Gender is over. Dead. Kaput. Finis. Indeed, in 2017, to have a traditional gender identity – like boring old “man” or “woman” – is to mark oneself out as achingly unhip. Gender is fluid now, you see. Last year the Fawcett Society Found that 44% of British people now believe that gender is not binary but can be expressed as a range of identities – with almost half of young women holding this view. Perhaps they are looking to the plethora of gender fluid stars such as Ruby Rose, Miley Cyrus and Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith – who has been the face of Louis Vuitton’s womenswear. Gender fluidity is officially a thing.

What that means, of course, is that the gender binary – which has caused us all so much trouble for so many years – is, finally, on its way out. Hurrah. Isn’t that wonderful, I hear you cry. Or maybe not. Perhaps you couldn’t help but feel that, yes, maybe political correctness has gone a bit mad when you saw the news that Transport for London won’t be addressing tube customers as “Ladies and gentlemen” any more. Transport for London boss of customer strategy, Mark Evers, said they want “everyone to feel welcome on our transport network”. If they could quietly drop “Adverse weather conditions” while they’re at it, I think we could all get behind that, too.

In cultures that constantly point out and overstates the differences between men and women, women suffer

While it’s easy to automatically dismiss this sort of thing as frivolous nonsense, though, there’s a very real case to be made for a less gendered society. As feminist icon Gloria Steinem points out, the more polarised gender roles are in a society, the more violence women face. In cultures that constantly point out and overstate the differences between men and women, women suffer. Plus, of course, not everyone does feel like a man or a woman these days. Things change. And really, does anyone in 2017 still identify as a “lady” or a “gentleman”? Maybe in the upper echelons of society, but not in the dive bars I drink in, that’s for sure – and they’re probably more likely to be found in a black cab than on the tube.

Radical feminists say they have been trying to abolish gender for the past 40 years – with limited success, it seems. It’s a noble aim. The theory is that gender is a social construct that places men and women in two distinct categories, which inevitably creates a power imbalance from which men benefit and women lose out. Do away with gender and you do away with the two-tier system that has oppressed women for millennia.

I suspect there are, aside from the obvious, some innate differences between men and women, but society exaggerates these differences through strict roles and rules to the point of caricature – to the detriment of women and sexual minorities in particular but, ultimately, oppressing everyone.

Even biology isn’t binary, which is where intersex people come into the picture. Their physical attributes don’t fall into the rigid categories of “male” and “female”, and even within these categories there is so much variation. We all have varying amounts of “male” and “female” hormones floating around in us, for example, because biology is more complicated than just two options – as is life. Some intersex people strongly identify as men or women, but some do not. Why should anyone be excluded from public announcements?

Thankfully, the transgender movement and rise of intersectional feminism is making real progress in moving towards a more gender-neutral society. It’s headline news every day. Last week, a parent who is raising their child gender-free was subject to a rude grilling by the constantly boorish Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain. In May, it was revealed that 120 schools in Britain have adopted gender-neutral uniform policies: weeks later, dozens of boys at Isca academy in Exeter wore skirts after the school insisted they wear trousers despite the heatwave. There are even gender-neutral preschools now – in Sweden, of course – where teachers avoid using pronouns like “she” or “him” in a bid to raise children without the poison of gender expectations. Gender-neutral toilets are popping up everywhere, with Berlin set on making all its public toilets genderless.

This month, Nic Sakurai became the first person in America to receive a gender-neutral driver’s licence. British charity Stonewall is now campaigning to have gender markers removed from official documents such as passports. Facebook users have been able to choose from over 70 gender options for the past few years. Everywhere you look, people are questioning traditional ways of forcing people into the two traditional gender boxes of man and woman.

You might think that something as fundamental and pervasive as gender was set in stone, but it is not.

Do I think we are going to do away with gender completely? No. Do I think people are going to suddenly stop wearing suits and high heels and having names that are considered to be masculine or feminine and all the rest of it? No. Would I want to live in that world? No. I quite like gender. Not when it is compulsory or oppressive, but when it is a choice that people are free to make. While many people are oppressed by gender roles, many others love having a strong gender identity. Lots of non-binary people have a very firm sense of gender too: it is just not binary.

So you can still be a girly girl if that’s your thing – you can walk around looking like Dolly Parton or Little Bo Peep, for all I care. And if you’re towards the other end of the spectrum and resemble David Beckham with his dad-beard or Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, good for you. Let’s go on a date sometime. But let’s also make some space for everyone in between and outside of that.

Doing away with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen” isn’t going to change the world overnight, but our ideas about identity and how we see and treat people are made up of millions of everyday examples like this where there is simply no need to bring gender into the mix. It’s impossible to exist without hearing these cultural messages every day, from birth to death. So the push for a less gendered society isn’t so much about abolishing gender as curbing its more extreme manifestations – by gently chipping away at one pointlessly gendered aspect of modern life at a time. Blogger and lawyer David Allen Green noted that he is yet to find a compelling argument for having a legal gender.

The fact is, we don’t need to be ladies and gentleman at all, if we don’t want to be – we can be part of plain old “everyone”. In this post-gender utopia, we’re all just travellers.