Teignmouth Central District Councillor Alison Eden makes her views known: The air turns crispy, schools begin the Christmas term and universities open their doors to a fresh intake of medical students eager to learn about anatomy.

The Lancet, a weekly medical journal, recently published an edition with the title phrase ‘bodies with vaginas’ bang on the middle of its front cover. Why not use the word ‘women’?

In the same edition was an article about ‘men’ and their prostate problems. The cover was a cold wet fish in the face for every woman who wishes the world and its publishers would stop dehumanising us by reducing our existence to a collection of body parts.

There is a war of words going on at the moment and if you’re female, you’re on the losing side. Sir Ed Davey and Sir Keir Starmer, leaders of the Liberal Democrats and Labour respectively, both flapped about like gasping guppies out of water and fluffed their replies to journalists’ questions about whether wearing a T -shirt displaying the dictionary definition of woman (adult human female) was a hate crime. Then later in the week, David Lammy MP revealed how much he really needs to go back to school when he said it wasn’t true only women have cervixes because he was aware you could create a cervix with ‘procedures… hormones and all the rest of it.’ Oh dear! He’s had three children – you’d think he’d know what a cervix is. It’s that thing that has to dilate 10cm during labour to let a baby out… You really can’t grow a cervix in a petrie dish and implant it at the neck of a biological man’s non-existent womb.

In other examples that I am determined to find galvanising rather than depressing you will find the phrases ‘human papillomavirus in men’ and ‘human papillomavirus in vulva owners’.

(Which reminds me, I really need to go and get my volvo cervixed as soon as I can get to a garage, its suspension has gone again…)

Word choice matters because it forms and consolidates opinions and beliefs. So, what happens when the language of a society tells women and girls that they are body parts (which can be alive or dead of course) while men get to keep the personalising word ‘man’?

By dehumanising women, by making them irrelevant, by removing them, quite literally from language, by telling women that any male bodied person who says they want to be treated as a woman should have access to all female single sex spaces, we are reinforcing an idea as old as time, that women must acquiesce to a secondary place in society.

I’ve been asked why so much of this debate focuses on trans-women. The answer is this. It’s because trans-men (females who’ve perhaps had their breasts removed to look more like men, who take testosterone to deepen their voices and grow body hair) do not pose potential rape threats to biological men in prison or elsewhere.

The challenge at the heart of all this is certainly not the people who seek veracity in their lives through transitioning. More healthcare resource is certainly needed to support trans-health.

The challenge here is that all political parties, including many Conservative politicians, are pushing to make it possible for any of us to self-declare as male or female and have instant and unquestioning access to sex-specific places and services. Is this the right thing to do? I think we need more consultation and discussion in order to protect everybody in our society.