Here at Stylist, we already know that Jameela Jamil is the Woman of the Year. We named her as much at our 2019 Remarkable Women Awards.

But she’s officially become the Woman of the Century today, courtesy of her brilliant take down of Piers Morgan on the subject of gender fluidity and the nature of identity. 

Their Twitter sparring started after Morgan commented on an interview between Jamil and Sam Smith on the subject of gender fluidity. After Jamil called Morgan a “giant pile of wank” and “England’s biggest shit stain” for questioning Smith’s remarks on his identity, Morgan said that he’d “rather be wank than woke”. 

“Mission accomplished hun,” Jamil replied. 

“Don’t call me ‘hun’,” Morgan shot back. “I identify as male, but ‘hun’ normally applies to a female (‘honey’) which means you are mockingly mis-gendering me & that’s now apparently a criminal offence in Britain. Unless you meant ‘hun’ as a derogatory term for Germans in which case you’re a racist.”

Jamil replied: “LOL. He thinks “honey” can only be used about females. How do we send this thing back in a time machine to the era in which it belongs…?”

Morgan, a man Stylist has called “a noxious gas” and “the eternal thorn in womankind’s side”, took issue with the interview that Jamil recorded with Sam Smith last week, in which the friends discussed body image, sexuality and identity.

“You are just you, you are a mixture of all different things,” Smith said in the interview. You are your own special creation. That’s how I see it. I’m not male or female. I think I float somewhere in between.” 

Morgan did not like this, not one bit. “I’m now identifying as Sam Smith, so I can get his royalties,” Morgan said. “This works both ways.”

He continued: “I just don’t get this… Sam Smith has millions of fans, what are they supposed to think? I can’t work out what I am?”

“Is it a generational thing? My young sons don’t care about this whole gender thing, they think I’m just an old fuddy-duddy, it doesn’t matter. ‘Why do you care, dad, what people identify as?’ But I think there are so many ramifications around self-identity that are a real concern, and they haven’t thought it through.” 

Jamil wasn’t going to let Morgan get away with it, though. “LOL,” she wrote on Twitter. “Of course England’s biggest shit stain has something mean to say about it. He thinks men who carries babies in a comfortable papoose where they can feel your body heat and pulse, aren’t ‘manly’. This clown spews constant toxic ideas of ‘masculinity’.”

Morgan hit back: “Appalling that you just assume I am identifying as male tonight.”

“You’re right, it is extraordinary I identify you as any kind of human being at all you giant pile of wank,” Jamil responded. And the award for best comeback of all time goes to…

In all seriousness, Morgan himself has stumbled on the problem with his repeated and determined crusade against gender identity. He mentioned in his rant on Good Morning Britain that his “young sons” don’t understand why Morgan is so hung up on the subject of other people’s gender identity.

Why do you care so much about what other people identify as, Morgan? What is it to you? It is absolutely no skin off your nose as to how other people in the world choose to construct and build and nurture their lives.

We know about all of the damage that restrictive gender roles have caused to people in the past. The effects of toxic masculinity are still being felt, especially when they are spewed from their beloved mouthpiece Morgan on morning television. When Morgan told Daniel Craig that he wasn’t manly anymore because he was carrying his baby in a papoose, he reinforced damaging gender stereotypes. When Morgan told Little Mix that they should put on some clothes, he reinforced damaging gender stereotypes. 

It is the year 2019 and we are finally beginning to dismantle some of the world’s most damaging identity scaffolding in place of something new.

Morgan, to use his own words, “is an old fuddy duddy” and doesn’t understand why we need to do so. If he can’t wrap his head around this simple thing, then that’s his problem.

But it’s not fine for Morgan not to listen to those, like Smith, who explain the need for gender identity fluidity, and how important it has been to reckon with both society’s and their own perceptions of their selves. It’s not fine for Morgan not to be accepting of other people’s desire to do this. And it’s not fine for him to mock those people. 

Thank god for our Woman of the Year – nay, the century – Jamil for always telling it like it is. 

This story was originally published on 21 March and was updated on 22 March to reflect the new comments from Jamil and Morgan.

Images: Getty