Oliver Brown talks to Tracy Edwards:

Even today, 35 years on, you can still detect the magnitude of Maiden in Edwards’ Putney home, a beautiful Victorian house just yards from the Thames. A painting of the boat takes pride of place in her front room, while in the conservatory, boxes of documents from her trailblazing life are piled high, ready to be digitised for the National Maritime Museum.

Although she is uneasy with adulation – “I find compliments hard and my daughter, definitely the grown-up in our relationship, tells me off for it,” she says – she has grown used to the attention, even gracing the Hollywood red carpets when a 2018 documentary about her defining voyage was nominated for an Oscar.

It was in this spirit that she attended this month’s musical about Maiden at the Southwark Playhouse. But what should have been a fulfilling, flattering evening turned instead into an ambush from which she has still not quite recovered. For no sooner was the final song performed than one of the young actresses, wearing the pink shorts that Edwards and her crew-mates in 1989 made their signature, hijacked the curtain-call to read awkwardly from a piece of paper, urging the audience to donate to the “LGBTQIA+ inclusion charity, working to make sports a welcoming place for everyone”.

The gesture was anything but altruistic in its intentions, designed primarily as a rebuke to Edwards’ gender-critical – or, as she prefers to describe it, “sex-realist” – perspective that men have no place in women’s sport.

Thus not only do men who claim to be women invade women’s sports and steal their firsts and their prizes, they also get to have women publicly shouting at women who resist the theft of their sports and prizes. Imagine a play about the courage of Ruby Bridges protested by a cast member blithering about the sorrows of white people. Seriously: imagine it. What the hell could be the point? The only possible point is “Shut up about the generations of abuse and oppression of this set of people and talk about something else instead.”

Edwards observes:

“The whole protest was so uncomfortable, thrown together at the last minute. You could see the actress’s hands were shaking. I’m so disappointed in them. That might sound patronising, but it’s not meant to. I’m disappointed that they spent months reading those words, being those people, and that they still didn’t get it. That’s sad.”

It is sad. They have been bullied into thinking women are the oppressor class, and that’s incredibly sad and destructive.

The actresses appeared oblivious to the supreme irony that, having spent 90 minutes singing and dancing in tribute to women who had toiled so fiercely to assert their rights, they then trampled all over these same rights by endorsing Pride Sports, a charity lobbying for biological males to be accepted in female competition.

Think about it, kids. Pride Sports would have had several males on the Maiden, so that would be the end of that milestone for women. You can’t do both. You can’t do feminism and do inclooosion of men in everything women do. If you pick inclooosion of men you’re an anti-feminist, and I say the hell with you.

Two members of the production team, she reveals, resigned over Edwards’ gender-critical beliefs before the opening night. Certain crew members, she was told, were worried about being introduced to her at the after-party. “Truly,” she says, “there aren’t enough eye-rolls in the world. It was just the vindictiveness of it, the nastiness. They didn’t protest the night before, or the night after, only the night I was there.

“They don’t understand the rights they are giving away, or how hard we had to fight for those rights. What I wish they would realise is that they stand on the shoulders of giants. It is not just me, but the Maiden crew, the people who got us there, my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s generation. They have all given something to the movement for the 100-plus years since the suffragettes. All have done one or two things that have pushed us that little bit further.”

And these nasty pipsqueaks are spitting on all that.

In May, tireless work by the For Women Scotland campaign led the Supreme Court to rule unanimously that the legal definition of a woman was based on biological sex. That ruling has had profound consequences across sport, with football, cricket and netball rewriting their policies within hours to uphold female fairness and safety. Even Mumbles Sailing Club – Edwards’ local club while growing up in south Wales, and a place that until two weeks ago still allowed men into women’s changing rooms – has had to fall into line.

“I always thought that sport would be the jimmy that forced the whole thing open,” Edwards says. “The problem is expressed so visually in sport, by the sight of a huge man towering over a tiny woman on a cycling podium.”

Oh yes, we were just talking about him.

The legs. The massive tree-like legs.