On Wednesday night the Prime Minister affirmed her commitment to making gender a matter of self-declaration.

To change one’s gender currently, you need a medical diagnosis and to have lived as your preferred gender for two years. Under new laws, you will simply declare yourself whatever you like. No surgical reassignment. No medical certificate. No hormones. You can live as a man but be recognised as a woman, with access to women’s toilets, changing rooms and refuges.

This is not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. Last year the BMA advised doctors to call expectant mothers “pregnant people”. Refuges have been under pressure to let in male-bodied people. Males claiming to be “non-binary” are showing up at women-only groups. A convicted double rapist was moved to a women’s prison, then segregated for harassment, and sex offender Ian Huntley plans to do the same.

New legislation will make all this easier. It will also undermine the monitoring of sex-based discrimination by obscuring the categories “male” and “female”. Sporting bodies will come under more pressure to allow male-bodied “women” into women’s sports.

A mad world, indeed. When Rachel Dolezal, a white woman from Montana, passed as black and became president of a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, her fraud sparked outrage. But women are censored from making the same objection on this issue — for saying, in the case of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, that trans women are “different”. Or when the BBC’s Samira Ahmed opposed gender-neutral toilets at the Barbican.

Trans logic goes that trans people must be accepted on the basis of self-declaration, so women, as a biological class, no longer exists. Gender exists only in our heads. But being a woman is not my chosen identity. It is a material reality that informs my experience of sexual assault and childbirth. Girls who are forced into child marriage, genitally mutilated or trafficked into prostitution are victims of being female, not of believing that they’re female. Many women who oppose the trans lobby are victims of rape. Some of them were raped in public toilets. Always by men.

For politicians this is an easy issue to score political points, but they have not thought through the real-world implications. MP Maria Miller, former chair of the Women and Equalities select committee, dismissed critics of her proposals for liberalising trans issues as “women purporting to be feminists”. But on this there has been no consultation with women whatsoever. As usual, we have simply been ignored.