Thanks! That seems to be it... HOTAIR is also not present. Not what I expected!
But XIST is present in Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.ncrna.fa.gz. I wonder if it would be appropriate to just concatenate the ncrna and cdna fasta to get a more complete reference.
For me, cDNA was "transcript-coding DNA" and not necessarily "protein-coding DNA".
I'm not sure if I'm being stupid
Hypothesis confirmed...