If, like us and most people, you’re interested in sex, it’s been a big week.

Attendees at the employment tribunal of a female researcher, sacked for tweeting that ‘male people are not women’, heard from her former employer that holding this belief was “incompatible with human dignity”. Meanwhile, a man launched a judicial review of police guidance on transgender hate crime, after being investigated for tweeting a “gender critical” limerick.

These days, the hottest topic isn’t who’s sleeping with whom, but rather definition itself. Even our use of ‘female’ and ‘man’ in the previous paragraph is controversial. The very concepts of sex and gender are under the spotlight, and if you say something wrong, you might end up in trouble.

Thanks to real-world sanctions, on top of an uneasy virtual world of online menace — including academics facing ‘death threats, intimidation, and harassment’, as well as the fear of job loss — there’s little space for debate. The findings of a recent public consultation on proposed reforms to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act are yet to be published. Yet, unsurprisingly, people are afraid to speak out — and when discussions do take place, important substantive questions are too often overridden in this emotive topic.