So we’ll compromise, we’ll make it unfair to most women but not the ones at the very top. That’s the way to go, right? Split the difference!

Transgender women are to be banned from professional and semi-professional women’s cricket in England – but controversially not from the grass-roots game.

Those nasty smelly peasants who don’t play professional cricket can just suck it up, right? If they’re women that is. Stupid bitches.

Those rules are among the most liberal in sport, allowing anyone identifying as female to play in women’s cricket – subject to written ECB clearance only for “professional club and England pathway teams”.

This has long sparked major concern among women’s rights campaigners about fairness and safety for those born female, including around shared changing facilities.

But women’s rights campaigners are being exclooosionary by campaigning for women’s rights, so we ignore their concern.

Sharron Davies, the British swimming icon denied Olympic gold in 1980 by state-sponsored doping in East Germany, and a leading voice in the trans debate, branded the new policy “a coward’s cop-out”. She added: “If it’s dangerous, unfair and unsafe at professional and semi-professional level, it’s the same at grass-roots or pathways. The ECB can’t say, ‘We’ll protect these females but not these females – because they’re not good enough’. All sport for females should be protected and an open category created, made welcoming of all, no matter how they identify. It’s wilful negligence to pretend biological males and females aren’t physically different.”

Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at human rights charity Sex Matters, said: “The ECB’s decision to include men who identify as women in amateur female competition is a disastrous, two-tier policy that makes no sense. Anyone who has ever played cricket knows that it’s neither fair nor safe for women to face male bowlers and batsmen, yet that is what most amateur female cricketers will have to do if men are included in women’s competition. And they will have no grounds to object.

“The message to women and girls from ECB seems to be that unless you’re a top player, you don’t get fair play. This policy will put promising girls and women off the game before they ever have a chance to progress to elite level, with catastrophic effects on the pipeline of player development. The ECB claims to support the women’s game but its grudging and partial acceptance of the International Cricket Council’s policy to protect the female category signals that male feelings come first.”

As always.