I was at dinner recently with a colleague and two PhD students. The latter are brilliant young women, very hard working and, as you’d expect of 20-something students interested in gender and race, extremely right-on.

Inevitably, over (admittedly delicious) vegan stew, the conversation turned to a series of gender awareness workshops we were all encouraged to attend in order to boost our handling of transgender issues.

I casually announced that workshops like that give me the creeps since they had nothing to do with my ability to do good work. Moreover, as an intelligent, decent person I was entitled to see these issues as I saw fit and had better things to do with my time than be hectored about them.

I was surprised at the response from the table: serious disagreement and a passionate defence of such workshops being mandatory.

I felt the now-familiar chill of looming Orwellian dystopia; the sense that any remaining freedom to do what we want in the privacy of our own heads is fast disappearing. The physical spaces that remain unpoliced by the evermore powerful PC militias are clearly dwindling, but so are the mental ones.

Righteous “progressives” now wield astonishing cultural and moral power, and, as the rise of workplace and university “awareness” workshops makes clear they won’t stop until they lord it over every inch of the very interior of our heads. Those who don’t fall into line will be forced. I changed the subject and settled glumly into a dairy-free chocolate tort.