That's the impact it's had on me. It's not bitter, or petty, or pointed. It's a really deep-seated sense of loss.
For as long as I can remember, I gravitated towards BBC reports of women's achievements: firsts, awards, records. I felt such a sense of pride and hope - We're getting there - bit by bit, we're getting there!
But now, I can't even bring myself to read them. I balk each time - and not just because there's a small but statistically telling chance it may be a male, but because the inclusion of males has changed the whole meaning of these articles for me.
Every single one has become a distressing reminder that women are still subject to males' construction of reality and identity - that we're secondary to males. This award-winning woman may not actually be a woman - that word that we used to measure our progress has been taken from us. And if she is a woman, her achievement could be superceded by a male who says he's a woman at any point in any case - that hopeful ladder of achievements I was watching us slowly ascend no longer even belongs to us. This record-breaking woman is no longer deemed remarkable because she's overcome the limitations that biology and society place on the female sex. The only raison d'être ever of these prizes and achievements has been negated. Women's ability to celebrate these wonderful, remarkable firsts entirely on their own terms - on our own terms - after hundreds upon hundreds of years of enforced invisibility, has been taken away.
And with that comes the sinking recognition of my own status as fundamentally, terrifyingly secondary. That first "woman" to do something that just 25 years ago would have been unthinkable/impossible? Reading it used to come with a surge of joy and RELIEF - a tangible sense of increased security. It now comes with genuine distress as a humiliating reminder of the vulnerability of my rights: if a male says he is a woman, he could be feted in her place. His simple self-perception could instantly displace her astonishing capacity to have done this thing with all the limitations that being female brings after centuries of oppression. 25 years ago, this female achievement wasn't possible because of male perceptions of women. Now, this female achievement is once again vulnerable to the male perceptions of women. It could be denied us any time.
If our right to have a word of our own can be taken, in the context of our astonishing, absolute oppression - the terrifying recentness of our rights - then anything can.
We've had what we do for so little time!
So now, awards like this by the BBC - Banda, its 100 "women" - that I used to LOVE instead tell me, every time, that I'm vulnerable. That national institutions may tell me I am what I man says I am, because this is Good and Righteous, and I'm Wrong to oppose it with what I say I am. A few decades after marital rape was outlawed and I was allowed my own bank account, the BBC, of all things, repeatedly, callously, reminds me that I am subject to men's perception of me.
The BBC's betrayal has, to me, been the greatest of all. My loss of trust and respect has been absolute, and that frightens me, too.
I no longer see them as democratic.
They have made me feel, in a very concrete sense, less safe.