“When I saw her,” wrote Sante, referring to Lucy, “I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning.” This was not a sudden whim for Sante, then aged 66, but a longstanding fixation made finally undeniable. As evidence, Sante included in the letter a list of recurrent “masturbation scenarios”, all of which involve coerced feminisation: “cast as a girl in the school play, then persuaded to go out on the town in costume; hired as an assistant by a wealthy society woman who amuses herself by dressing me up as a girl; new roommate assigned to me in college has been dressing as a girl for years and has a full wardrobe.”

Sante’s friends were uniformly warm and positive in response. One female colleague wrote back to say it was “exciting to have another great female writer”. Only one person replied critically — a trans woman, who told Sante: “My only note so far is that I wouldn’t mention your crotch in connection with a realisation about your gender identity, because any mention of genitalia or crotches instantly brings up all sorts of bizarre paranoid delusions that trans women are just transitioning as part of some kind of sexual fetish.”

Sante bridled a little at the judgement, given that this was a private letter to a small group, but changed the word “crotch” for “belly”. And then — this is the fascinating part — reverted to “crotch” for the least private possible audience, republishing the original letter in a new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. In fact, Sante seems entirely blithe about the crotch mentions, announcing near the end of the book that: “my dysphoria was never centred on or even especially concerned with genitalia. (Although it is extremely exciting to have tits.)” Bottom surgery is presumably not on the to-do list.

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It hardly seems to require any “bizarre paranoid delusion” to see evidence of a fetish at work. But for Sante’s trans woman correspondent, the anxiety was presumably about saying the quiet part out loud. Since the start of this century, trans activism has pushed a “born this way” narrative of gender identity — and at the same time, aggressively rejected any implication that a man might have a sexual motivation for identifying as a woman.

This is despite the fact that we are supposedly in a more permissive era than ever before. “Kinkshaming” is the great taboo: it’s a worse faux pas to wrinkle your nose at someone else’s peccadillos than it is to flaunt your own. And yet this is also an era with a great intolerance of male displays of sexuality in culture. While the underworld of pornography propagates unchecked horrors, the oversexed male mainstream writer is a subject of open derision. There are few more crushing satires than the “men writing women” meme: “She breasted boobily to the stairs and titted downwards…”

A lot of men’s writing about women has been ludicrously sexist, and in recognition of that fact, a great many male authors today — who come, on the whole, from the nice liberal side of the tracks, and would be alarmed at being cast as “anti woman”, especially in a heavily feminised publishing industry — have tended to stow their libidos. By contrast, the big filthy beasts of the 20th century look tawdry and dated: Philip Roth, John Updike, Martin Amis, standing awkwardly in the corner with their dicks in their hands. In the mid-to-late 20th century, their openness about desire was revelatory — part of the great post-war liberation. In the 21st century (and especially after #MeToo) they’re treated with more suspicion: less literary explorers of the libidinous underworld, more cringy self-pleasurers. The only heirs left to that literary tradition seem to be trans women writers, such as Sante or Torrey Peters, whose novel Detransition, Baby is a riot of sissy porn and flopping testicles. Perhaps the stigma about “breasting boobily” goes away when the male authors in question have grown their own.

Male desire can be a forbidding subject for women. Whether as a consequence of nature or nurture, men’s sexuality tends to be a more consuming presence in their lives than it is for women. In a bell curve distribution, there will be significant overlap — but men in general have higher sexer drives than women. Men also tend to have weirder sex drives than women: paraphilias, the fancy sexologist work for “kink”, are considerably more common in men than in women.

This is uncomfortable knowledge, and for women it can be nicer to ignore it.  For men, meanwhile, sustaining a “decent” life while suspecting yourself of being thoroughly indecent within can become intolerable. Sante writes often about the strain of repression. And the trans writer Debbie Hayton described managing autogynephilia as “like someone trying to hold down a beach ball underwater, only for it to force its way to the surface”. Alasdair Gray — author of Poor Things, and one of the greatest of all literary perverts — wrote that “unless we bring one of our wicked little dreams just a wee bit to life we live like zombies”.

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Women, often, would simply rather not know about this aspect of men. It is disturbing, alien, disruptive. That perhaps explains why Sante’s woman colleague was able to skip past the “crotch” sentence and arrive at the comfortable conclusion that Sante was now “female”. It explains why many female readers of Detransition, Baby seemed to overlook the dirty bits and neuter it into being a novel about “womanhood”.

But it explains too why there was a response of unmitigated disgust from some women who recognised Detransition, Baby for the work of honest filth it is. When Peters was long-listed for the Women’s Prize in 2021, the objection from some gender critical campaigners was not only that it should have been ineligible by dint of Peters’ sex (a fair point), but also that its content made it illegitimate.

“Had a female author submitted a culturally regressive, sadomasochistic, misogynistic ‘surrendered wife’ narrative to the Women’s Prize, it would rightly have been ignored by the judges,” said one angry open letter to the Women’s Prize. Actually, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, with multiple scenes of sadomasochistic sex between its two protagonists, was long-listed in 2019, so this criticism doesn’t ring true. What was objectionable about Peters’ book was maybe that, unlike the melancholic Rooney novel, it appeared to be written by someone who was having a thoroughly good time getting mucky.

Yet men’s sexuality seems, on the whole, to be something women ought to be interested in. After all, almost all of us live with or alongside men. Some of us sleep with them too. The truth should be more valuable than the nice-guy mythology: knowing what a man wants entails no obligation to consent to it. To respond with disgusted calls for men to censor themselves — or worse, with the ladylike self-censorship of Butler — is to wilfully choose ignorance.

There’s a complication, though. Desires are not just inherent: they’re also imitative. Part of Sante’s journey to transition is the slow-burn of a lifetime of fantasy; part of it is the easy access to an online community that reinforces the wish. For most of Sante’s existence, “becoming a woman” was an impossible urge. Only when technology makes it tangible did it become a consuming obsession. There should be space in the world for the honest — and hopefully intelligent — disclosure of the male libido, as for the female. But it may be men who pay the highest price for that knowledge.

Rumours that this or that star was actually, secretly same-sex attracted were par for the course in classic Hollywood, even as studios provided cover to their not-so-straight stars by casting them in scripted fauxmances with celebs of the opposite sex. Actor Tab Hunter, then closeted, reportedly managed to keep his career afloat in the Fifties by “dating” Natalie Wood, while gossip columnists asked sly, barbed questions about whether he was really the right type of guy for her, wink, wink. Rock Hudson battled rumours about his orientation for decades, even marrying his agent’s secretary to preserve the appearance of being a good old-fashioned lover of ladies. In a culture that viewed homosexuality with a mix of horror and fascination, creating a straight narrative for gay actors was part conspiracy, part con: to stay in the public’s good graces, they needed to at least pretend to conform to its mores.

But times changed, and with them, so did the nature of the is-he-or-isn’t-he discourse. Malicious rumour-mongering about gay actors gave way to something more like idle curiosity, while straight artists earned accolades for playing explicitly gay characters on-screen. The overt homophobia of the 20th century was replaced in the 21st by a fascination with minority sexual orientations, and shortly thereafter, the commodification thereof: Tumblr fanfic writers avidly projected queer desire onto canonically straight characters (not to mention the actually straight actors who played them), culture critics wrote think pieces about the problematic appropriation of allowing straight people to play gay roles, and the term “queerbaiting” was coined to describe the behaviour of celebrities who weren’t gay — or were they?

Crucially, this is bait that people of all persuasions have been all too happy to take. Today, the penchant for slyly referring to certain celebs as “confirmed bachelors” has been replaced by a smorgasbord of stars who are confirmed queer, or queer-adjacent, or queer-suspected, along with the occasional celebrity of a certain age who was grandfathered into the closet back when the mores were different and now remains there either by choice or inertia. Being ambiguously gay, or at least willing to be seen as maybe possibly such, confers status and intrigue much in the same way as those studio-orchestrated fauxmances did back in the Fifties.

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But the symbiosis between the maybe-gay star and the slavering public is a precarious one, and it is possible to push it too far — as illustrated by the New York Times opinion piece titled “Look What We Made Taylor Do”. The essay, written by Anna Marks, is presented by its author as a catalogue of all the evidence that Taylor Swift is actually, secretly gay, but is probably better described as 5,000 words of pure wish-projection, a Tumblr-grade conspiracy theory that somehow wormed its way into the paper of record. Per Marks, Taylor Swift’s entire dating history (men), lyrical subject matter (men), and publicly stated preferences (men) are all just an elaborate psy-op: what’s really important, what really matters, is that her Lover album cover contains some of the same colours, sort of, as the bisexual pride flag.

As a cursory internet search for the term “Gaylor” will reveal, this is not the first time Swift’s sexual orientation has been the subject of speculation. And yet, there was an immediate sense in the wake of its publication that Marks’s essay had crossed a line. An anonymous source from within Swift’s camp slammed The New York Times in an interview with CNN, saying that a similar article about a male artist would never have passed muster at the paper: “There seems to be no boundary some journalists won’t cross when writing about Taylor, regardless of how invasive, untrue, and inappropriate it is — all under the protective veil of an ‘opinion piece’.”

Here, it is probably worth noting that, however inappropriate an article like this is, it is neither singular nor sexist: though Marks rarely writes for the paper at which she is an editor, she does have one other essay under her belt, a similar (albeit less lengthy) case for the secret gayness of Harry Styles. “Mr. Styles’s performance (and exorbitant ticket prices) makes his identity our business,” she wrote in August 2022. And if it is inappropriate, it’s arguably not more so than all the other speculation about Swift’s sex life that the press has engaged in over the years, including camping out at the apartment of current beau Travis Kelce in order to breathlessly report that Swift — who, lest we forget, is a 34-year-old woman — spent the night with her boyfriend. The difference, perhaps, is that the latter narrative is one in which Swift has always been a willing participant; what The New York Times did is more akin to casting her in a public and vaguely masturbatory lesbian fantasy without her consent.

The sympathetic take on this is that it’s about representation and identity, and specifically about the desire of marginalised groups from whom dignity, respect, and due credit have often been withheld to claim certain celebrities as One Of Us. Certainly this was the desire that fuelled last year’s controversial New York Times op-ed about Louisa May Alcott, to whom the writer assigned a trans identity and he/him pronouns — and which not coincidentally struck some of the same sour notes as the Swift one, fuelled in this case by the fact that Alcott was not alive to object.

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The more cynical interpretation, though, is that Marks’s essay is a sort of queerbaiting unto itself — as in, baiting Taylor Swift into an argument about her own sexual orientation that she would really prefer not to have, forcibly conscripting her into a culture war she has thus far done her best to avoid. It’s hard not to notice that many positive cultural developments, such as the welcome rise in visibility and acceptance of the LGBT community, have been accompanied by the rise of an ideology powerful enough to supersede both national and religious identity, draping its rainbow-coloured flag over statehouses, churches, and corporate culture alike. And with this has come the unspoken but palpable sense that there can be no fame without the proper politics — a monocultural hegemony in which the press, including The New York Times, act as chief enforcers. There is an expectation that pop stars who’ve ascended to a certain level of visibility will announce their support for Democratic candidates. They will use their platforms for progressive activism. And they will produce an artist’s tithe in the form of an anthem signalling their support for the LGBT community — or be subject to increasingly pointed questions about why they haven’t yet.

In this context, Marks’s essay starts to seem like more than just a piece of poorly argued gossip, something akin to the political rumour-mongering about which Hollywood figures were Communist sympathisers at the height of the Red Scare. Calling Swift queer in the pages of The New York Times feels like a flex, and a test: what’s she going to do about it? Complain? After nearly two decades of playing peek-a-boo with her fans and the press alike over which guy she wrote that revenge song about, it’s the essay about her secret LGB status that’s somehow beyond the pale?

At this point, Swift can’t protest this invasion of privacy without being accused of protesting too much. Any objection will be read as an admission of guilt: if not that she’s the closeted queer her fans so desperately yearn for, then that she’s the secret Right-wing bigot the press has so often accused her of being, which is of course the only type of person who would object to being called gay in The New York Times. The only way for Taylor Swift to signal now that she’s on the right side of history is therefore to stay silent… at least until she releases her next album.