Transwomen and women were once each other’s strongest friends and allies. We respected and supported each other’s rights and safety. We fought side by side on the same team against the common enemy – toxic masculinity. Tranwomen never made any claims on womanhood. Both sides knew that our lives, challenges, experiences and biology were different. But that didn’t matter; transwomen were welcomed into the club as honorary members and we all rubbed along together in harmony.That, however, was back in the day we knew what “Trans” actually meant. A transsexual was someone who had medical treatment and surgery in order to live socially as the opposite sex. But now the new identity politics woowoo has allowed the trans community to be invaded and overtaken by cross dressers, transvestites, fetishists, autogynephiles, men with porn-soaked lesbian fantasies, any attention-seeking, gender non-conforming male who loves glitter and lipstick and calls himself non-binary… They’re all covered by the ‘trans umbrella’.  Trans now means everything. And it means nothing.

What it is to be Transgender I had begun to annoy the extremists of trans Twitter with a piece I published in July 2014 which called for recentering trans debate around material reality. Broadly that: human beings are sexually dimorphic mammals; transwomen are biologically male (if we aren’t, then what do we transition from/to?); human beings are subjected to sex-based socialisation which begins at birth (what does this say about transwomen who cannot accept this?); the lives of transwomen are different to the lives of women (by this I mean women born women, again what does this say about transwomen who cannot accept this?). rape and death threats directed at lesbians and other feminists are wholly unacceptable.