Next bit from that chapter:
The panellists were literally surrounded, like it was a theatre-in-the-round, by the studio audience. And somehow, anti-trans activists had managed to infiltrate the crowd. Any time that Munroe or Caitlyn (both of them trans women) opened their mouths to speak, they were met by a barrage of vulgar abuse. Trans-hostile feminists screamed the word penis at the top of their lungs - Venice Allan amongst them - even when cisgender women like me were talking. It was later alleged that the audience had been actively encouraged to heckle by producers. Hundreds of complaints were made to OFCOM, the broadcast regulator. But ultimately, the hecklers had the final word - their slogan that "women can't have penises" was adopted by the mainstream press.
Though many feminist and LGBTQ rights groups condemned the sticker campaign, the slogan became prevalent within a section of the feminist movement who believe that trans people shouldn't be accepted as their chosen gender. "CAN A WOMAN HAVE A PENIS?" became the standard interrogation for a particular kind of online transphobe, who would inevitably scoff and harrumph if the reply was yes. The only acceptable answer in these online contexts was one which excluded trans people. Journalists like Kay Burley, whether due to ideological affinity or social media osmosis, ended up being mainstream mouthpieces for the talking points of online extremists.
Why even ask whether a woman can have a penis? On the face of it, the "answer" seems obvious. You cast your mind back to the first thing you learned about men-bits and lady-bits at primary school and manage to splutter out a "no". But maybe, just maybe, the intricate tapestry of our world has more to it than what we teach to six-year-olds. Biological sex is complicated. Chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs, sexual organs and other physical characteristics don't always coalesce neatly around either end of the binary. According to Human Rights Watch, approximately 1.7 per cent of the world's population is intersex, that is, born with some combination of male and female biological traits. For some of these people, their external genitalia might not match up with their other bodily characteristics. It would take an especially cruel and unempathetic person to say that the shape of their genitals defines them more than how they live in the world. So, stopping to consider it, we'd accept that women with intersex conditions - some of whom may have male sexual or reproductive organs - are women. We certainly wouldn't think it's right to dictate what toilets they should use, or which changing rooms to access.
"Sure," I hear you say, "but that's a tiny minority of individuals. Most of the time, for most people, whether they have a penis determines which spaces they can access." But think about it a little more deeply. There are some contexts in which my sexual and reproductive organs really impact how I'm being treated as a cisgender woman. It matters for women who can't get the right treatment for endometriosis, because doctors are dismissive of their pain. It matters for women and girls who can't afford period products. It matters for black and Asian women, who are more likely than their white counterparts to be diagnosed with late-stage breast and ovarian cancers. It matters in contexts of sexual violence, strip searches and other forms of physical violation and degradation.
But most of the time, people aren't treating me as a woman because they've seen what's in my jeans. It's because I outwardly conform to what people think a woman is, through my clothes, build, hair, behaviour and voice. None of these things define a woman. There are cisgender women with short hair, muscular builds, deep voices, butch presentation - you wouldn't want them kicked out of the loos for failure to conform. In practice, my gender is being reflected back to me by others on the basis of how present myself, rather than any intimate knowledge of my body (and thank the Lord for that). The fact is, when I'm in the women's loos, I don't know if the person in the next cubicle over has a penis or not. I'm not peeking under the door, and they're not especially likely to show me. Other people's genitals are generally not something you see in the ladies' toilets. Gender segregation in bathrooms and changing rooms function on the basis of adherence to social norms, rather than biological ones. If someone looks like a woman, and in the words of Nick Ferrari, walks through the door "with a woman on it", that's usually all there is to it. You're not going to look down their pants to copper-bottom your first impression.
Here's what's tricky about gender: every time we look for a physical characteristic to pin it to, it wriggles and squirms out of our grasp. We find exceptions to every rule, hard facts which turn out to be assumptions. What makes a woman - or more precisely, what makes us willing to treat someone as a woman - isn't fixed. We're talking about clusters of characteristics, rather than a definitive list. You might not accept the idea that trans women are women, or that trans men are men, but the fact is that you've probably shared single-gender spaces with them without even thinking about it. Our ability to accept complexity and nuance in the real world is much better than it is when we're debating issues out of context. But questions like "can a woman have a penis" box politicians in. Unless they give a stupid and reductive response, they're pilloried as being clueless by a media class who were only ever willing to accept "no" for an answer. Keir Starmer was excoriated for even hinting at the idea that there might be exceptions to the rule that women don't have penises, which prompted relentlessly negative coverage in the Telegraph, the Spectator and The Times, and drew the ire of J.K. Rowling. Since then, the Prime Minister has rolled back on trans rights, promising to exclude trans women from female hospital wards and saying that trans women don't have the right to use female toilets. Politicians may get bullied, but it's minorities who pay the price.