As a barrister one would imagine that we are immune from the ideology pandemic but having attended continuing legal ed while in lockdown i was perturbed to understand that I should now put a pronoun under any letter that goes out in my name. This was apparently because according to the speaker you need to show you are not a "bad" person. I don't even put the letters of my three degrees under my name which appear to be far more relevant so why I would start engaging in delusional language is beyond me. We were also advised we needed to ask our clients their pronouns. Frankly, many women would be extremely insulted being asked such a question, especially elderly women, who might feel that somehow you thought they appeared masculine. I raised this with my client the next day who happened to be a middle aged female, and she told me she would have found the question, if asked seriously, extremely rude. I now also find myself banned from Twitter for "hate speech". I have read of many people being banned for hate speech and it concerns me that like me, their comments are appropriate and factual observations and not at all "hateful" in common parlance. On the other hand I have seen highly abusive media attacks on women by men in dresses who call themselves women and this is not only condoned but apparently celebrated. I am seeing legislation and government policies undermining and erasing women by taking away their words and dehumanising them. i am watching cases unfold in the courts where young children are allowed to continue on a path of self-mutilation with state encouragement and sanctioning. I think the general public is not aware of what is happening in the world around them while legislative gates are clanged shut and we are herded into yards where you cannot speak freely for fear of prosecution. I see newspapers falsely reporting events to encourage a false narrative. i see cancel culture where people are harassed and threatened if they challenge the narrative in any way. We have seen in history the ugliness of infection of society with extreme ideas. It happened in Salem in the witchcraft trials, it happened in 1930s Germany when seemingly intelligent and civilised people condoned the erasure of the Jewish people, we say it with the Stassi in East Germany, we saw it with the cultural revolution in China. For some reason we cannot imagine it could happen to us and yet it is. It is real. We need to tell our stories. We need to be noisy. We need to be the boy who calls the king is naked.