Two weeks ago my neighbour’s children were very much unsupervised. I was several metres up the tree, cutting with an acoustic saw for five or so hours, and the pair of eight-to-ten-year-olds kept popping out their back door to yell slurs at me.

I had the impression they were goading each other into it, popping out and feeling bold, shouting the forbidden and then running back inside.

They shouted ‘cut your fingers off’ and ‘you old tranny bastard’ and ‘you old woman’, and ‘old tranny bastard’ again. That one came up more than anything, and I was a bit affronted to be called ‘old’. I’m 38, which, to be fair, might seem old to a child, but I’m not even half way to death of old age.

I wasn’t so frustrated by the other parts of the slur. Nice to be acknowledged, I thought. Nice that I’m visible on the street as something other than a dull and ugly man. Evidently my culottes are weaving me a reputation.

When the prophet Elisha was mocked for his baldness, he called down a divine snare, in the form of bears who killed all the mocking children - though in that passage ‘children’ could mean anyone up to the age of 25 - but that felt unhelpful here. Jesus encouraged us to suffer little children - not by our modern meaning of ‘suffer’, but both applied here. I guess ‘suffer’ in the New Testament is like ‘be patient with’, the opposite of ‘insufferable’. I think people go through phases of being wilfully hurtful jerks, and I hope they grow out of it and live to regret it.

Anyway, there was no response I could give that wouldn’t make things worse. I kept sawing and gave no sign I’d heard them at all. That must have been annoying. I’m not going to go telling tales to their parents - for one thing they might agree with the kids, and for another, it would solidify me and my very gender as an enemy.

I’d rather just be an ok, tolerable neighbour who can work at a task, like pruning a tree, and never rile to anger, never live up to demands by cutting off a finger, and barely ever fall out of the tree.

And I am rather taken with being attacked with the phrase ‘you old woman’. I’m non-binary, and to a large degree fear counting myself as any kind of woman for fear of rocking the boat and causing affront, but up in the tree I was termed a woman with the confidence of an angry shout. It was meant as a churlish insult, but I’ll take what I’m given.