I asked a lefty straight man I know (this is irl) whether he was aware how many penised ‘lesbians’ are involved in the push to access female spaces. The subject made him incredibly uncomfortable. He simply didn’t want to hear it. I then asked him whether he knew what his straight male friends wanted from women in the bedroom, kink/sex wise. Horrified look: ‘no, of course I bloody don’t.’

I said to him that if you put 100 straight and bi women of our age and average sexual experience in a room together, they could write an authoritative compendium on straight male kink in an afternoon, from their own direct experience or that of women they know. I said I presumed he knew that a cross-dressing fetish is one of the most common paraphilias in heterosexual men and that this has been in the psychological literature since Freud.

I cannot overstate how little he wanted to talk about this, let alone acknowledge that any of it was real and happening. I don’t know whether it was the idea that women actually talk about what they meet in the bedroom that touched a nerve, or whether he found the whole subject ick, or didn’t like the suggestion that he was naive or poorly informed, but the impression given was that I was depraved to say such things aloud, and that he’d much prefer a seemly silence.