How do you change someone’s mind? This may appear to be a simple question, but it’s a very complicated one. What makes you change your mind?

How about this: even though you tried your best in life, you had a couple of bad thoughts that I find offensive, so I make sure you lose your job and that none of our mutual friends ever speak to you again?

I call you a hate-monger and I encourage others to do the same. I come on like a tooled-up Dalai Lama, a semi-deity of moral spotlessness, and you are cast out, for ever maligned by random egg-people on Twitter. The world at large ignores it all, because all that happens is that everyone’s existing world view is simply reinforced.

The term “cancel culture” originally surfaced as a hashtag, credited to black users of Twitter. It was used when celebrities such as Michael Jackson or Bill Cosby or Roseanne Barr were seen to fall from grace. At times it got linked to the #metoo movement, and so Louis CK was cancelled – for all of 10 months! Taylor Swift said in 2016 that she had been portrayed as a liar after saying Kanye West did not warn her about his lyrics. The hashtag #TaylorSwiftisCancelled soon trended.

As she said: “When you say someone is cancelled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being.”

When civilians, ordinary human beings, are cancelled, their lives are turned upside down. Jon Ronson has written perceptively about cancel culture’s sibling, public shaming. An ill-advised tweet may make someone unemployable, the consequences lingering for years.

I write this as someone who I know some would like cancelled because I continue to think biological sex exists – which in certain circles is heresy. It’s true I have this platform, and cancel culture can be a way for the powerless to bring down the powerful.

Lately, however, I see it as just another power tool of misogyny, and I cannot stand by and watch as more women are basically thrown onto the pyre while twitchy mobs ready the torches. JK Rowling imagined worlds that enchanted many, then dared to tell us some real stuff that happened to her. Actors with their eyes on the prize denounced her. Out went any imagination; in came the witch-finder general. Those who had encouraged the mob then had to backtrack when the man who abused her appeared on the front page of the Sun. They had, it seemed, wanted to burn her at the stake – but didn’t really like the smell of the flames.

Now we have Damian Barr making sure Emma Nicholson, who held an honorary position on the Booker Prize Committee, is booted off for her views on same sex marriage and some terrible tweets about trans people. Gay authors have won the prize, but Barr said she would have the ring off his finger. Really? Some of us are not fans of marriage full stop, but I digress.

This becomes yet another argument where to disagree with someone is said to erase them. This is not a dialogue. It is a showy monologue of purity, always bound to unravel. It is possible that Nicholson is a homophobe who has also done some good in the world: rescuing Romanian orphans; starting a charity in 1991 called AMAR in response to Saddam Hussein’s systematic persecution of Marsh Arabs; campaigning for many years for the Yazidis, who continue to suffer terribly. Can a person do good things and think wrong things ? How do we evolve if this cannot be acknowledged?

As it turns out, Barr himself wrote some nasty tweets about the attempted suicide of a trans woman. I don’t want him cancelled. I don’t want Nicholson cancelled. None of this is activism, which is daily work, often boring and inevitably involves compromise. This is just backslapping performance, and it disturbs me to see how its targets are now regularly women – such as Allison Bailey and her case against Stonewall.

David Willetts, who is also no great shakes on gay rights and is on the Booker committee, was not targeted by Barr. Why not?

Clicktivism, especially when it involves cancelling, is a psychological method of bonding offering status and a veneer of solidarity with no real cost. If you don’t take your target down, another woman doing wrongthink will soon pop up.

If cancelling doesn’t work, it is because the people targeted are being protected by something more evil than can ever be imagined (yes, I have read this about myself), rather than the mundane truth that people may think differently from each other. Difference is not hate. We contain multitudes, we make mistakes, we grow. “I got some bad ideas in my head,” said Travis Bickle. Well, don’t we all?

If identity politics is the new theatre of war, let’s stop the performance of a pre-formed, perfect set of beliefs and discuss how we engage each other politically. Cancelling is short-lived as a high. You are better off with poppers. It’s a zero-sum game. Because in the end we are all potentially cancellable – but you can’t cancel my right to think.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist.