IN a verdant nook of douce Edinburgh amidst neatly-trimmed foliage, the lady who exposed her pudenda in the public gallery of the Scottish parliament is looking for votes. Elaine Miller is standing as an independent candidate in next month’s council by-election in the Costorphine/Murrayfield ward and refuses to conceal her moment of notoriety. The local citizenry though, appear unfazed that the “flashing feminist” (copyright Daily Express) is seeking to show them her wares.

We’re standing on a grassy lip at Roseburn Place where the Water of Leith bends towards the city centre. Over there, beyond the flood-plain (a mecca, it seems, beloved of the city’s dog-walkers) is Murrayfield stadium, the Holy of Holies for Scottish rugby supporters.

Ms Miller’s act of fleecy defiance as Holyrood ratified its controversial GRR legislation wasn’t as real as some of her critics might have preferred. She was sporting a merkin that December day which, as an entire sheltered generation of West of Scotland men like me have since come to know, is a pubic wig and not an accessory for combating the cold.

It might have been the only part of Ms Miller that wasn’t real. She adopts a bracing approach to life and work which doesn’t suffer hesitancy or pessimism. Unlike several of those contesting this seat, she actually lives here. Her purpose is two-fold: to address local issues that she feels are neglected in the old-boy carve-ups of local politics and to raise awareness of how such dereliction adversely affects women.

First though, she must deal with a complaint from an elderly lady who lives on the opposite side of the street. Her delivery channels a 1950s public information announcement where paths become pawths. She’s concerned about people feeding the herons that hunt along the banks of the river. “It encourages the rets, you see. The herons are perfectly capable of feeding themselves.”

A younger woman approaches. She’s edgier and her taut deportment betrays anxiety. She’s sleeping on a friend’s couch while she awaits permanent council accommodation that may be several years away. The local authority simply isn’t building enough homes for its disadvantaged and vulnerable citizens and rental rates have soared as private landlords feed on the more lucrative profits that can be made from Airbnb. One of Miller’s aides who has expertise in local housing spends almost an hour advising her of some options that might alleviate her distress.

Miller is furious about a sprawling private housing development which is currently progressing unchallenged by the main parties who seem bent on nodding it through as usual. “The development manager for the proposed site earns £850k-a-year, and for good reason,” she says.

“These large house-builders make millions from developments like these and no one asks questions about the collateral damage wreaked by some of them. In this instance, three local businesses are in the way of the development, but have been viewed by the company and some councillors as acceptable collateral damage. It’s truly sickening.”

Miller had initially decided to stand as a candidate merely to shine a light on the way that the needs of local groups – particularly women – are being eroded through official abandonment and insouciance. “Women are affected by council decisions more than men,” she says.

“They still require more support in dealing with domestic or sexual abuse and at a more granular level they require a targeted approach that takes account of things like school clubs for children, street-lighting and the increased cost of leisure services.”

She’s been greeted warmly on doorsteps by voters who have taken to her engaging style and her pledges to address their specific concerns rather than issue wavy, catch-all platitudes. In a ward with an expected 20% turn-out, she permits herself a degree of mild optimism.

If she were to be elected, some local panjandrums may find their comfortable lives upended somewhat. Miller’s journey to this point, via her vivid display of skirt-up dissent at Holyrood and a five-star Fringe show at the Edinburgh Festival, has been driven by her passionate commitment to addressing women’s health inequalities. It was this more than anything else that turned her into one of Scotland’s most formidable and eloquent opponents of the self-ID part of gender recognition reform.

In her professional life, Miller is a highly regarded physiotherapist specialising in pelvic health. A clutch of visiting professorships are testament to her expertise. This is a delicate and physically embarrassing area for many women, but there’s nothing delicate about her advocacy and she has little time for nuance. She believes it’s too important an issue to waste time on sparing other people’s discomfort … including mine.

We’re in her home on the other side of the river. “Leaky ladies, vexatious vaginas and fallen fannies: this is what I’m about. That's my remit,” she says. “And with this comes incontinence; birth injury, menopausal problems and sexual dysfunctions.” The lady is not for fannying about.

“There's gold standard evidence for this stuff. And addressing it early and with compassion and understanding does work and it changes lives. Once you get women comfortable about talking about these problems, within one session you can give her answers and within six sessions she’s getting better.

“Why does nobody know that this specialism exists? Because that's the narrative I hear from women who come into the clinic: ‘I didn't know. I thought I had to put up with this.’ And that's our fault as professionals. It’s not the fault of GPS or surgeons or the women. It’s because a physio has not been good enough at doing research and outreach.

“I began saying to my profession that this isn't good enough and that we should be doing prevention. No woman should be in this situation. And the fact that it takes an average of seven years for a woman to come and seek help is heart-breaking. It’s just appalling. Somebody should have told her at some point.

“That if you do your pelvic floor exercises this is probably going to get better. And that if you give them the information that if they do these exercises three times a day for three months, then three-quarters of them never need to speak to someone like me again. They can self-manage.”

In other countries, politicians strive to serve the people who elected them. In modern, ‘progressive’ Scotland we have parliamentarians who think it’s their job to hound the voters and threaten their incomes. Like other angry and entitled young men who fancy themselves trans activists, the Scottish Greens MSP, Ross Greer thinks he knows more about this than women’s health professionals.

Following Miller’s act of pubic resistance (let’s call it an am-bush), the Bearsden Bolshevik accused her of committing a sex crime. Another MSP accused her of workplace harassment. This was because she had photographed the Social Justice minister, Shona Robison in committee doodling on her notepad while supposedly listening to GRR submissions. Now a complaint – entirely vexatious - has been made to Miller’s professional body.

In all of this she’s been driven by anger at the implications of self-ID for women’s health, something she says is a matter of life and death. “As well as potentially distorting statistics that govern where services are targeted, much of this process has involved a callous and deliberate erosion of womanhood and all of our protected physical characteristics. This has profoundly disturbing consequences for women’s health.

“I started on this from a women's health point of view and looking at why women are ignored by the government and budget-holders. I have gold-standard evidence that can save them all billions of pounds. In my naivety I expected to be welcomed with open arms and have roundtable meetings with ministers and give them what I know.

“And then some clever civil servants would work with the detail because I thought they’d be interested in having happy, healthy citizens. But in reality, they won’t venture beyond the boundaries of their manifestos. There’s no wriggle unless it’s for one of their cultural obsessions.

“To me, that means they’re accepting that women suffer needlessly. I told them that female incontinence is a total barrier to exercise and that coronary heart disease is the biggest killer or the biggest cause of premature death of women in Scotland. They don't exercise because 70% of actual, genuine women worry about wetting themselves when they do. But I can help them fix that.”