Julie Bindel talks to an escapee from fanaticism:

In 2003, aged 20, Appel trained as a hairdresser and worked in a salon for a decade. In 2011, he met his husband-to-be, and in 2017 they moved to New York, where he enrolled at Columbia University. Studying non-fiction writing, while campaigning against the incoming Trump administration, he became embedded within the so-called liberationist movement that includes LGBT rights.

In the three-and-a-half years he spent there, Appel saw fellow students becoming indoctrinated with pseudoscientific, anti-Western dogma sold to them as progressiveness. He began to see that what was happening was cult-like and “in many ways worse than Lamb of God”.

Any slight digression from the “trans women are women”, “death to the West” type politics was severely punished, he says. “Intelligent young people bent over backwards to be anti-racist, against imperialism and even embracing Islamic jihadists in the process.”

And embracing the idea that being critical of Islam is equivalent to being racist, or for the less subtle types racism tout court.

Social justice warriordom morphed into the cult of queer, and punishments meted out for failure to adhere to the creed were severe, involving bullying and ostracisation.

He had been indoctrinated in the view that sees white cis men (gays included) as the enemy. For these new puritans, the airing of grievances was the preferred blood sport, and there was an obsession with identifying the oppressor, rather than the victim.

That’s a good point. The sadistic thrill of othering one of their own is the top priority.

In his third year at Columbia, he continued to excel, but mentally he was falling apart. “Suddenly,” Appel says, “I was having these symptoms that were exactly like [the ones I experienced as a teenager].”

He found himself flooded with constant anxiety about being a bad person, misspeaking, misgendering and sinning. “It was so all-consuming,” he says. “People started to call me something called ‘cis’ and it had to do with my gender performativity. It sounds horrible. It sounds like sissy.” Not only that, but it was said “in the same cadence that the middle-school kids called me fag, and with the same hatred and the same vitriol behind it”.

The hatred and vitriol are the point. The cause they’re in aid of is just the launchpad.

Now a full-time writer, and non-aligned politically, Appel says: “You have to keep in mind that arguing with these people is like trying to argue with a biblical literalist, in that they believe that holding certain views makes them a good person and protects them from going to hell.

“Now I can say, there’s no third gamete, men should not be in women’s prisons, children are never in the wrong body, and not all white people are racist. I will be saying this even if they bring back the guillotine, right before the blade falls.”

They don’t need the guillotine. They could just lock you in a cell with a video of India Willoughby talking on a loop forever. This is hell, nor are we out of it.