Gender is such a hot topic – more of an inferno, really – that it’s easy to get your fingers burnt. Last March, Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray wrote a long, nuanced article arguing that trans women who grow up male don’t experience the world in the same way as natal women. For this, she was publicly rebuked by Stonewall, accused of transphobia and added to the student union blacklist of Wicked Old Women.

Now it’s the turn of her co-presenter, Jane Garvey, to slap on a hard hat, grab a hose and dash into the burning building. All this week and last, Garvey has been hosting a series of debates on gender, trying to understand the conflict between feminists and trans activists, and – a genuine public service, this – render it comprehensible to the average listener. One of the weirdest things about this argument is how hard it is to understand. Every single one of us has personal experience of sex and gender; yet the subject has become so encrusted in jargon that only the most obsessively interested parties can follow the conversation.

“What are sex and gender?” Garvey asked at the start of the first debate, last Monday. Sociologist Sally Hines cleared her throat and attempted clarity. It didn’t last long. “Sex, I would argue, is a very complex mix of chromosomes, hormones and genitals… So we are talking about biological factors, but we’re not talking about anything at all which is straightforward…. We are talking about a complex mix of factors which, especially in the West, have often been seen through a binary framework.”

You could practically hear Garvey’s eyeballs rolling in her head. I share her impatience with the self-important verbosity of gender politics. And if Garvey sometimes seems exasperated by her trans guests, who can blame her? They keep refusing to take part in a proper debate – insisting on recording their interviews separately from the enemy.

This Monday’s discussion was supposed to be about how to improve communication between the two sides. But Bex Stinson, head of trans equality at Stonewall, refused to appear in the studio with her opposite number (Helen Lewis of the New Statesman) on the grounds that the debate was too toxic. The mad circularity of this argument – I won’t try to have a civilised conversation because the conversation is too uncivilised – was especially baffling because Lewis is one of the gentler critics of the trans lobby.

She already believes that trans women are women, deserving of the same rights and respect as other women. Yet, said Lewis, because she doesn’t subscribe to every element of trans doctrine, Stinson apparently regards her as a dangerous bigot. And “if she’s saying that about me”, added Lewis cleverly, “she’s saying that about – I would say – 95 per cent of Woman’s Hour listeners.” That’s how to win a debate: speak plain English, know your audience – and above all, be in the room.