It’s all so grudging.

Trans women can be excluded from some “women-only spaces” in some circumstances, Keir Starmer says, as the controversy threatens to open a bitter row in the party.

That is, women won’t be forced to have men in all women-only spaces, Starmer says, only some of them. The Independent of course simply has to put it in terms of “exclusion,” and has to put scare-quotes on the very bizarre unfamiliar shocking idea that women get to pee in a room without men in it.

The law “rightly assumes the inclusion of trans women, except in specific circumstances”, the spokesman said, normally thought to include prisons and refuges.

But everywhere else we’re required to pretend that men really are women.