Male reporter talks to three women about their work, fails to avoid sneering.

Lisa Mackenzie, Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn call themselves “a policy analysis collective”. They wince slightly when they hear this description spoken out loud.

“It was the best descriptor of ourselves we could come up with,” Mackenzie says apologetically. Known collectively as Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (MBM), they have consistently provided the most cogent criticism of the Scottish government’s attempts to make it easier to change your legal gender.

In policy papers, blog posts and evidence to parliament over the past five years they have offered clarity where there was muddle. With intellectual ruthlessness they have identified key weaknesses in Sturgeon’s proposal. They have provided a line by line feminist critique of a policy which, despite a healthy majority in parliament, remains deeply unpopular with the public and deeply divisive within the SNP. Gender reform has convulsed Scottish politics and shone a harsh light on how we are governed — and the MBM trio have been operating the searchlight.

So far so good, and it continues to be good for several more paragraphs, but then…

Despite critics pointing out the risks, Scottish government ministers pushed the gender recognition law through Holyrood in December. The UK government blocked it last month, claiming a conflict with UK-wide equality legislation. A showdown at the Supreme Court now looks likely. Meanwhile, the first minister has come under fire over the case of a double rapist known as Isla Bryson who was sent to a women’s jail after claiming to be transitioning to a woman.

Public debate on this subject is shrill and moves quickly to extremes, with little scope for agreement. MBM deny they are participants in a culture war. Murray says their “emphasis on evidence and analysis is the counter to that kind of accusation”.

Sigh. He just had to go for the s-word.

I have warned the trio I will ask them deliberately provocative questions to see how they respond. In the history of equality, I say, progress came when people made room for others who had been excluded. Sometimes they made room voluntarily and sometimes because the law required it. So white people made room on the Alabama bus. Married heterosexuals made room in the register office for married homosexuals. On trans rights, were MBM saying there was no room on the bus?

It should be possible to ask provocative questions without asking stupid questions. We don’t have to “make room” for everybody on every bus. Women don’t have to “make room” for abusive men, or rapists, or murderers of women, or murderers of any kind. We can’t be “inclusive” of everyone and everything in all places and situations, and trying to do so would be “exclusive” of far more people than it would include. It’s not unjust “exclusion” for women not to want men peering at them over the wall of the toilet compartment. Men own most of the buses in the first place, and if women want to say there’s no room on this particular bus because all the seats are taken then we get to say that.

Blackburn bristles. “The privilege argument is very difficult to hear when you’re a woman,” she says before adding, “particularly from a man. I never feel privileged in contexts where I feel vulnerable to men. It’s offensive. It’s offensively wrong.”

Oh no no, it’s merely “provocative.”