'Victoria Atkins is blazing a trail in the trans controversy,' writes Nigel Nelson

Strident voices on both sides are not helping - and that includes you, Joanna Rowling. So let us take the heat out of this and see if we can find some light.

Health Secretary Vicky Atkins found a sensible way forward with her reform of the NHS Constitution. In future, female hospital wards will only contain biological women, and only a biological woman doctor will carry out intimate examinations of biological women if that is what they request.

Meanwhile, trans women will get private rooms in NHS hospitals to show them the dignity and respect they deserve. This is a win-win all round and should apply equally to trans men.

Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting muddied Labour’s waters somewhat by telling The Sun newspaper: “If you’d asked me a few years ago I would have said trans men are men, trans women are women. Some people are trans, get over it.

“Now I sort of sit and reflect and think actually, there are lots of complexities.”

Yes, there are, Wes, and it is the complexities which we need to concentrate on and sort out. Not above the powers of a politician of your talent, I would have thought.

Thing is, Wes, you were right first time. A trans woman is a woman. Although biological sex cannot be changed gender can. That is the official position of this country enshrined in legislation put through by the last Labour government.

To get a gender recognition certificate the 2004 Gender Recognition Act requires applicants to live in their acquired gender for two years and satisfy a panel made up of lawyers, doctors and psychologists they have gender dysphoria.

It means they can change their gender on their passport and birth certificate and any other official documents recording sex. No surgery is required to enable this.

JK Rowling is also right to campaign for women-only spaces - such as single-sex wards. Biological women should not have to witness male genitalia being waved around, especially when they are already feeling under the weather.

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Victoria Atkins has admirably conquered that complexity. And sport is also active in this field because a male body is stronger than a female one.

World Athletics, World Aquatics and the International Cycling Union bar trans women from women’s elite competition if they did not medically transition before puberty.

The same goes for cricket. But trans women are now totally banned from international women’s netball competitions.

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer wants the FA to keep trans football players out of women’s teams. She said: “It’s not appropriate to have women competing against people who are not biologically women.” But for now, the FA is just messing about with testosterone tests for those aged over 16.

The Ladies Professional Golf Association and US amateur boxing insists participants must undergo gender reassignment surgery to be eligible for competitions.

Equestrian events are unaffected by gender because it is the strength of the horse and not of the rider which matters. Women have always been able to compete against men.

Meanwhile, and this is a weird one, the International Chess Federation (Fide) has chosen to ban trans women from female-only events, at least temporarily.

That prompted Labour MP Angela Eagle, joint winner of the 1976 British Girls’ Under-18 chess championship, to rage: “This ban is ridiculous and offensive to women. There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe men are inherently more able to play than women.”

You’d have thought that as chess also has a couple of horses on each side gender should play no part in it.

The criminal justice system also has its anomalies, although it seems to have rightly come round to the view a trans woman sex offender should not serve her time in a woman’s prison.

Police record the sex of offenders not on biology but on the gender they choose to present. This can skew crime figures - and the stats need to be robust because designing criminal justice policy relies on their accuracy.

Under English law, there is a presumption only men can be rapists because the offence is defined as penetration with a penis - with the exception that a woman can be charged with rape if she assists a man in committing it, say in a case of extreme conversion therapy where rape is involved.

In the 10 years up to June 2022, there were 49 women convicted of rape. Yet the figures give no indication of how this came about.

It is one of the many reasons why, 20 years on, the Gender Recognition Act should be revised. It needs a cool head and a kind heart to do that, of the sort Victoria Atkins has just shown.