A BUSY pub goes silent the second I start to say, ‘but your semen is not female’. Before the ‘b’ of ‘but’ leaves my lips, chatty cheerful people from one end of the pub to the other all reach the end of their sentences simultaneously.

A hole opens up in the fabric of time and for a second I want to jump right through it.

My comment met giggles and not gasps of horror which is something I suppose. But why are we even discussing definitions of what it is to be a woman or man? Here’s a reason.

The BBC reported on March 16 that an 83-year-old woman had been arrested for decapitating a pensioner in New York. I was disturbed by this – I couldn’t comprehend an old woman committing such a crime (although I can imagine some wanting to). It transpires that Harvey Marcelin, a biological male who’s done time for killing and dismembering women, has recently been identifying as a woman. ‘Call me a woman’ says the captured serial killer. ‘Yes Ma’am’ says the cop, the media, the health services and all other public bodies.

Reporting Harvey Marcelin’s recent alleged atrocity as a female crime would be wrong. But even if it were acceptable to say that, now, ‘she’ most certainly did not rape a woman in the 1960s. He did. Yet even the Daily Mail reports: ‘She is on lifetime parole for killing two women - one in 1963 and another who she stabbed and chopped up shortly after she got out of prison in 1984.’

It is dangerous to view biological sex as irrelevant to crime because it skews our analysis of violence and the sex-based motivations of some criminals. If in 30 years, Wayne Couzens, the policeman who killed Sarah Everard last year, announces that he is trans should Sarah’s abduction, rape and murder be described as being at the hands of a woman?

I think absolutely not. But judging by this week’s media coverage, Sarah’s killer would indeed be described as female.

Metaphor, imagery, fantasy is integral to human nature. Taking statements literally when they are figurative is therefore extremely dangerous. If a female bodied person says: ‘I am a man in a woman’s body,’ the response should not, in my view be either ‘yes you are, would you like to bind your breasts until we can get you a double mastectomy’, nor should it be ‘no you’re not, don’t be ridiculous.’ The response should be a gentle, loving, objective exploration of what those words mean to that individual person. For example, is that female-bodied person in a culture where being gay is illegal or a family where being a lesbian brings disapproval? What does being male mean to the woman who seeks identification as a man?

Baroness Nicholson (former MP for Totnes) spoke in the Lords this past week about a woman who reported being raped when on a female ward at an NHS hospital. When the police contacted the hospital, they were told by staff that there were no men on that ward and therefore a rape could not have occurred. After a year, the hospital has finally admitted that there was a transwoman on the ward at the time of the alleged rape.

No woman should have to worry that if she ends up in a single-sex ward in hospital that she could be attacked by a female-identifying male-bodied person, report it and then be vilified and ignored by the medical profession.

Too many public figures will not speak out about this – so thank you Baroness Nicholson for campaigning for women’s rights. I wish you had more companions in both houses!

For the record I may not be ‘woke’, but I’ve definitely been shocked awake by the fact of vicious men committing violent rapes that are categorised decades later as female crimes..

I call on those of you out there who are ignoring the consequences for all women of losing their safe single-sex spaces in hospital wards, prisons, refuges to stand up and fight to retain women’s rights; as defined in law exactly as they are right now. In the Equality Act 2010, sex is a protected characteristic, and courts are clear how to define ‘woman’ and ‘female’. (Moves to remove these protections are ongoing although an attempt to redefine sex recently failed in Scotland.) Rights for women are based on evidence of need, not emotive need, but physical evidence. Three women, somebody’s sister, mother, daughter, friend are murdered every week by men. Women’s rights are hard-won and easily lost. Let’s protect them.