'What is a woman? The answer is simple if you look at the facts,' says Dame Jackie Doyle-Price

There are two sexes. Males and females. Men and women. Sex cannot be changed. Not ever.

No amount of surgery or hormones will alter the fact that men will always be men and women will always be women. Neither will any change in the law.

Some people seem to think that being awarded a Gender Recognition certificate somehow changes things. It does not. It is a legal fiction.

The Gender Recognition Act was a response to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which said that the inability of transgender people to change their biological sex was a violation of their rights under articles 8 and 12 – the right to a family life.

This was all before we legislated for same-sex marriages. Since then, there has been no useful purpose for a Gender Recognition certificate.

The question is why continue to keep them? Instead, Labour wants to make it easier for people to get them. For what purpose has yet to be explained.

Labour still do not seem to comprehend that for many women it is utterly offensive that a man can simply declare themselves a woman and be treated as such. It diminishes women that we should be expected to simply ‘be kind’ and share our changing rooms and hospital wards. It compromises our dignity.

When we access intimate healthcare we want to be able to explicitly state that we want to be treated by a woman. And that means a woman, not someone with a piece of paper that says they are.

And surgical intervention does not make anyone more or less the biological sex they were born into. Surgery and hormones seem to have been normalised as a failsafe way of changing gender. They are not.

And yet we have the spectacle of David Lammy lecturing the women who are doing their best to protect their safe spaces derided as ‘dinosaurs hoarding their rights’ and claiming that with hormones a transgender person can grow a cervix.

And Keir Starmer claiming that it is wrong to say that only women have a cervix. And a male actor feels sufficiently entitled to say that he wishes Kemi Badenoch didn’t exist because she is at the forefront of the fight for women.

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What is wrong is ignorant men making decisions which will impact women’s safety and comfort. And trying to silence us when we object. It is up to women to decide what is acceptable to us.

Politicians cannot claim to support ending violence against women and girls without properly understanding from women what we want in order to be able to feel safe. We want our own spaces. Male sex offenders should never be housed in women’s prisons. Women must have our own sporting competitions.

If transwomen are entitled to compete in the women’s category, then women’s sport will be destroyed. The physiological differences between men and women cannot be altered. It is quite shocking to me that in 21st-century Britain, these are even matters of debate.

As someone who grew up in the 1980s, I thought that the battles for women’s liberation had been won. But still, we are expected to put up with being pushed around by men.

So for the record, when I enter a space labelled ladies or women, I only expect to see biological females. No woman should be expected to share those spaces with anyone who wasn’t born female unless they consent to do so.

The fight for women is far from won.