Unlike its male counterpart, female orgasm is a covert, hidden experience, frequently recognizable only to the person experiencing it. (And sometimes, not even to that person: in rare cases, women can orgasm without even realizing it themselves.) There is no physical, visible proof of female orgasm, and by extension, no physical proof of female pleasure – unless, like me, you’re one of the women who can experience female ejaculation.

And yet, instead of serving as incontrovertible evidence of the existence of female sexual response and female orgasm, discussions of female ejaculation serve mainly to provide fodder for the debate about whether or not women can be trusted to accurately report their own sexual experiences.

Almost every conversation about female ejaculation devolves into a discussion of whether or not it is “real”. Though a whole genre of pornography is dedicated to celebrating the phenomenon, filmmakers are routinely accused of faking it with some kind of studio magic. When a recent scientific study investigating the phenomenon identified two forms of female ejaculation and argued that the more common “squirting” form was comprised primarily of fluid from the bladder, many crowed with delight to have “proof” that what ladies had “mistaken” for a sign of sexual pleasure was merely a form of arousal-induced incontinence. (Notably, the second, rarer form of female ejaculation – deemed more “legitimate” by the study – bore a slight resemblance to male ejaculate.)

The skepticism about women’s ability to understand their own sexual responses shows up in pop culture too; in the first season of Amazon’s Transparent, a character who mentions squirting with a partner is immediately asked whether she wasn’t merely urinating.

But why is there still an assumption that women can’t understand or describe what we experience during sex? It’s perfectly clear to any woman who has ejacluated that doing so is a unique experience unto itself – including me. At thirty-two, I’ve long forgotten many significant sexual firsts, but I do remember the first time I ejaculated: I was 19-years-old, in my apartment on the Upper West Side; as I played with a small vibrator, I felt something inside of me break open. For the previous year or so I’d been on Paxil, which had subdued and restrained my sexual response, even rendering me anorgasmic. But the liquid pooling on the floor below me was solid evidence that my ability to orgasm had finally been restored.

Female ejaculators know firsthand that even, if the fluid they emit during orgasm comes from the bladder, it looks, smells and feels different from urine. And it’s hard to ignore that the experience of spontaneously expelling fluid in the height of orgasm is fundamentally different from the more intentional act of voiding one’s bladder.

But regardless of the biological basis of female ejaculation, the physical experience is, at its heart, a pure expression of female sexual pleasure. Insisting that female ejaculation is really just confused urination doesn’t just denigrate women’s ability to understand our own bodies – it also positions female sexual pleasure as filthy, dirty, and ultimately less than the celebrated male orgasm.

To some, the question of whether female ejaculation is “real” may seem frivolous at best – an academic debate with little impact beyond how one handles clean-up in the bedroom. But the answer to this question has effects beyond our personal sex lives, and the stakes involved are real. Both Australian and UK obscenity codes ban female ejaculation from pornography on the basis that it might be urine and thus obscene. Since pornography is a visual medium and female ejaculation is the only visual evidence of female orgasm, this ban is tantamount to a wholesale censorship of female sexual pleasure in explicit media.

And in a world where women’s narratives about their sexual experiences are routinely called into question, the debate over female ejaculation serves as a reminder that, when it comes to sex, we still don’t believe women. Even when they’re literally wetting the bedsheets with proof.