Sometimes the hilarity of woke can blind us to its brutality. We lose ourselves in ‘wokeness gone mad’ stories and lose sight of how cruel wokeness can be. We’re so busy getting a kick from viral clips of some privileged pink-haired kid wailing at work because he was referred to as ‘him’ rather than ‘them’ that we forget what a baleful impact this cranky ideology can have on real people’s lives. The chilling case of the Californian charity worker Fran Itkoff should bring us crashing back down to Earth. It’s hard to think of any recent cancellation as brutish and unforgiving as this one. Mirthful it is not.

Mrs Itkoff is 90 years old. She was a volunteer for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in the US for 60 years. Along with her late husband, who suffered from MS, she ran the society’s Long Beach Lakewood chapter. And yet she now finds herself unceremoniously cast out, excommunicated after six decades of service. Her crime? She says all she did was query the society’s obsession with ‘preferred pronouns’. She’d seen people putting their pronouns in their email bios. She herself was asked to do likewise. But she pushed back. It doesn’t ‘make sense to me’, she told her superiors. An old woman questioning pronounology? Ready the ducking stool.