled souls lost in turbulent winds not of their own.

7/ A man is a bookish boy. A nice stranger who helps a lost Walker. A friendly bloke who gave directions. A big strong bloke who talked about poetry in a pub and everyone was surprised and it moved your heart.

8/ non binary rejects this beautiful 180 degree light spray of what it is to be a man. Ignore this bogus poison. Forsake it. You are a man. You are your own type of man. The 360 degrees of different ways of being male. Come back. Be a man.

9/ Despise these plastic people, their innovations in our beautiful old words who say what bullies always say: “you’re not a real man”
Laugh at this blank firing bullet. Real men cracked codes that won wars. Real men fought them. Real men cared for this sick.

You are a real man