By now it’s as familiar as “Once upon a time.”

A Tory deputy chairwoman has had a “hate incident” recorded against her after she described a trans woman as a “man in a wig”.

Rachel Maclean, the MP for Redditch, was accused of transphobia after she shared a post on X, formerly Twitter, about Melissa Poulton, who is standing for the Green Party against Maclean at the next general election.

The post said that Poulton was “a man who wears a wig and calls himself a ‘proud lesbian’” and Maclean added: “‘While the Greens don’t know what a woman is, my Worcestershire neighbours the people of Bromsgrove certainly do.”

It’s also relevant that Maclean is in fact a woman, while Poulton is not.

Poulton literally is a man in a wig, so is it in fact a “hate incident” to say so?

In all fairness there are literal truths that are cruel to point out, emphasize, belabor. It doesn’t really matter much whether you call uttering them hate incidents or just cruelty. Bullying with cruelty isn’t generally a police matter but it certainly is a social one.

But there are other literal truths we need to point out and even emphasize. The truth that a man is not a woman is very much one of them, especially now that it’s been made taboo. That applies to the generalization that men are not women and also to the particular instances of men trying to force everyone to agree they are women. It may hurt the feelings of the man in question (or it may give him the thrill he’s seeking), but that doesn’t matter nearly as much as women’s always precarious rights.

It is true that Poulton is a particularly awkward fit as a pretend-woman, and it may be rude to point that out, but given the rudeness of his claim to be a woman, I can’t summon much sympathy for him.

Maclean, who is the party’s deputy chairwoman for women, has said that she would “continue to make this stand” however many times she was reported to police.

Yesterday she said that West Mercia police had recorded a “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) on her file.

Posting on X, Maclean said that she was involved in “changing rules to bring in common sense and proportionality” around such incidents while a Home Office minister.

She said: “Originally NCHIs were introduced in wake of Stephen Lawrence case and were used as intelligence gathering tools. It seems wrong and ridiculous to use the same tool to record that a woman said a man cannot be a woman or a lesbian.”

Wrong and ridiculous and an absolute disaster for women’s rights.