LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - It was supposed to be a simple consultation process. Yet just three months later, the British government’s review of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which ends on Friday, has descended into a bitterly fought battle over language, culture and the meaning of what it is to be a woman.

At the heart of the matter is how to simplify the law, ensure it keeps pace with changing times, and how best to recognize transgender and non-binary people in their new gender. The result has been a war of words over gender and the wider society.

“What the whole kerfuffle has revealed is a massive confusion about what the hell gender is, what sex is – why they’re different, why they need to be to be different,” writer and broadcaster Beatrix Campbell told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“It has revealed a kind of crisis in the ways that boys and girls inhabit our hugely polarized gendered culture.”

According to a British charity, the Gender Identity Research and Education Society, about 1 percent of the 66 million-strong British population is “gender non-conforming to some degree”. However, just 4,910 people have legally changed their gender since the act was implemented.

Announcing the review in July, the British government said it recognized many had deemed the process “too bureaucratic, expensive and intrusive” to bother applying.

Under the current terms, trans people need a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and proof of having lived in their new gender for at least two years, as well as meeting a slew of other conditions. An anonymous panel then assesses the application.

Yet while the consultation, which has received more than 36,000 responses, set out to streamline the legal process, the debate has morphed into a series of questions on the very nature of being a woman in today’s society.

Are trans women’s rights compatible with those of other women? Do they impact hard-fought-for women-only spaces and services? Or is this, conversely, a straightforward human rights issue?