What you call the GC movement hasn’t ever been a monolith, but a loose collection of separate political movements and individuals, some of whom have literally nothing in common but the belief that sex is real and matters. This has been both blessing and curse.

On the positive side, real, lasting solidarity has been forged between women in different political parties who’ve worked collaboratively to fight back against the massive assault on their rights. On the negative, left-wing feminists are being lumped together with people whose attitude towards gender expression is as regressive as that of hardened trans activists (‘if you want to wear lipstick and a dress, you’re a woman’/‘dresses and lipstick are only for women’).

I will say this, though. Many, many women who wouldn’t have thought twice ten years ago about asking for help from a gorgeous young man in lipstick working at the MAC counter have now been on the receiving end of so much aggression and so many direct threats from men in lipstick that they’ve developed a conditioned response, an instinctive wariness, where formerly there was complete indifference.

I’ve experienced this personally. I was approached in the street by a pink-haired young man with what I’ll call very exuberant dress sense and my adrenaline shot through the roof. For a second I thought, ‘this is where I finally get punched.’ And he couldn’t have been sweeter, wanted to talk Harry Potter and get a selfie.

Ten years ago my immediate response to somebody with his style would have been purely appreciative, but no longer, sadly, and the change in me, and in a lot of other women, has been brought on by a tsunami of threats and rage, not because we think there’s anything innately wrong with men wearing make up.

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