The first time anyone suggested to me that 'misgendering' - referring to a trans person by reference to their biological sex - was hateful was in 2017. That recently.

I was bemused. How were we to know someone's inner sense of self? Or meant to distinguish between someone ...

... choosing an androgynous presentation from someone experiencing gender dysphoria?

An illiberal, unenforceable, bad policy, I thought. There are - there must be - other, better ways.

What I didnt realise at the time was that the espoused policies were meant to be illiberal.

The aim was not to find workable solutions, it was to make men and women indistinguishable from each other in any meaningful way, with the consequence that neither law nor policy could uphold the rights of the female sex.

It needs digging but, once you get it, all makes sense.

I'm not one of those subscribing to the view that all TRAs are motivated by a desire to dismantle women's rights.

To me, that seems hyperbolic.

It's just that they don't care enough about the needs of women to defend them. They allow other rights to over ride, without thought.

And in that they bear the principal hallmarks of MRAs.

Yes, fathers deserve justice. So do mothers and children.

Yes, trans people have the right to privacy. So do women.

If you're looking for a 'winner' here, you're going to lose.

Five years ago it would have been unconscionable, anywhere in mainstream politics, to suggest that women did not have the right to women only services like rape crisis or refuges. Indeed, the law made such provisions specific just ten years ago, without any controversy.

We defined - in law - a woman as a human female of any age. We all agreed that women's sport was for women only.

The policy capture by Queer Theorists is breath taking in its speed and universality. But, at the end of the day, it will be ephemeral. It has relied on the shadows.

Now that it is being discussed openly, it is being dismantled.

People know that women don't have male genitalia.

It really is that simple.