Now even the Women’s Institute (WI) is ‘willy inclusive’. The UK’s largest voluntary women’s group has this week confirmed that trans-identified males are permitted to join. In fact, transwomen have been allowed to join the WI since 2015 – the current policy states that ‘anyone living as a woman’ can be a WI member and participate in any of its activities.

Some actual women members are not happy about this. A group called the Women’s Institute Declaration (WID) recently published a petition asking for WI members to be able to debate and hold a vote on whether to include transwomen.

The declaration calls for a moratorium on membership applications from trans-identified males and asks the WI to ‘focus on women as a biological-sex class, rather than as an individual expression of gender’. It also condemns the rolling back of women’s sex-based rights in the name of gender ideology. And it calls on the WI to respect women’s right to self-organise. Some might be tempted to sneer at this as just a spat between the ladies of Middle England, or as ‘handbags at dawn’, but the points raised by the declaration are valid and important.