As the gender-identity wars reached fever-pitch, Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury, accused her party of having ‘a woman problem’. Ever since Duffield first tentatively raised her head above the parapet to suggest that the common noun for ‘individuals with a cervix’ is, in fact, ‘women’, she has been subjected to outright hostility and ostracism. The lack of support for her from the parliamentary Labour Party is deafening. For Labour, the question of ‘what is a woman?’ is ‘always a sensitive issue’. According to Keir Starmer, the statement that only women have a cervix is ‘something that shouldn’t be said’.

It’s not only the Labour Party that has tied itself up in knots on the gender question. Theresa May, the former Conservative prime minister, arguably started it back in 2017, when she declared her plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act, by ‘streamlining and demedicalising the process for changing gender’. Other Tories have been equally keen to jump on the ‘right side of history’ bandwagon, betraying their ignorance of the issues at stake.

Amid all this gauche, progressive posturing, it seems that feminism might be finding itself again – in the unlikely form of the ‘TERF’. TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) began as a pejorative label, but has turned into a category that, in our current state of hyperreality, has come to seem more recognisable than ‘woman’.