This is an extraordinarily contemptuous statement, Sharron. You want to argue about biological sex? Argue it. You want to argue for sex-based categories in sport? Argue it. But claiming that trans women are simply men “pretending to be a regressive & narrow female stereotype” isn’t a defence of women’s rights. It’s you presuming to know the motives, experiences and inner lives of an entire group of human beings. And what exactly is the “regressive female stereotype” they’re supposedly impersonating? Long hair? Dresses? Make-up? Femininity? Because women fought for decades against the idea that any of those things determine whether we are women. Yet here you are using precisely those stereotypes to ridicule another group. My daughter didn’t tell me at nine years old that she was a stereotype. She told me she was a girl. She didn’t transition to perform femininity for you, compete with you, threaten you or diminish your womanhood. She grew into herself. You don’t have to believe that sex changes. You don’t have to support trans inclusion in every sporting category. There are legitimate discussions to have about biology, fairness and safeguarding. But you can make every one of those arguments without reducing trans women to deceitful men playing dress-up. Once your argument becomes “they’re pretending”, you’ve stopped discussing policy or biology and started declaring that you know another person’s mind better than they know themselves. You don’t. My existence as a woman is not threatened by my daughter’s existence as a trans woman. Neither of us is a stereotype. We’re simply two women with very different life experiences, and neither of us needs you to define the other out of humanity.

Look at these women. Laverne Cox. Ella Morgan. Both are transgender women. Both live and present publicly as women. Now imagine telling either of them that, because of the sex they were born, they should walk into the men’s toilets. What happens next? How safe would they feel? How would the men around them react? How many questions, confrontations or humiliations might follow? This isn’t theoretical to me. My daughter is a trans woman. Like many trans women, you wouldn’t know she was trans unless she chose to tell you. And the current situation has consequences for her everyday life. She worries so much about being challenged when using public facilities that she sometimes avoids drinking when she is out so that she won’t need to use a toilet. Read that again. A young woman deliberately restricts how much she drinks because she is frightened about what might happen if she needs the loo. As her mother, I find that completely unacceptable. Whatever your position on the Supreme Court judgment, surely we should be capable of acknowledging the human consequences of how it is interpreted and implemented. Women’s safety and privacy matter. I am a woman. Of course they matter to me. But trans people’s safety, privacy and dignity matter too. These things do not have to be mutually exclusive. So I keep coming back to a very simple question: What is the humane, workable answer for women like these? Because saying “use the men’s” may sound remarkably simple from behind a keyboard. Living it is something else entirely.