Bristol is another battlefront.

The conflict goes back to July 2022, when Bristol City Council passed a motion to “recognise and affirm trans men are men, trans women are women”.

Why stop there? Why not pass motions that say trans children are children, trans rabbits are rabbits, trans apples are apples? Why not just stamp everything “trans”?

It was concerns like these that led Stephenson and several others to join the Women of Wessex. “We wrote to the council, we attended meetings, we showed them legal evidence that the motion was unlawful. We did everything we could.”

But their efforts seemed to fall on deaf ears – until spring of this year, when the Supreme Court ruled that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological sex, not gender identity, and that biological women have the right to single-sex spaces. “After that, we started paying attention again,” Stephenson says.

The Women of Wessex began attending council meetings and using the public forum, a 30-minute window in which residents can put questions directly to elected officials. What they encountered, they say, was not a chamber interested in dialogue but one intent on closing ranks.

According to the group, Green councillors in particular have worked to shut down scrutiny and punish dissent, creating an atmosphere so hostile to disagreement that even asking a lawful question has become precarious.

See that’s one of the effects of promoting and enforcing a legal fiction aka a lie – to protect it you have to bully dissenters, because bullying is all you have.

When the Women of Wessex first stood up in July to ask what the council had done in response to the Supreme Court ruling, it became immediately clear what they were up against. Before they had even finished their question, a group of councillors rose, filed out of the chamber and only returned once the women had sat down. “I was shocked,” says Stephenson. “I didn’t think that they could take themselves out of the democratic process, because that public forum in the council is there for local residents to have a voice.”

Sorry, if you think women have rights, you forfeit your voice.

When the next opportunity to ask questions at a meeting in September came, Stephenson says that councillors mounted another “orchestrated attack”. As in July, the women had planned to stand up and ask about single-sex spaces; in response, 18 councillors “walked out each time one of us got up to speak and then came back in when we’d finished speaking”.

Again, the whole process was rendered absurd. In one instance, a member of the public, Stephen McNamara, former head of legal at the council, posited a situation where a 6ft 2in trans woman could be sharing bathroom space with a 14-year-old Muslim girl. “The Lord Mayor responded: ‘Please stop. No. That is incredibly offensive. Please stop. Get to the question.’ A councillor shouted from the floor: ‘You don’t have to take these questions, they’re offensive,’” recalls Stephenson. “[We were] asking reasonable questions in lawful language, describing biological sex.”

But what about the huge adult men and the 14-year-old girls, Muslim or not? Why is it offensive to ask the question but not offensive to create the situation?

By November’s council meeting, the situation had escalated. Not only was Helen’s question on predatory males banned entirely, but during the course of the meeting, numerous councillors held up placards with slogans such as “Trans women are women” and “Protect the dolls”.

Seriously? Grown-ass adults?

One council officer, who didn’t give her name for fear of being identified, agrees that an “unhealthy” ideology has taken root at Bristol City Council: “I wouldn’t dare mention that I believe that sex is binary and immutable,” she says. “When some councillors walk out of the chamber or wave placards when members of the public simply quote from a Supreme Court ruling it sends a very clear message about which opinions are welcome within the council and which aren’t. I don’t think that’s healthy for an organisation.”

All the women point out that for the chamber to be a place of democracy, they need it to be a neutral zone – without any form of protest. “We think about what questions we’re going to ask,” says Stephenson. “The law is behind us. Sensible people are behind us. And we come into this chamber and it’s just humiliating. They’re not playing by the rules at all… They’re laughing at us.”

Well, see, you’re women. Women are garbage. This is very progressive.