Transgender ideology is in the media spotlight again.
Third-wave feminists launched a petition to stop Germaine Greer from speaking at Cardiff University.
Greer, a second-wave feminist, believes ''surgery will not turn a man into a woman''.
Third-wave feminism, being powered by middle-class women, is generally marked from the early 1990s to the present time.
Proponents claim that, as women, it allows them to define feminism for themselves, challenging the second-wave agenda.
It is becoming increasing more academic.
For my own personal interest as a feminist, I canvassed both feminist and non-feminist women on their stand on whether transgender-women are ''woman''.
To begin let me define ''sex, gender and sexuality'' which is integral to this debate.
Sex is a biological reality.
Gender is the state of being a man or woman or somewhere in between and is typically used with reference to social and cultural contexts, rather than biological ones, referring to the attitudes, feelings, and behaviours that a given culture associates with.
Sexuality is defined as your sexual orientation, your sexual activity and your capacity for sexual feelings.
Homosexual (gay or lesbian) or bisexual or asexual or heterosexual are examples of your own personal choice of engagement.
Gender identification and sexual orientation fall within the realm of personal choice, be it outwardly recognised by others or private.
However, your biological sex is something that is defined by genetics and is embedded in DNA coding.
The current transgender ideology puts all three categories of ''sex, gender and sexuality'' into the realm of personal choice and this is where the central ideas in the argument become inconsistent, having little support in science or the ethics of power analysis.
All transgender-women by definition are biologically male, mostly socialised as boys who usually ''transition'' as adults, although in the present climate it appears to be coming acceptable for children to ''transition'', which should be examined critically rather than accepted unconditionally.
That our underlying biological reality remains fundamentally unchanged is not a value judgement; it is a morally neutral statement of fact, neither good nor bad, it just is and being female is not a feeling or an opt-in.
Of course there are the exceptions to the rule, which the few who fall in the middle express.
We are all on a spectrum.
So what makes females female (or woman women) and males male (or men men)?
Ninety-nine percent of male and female coding is exactly the same.
The less than 1% variation between the sexes is small but the percentage difference influences every single cell in our bodies.
The difference between female and male brains is revealed to be complex and widespread.
Male and female brains and bodies start to develop differently in utero, not from how one's parents raised one as a boy or a girl.
Until 8 weeks old, every foetal brain looks female - female is nature's default sex/gender setting - their circuitry being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones.
A huge foetal testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week of gestation will turn the unisex female brain into a male brain, killing off some cells in the communication centres and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centres.
If the testosterone surge does not happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed, with the foetal female brain cells sprouting more connections in the communications centres and areas that process emotion.
Foetal development defines our innate biology and this is a basic tenant which academic transgender ideology ignores.
Indeed, it is confused gender politics when a biological man replaces the biological woman in Glamour Magazine's honouring of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as ''Woman of the Year''.
There is no argument that it is important to accept, respect and include our diverse transgender communities.
However, a transgender-woman is not biologically a woman.
This was affirmed by my informal qualitative research, in which the ordinary woman on the street acknowledged transgender as transitioning from one gender to another and equally affirmed that a transgender-woman is not a biological woman.
No doubt this debate will be ongoing and perhaps more profoundly played out on the sports field or in the genetic laboratory, or for that matter within the UK ''X-Factor'' categories, rather than in gender studies of the sociology departments at universities.
• Tracey Crampton Smith, of Dunedin, is a feminist campaigner, activist and educator.
