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“Ignore these attention freaks and they will go away.”

If only.

We are in Orwell's 1984 territory now, and have been for some time.

There was once a time when you could ignore these mentally ill people who really do need help, but no longer.

Like Winston being tortured by O'Brien in 1984 to make him believe that 2+2=5, it isn't enough to blurt out in pain "Okay! Okay! I believe it! 2+2=5! A man or woman can be accepted as whatever sex they decide they want to be! I believe it!"

And they say "Oh, no. You cannot just say that. You must believe it. Believe it in your heart. Believe it with passionate love. Believe it with fierce conviction. You must celebrate it! You are just saying that to make us stop torturing you."

And you cannot be silent and hope for a default tolerance and peace simply because you don't speak out. You must participate, believe, and be a joyful believer. Because the new mantra to ensure that doesn't happen is "Silence Equals Violence". This passage from 1984 seems to capture their evil and the plight of those who oppose them quite well:

From Orwell's 1984 where O'Brien tortures Winston in The Ministry of Love:

"...Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing in sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and a degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are ordered here are true. We make them true. And, above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and poor you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed."

Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.

"You are thinking," he said, "that since we intend to destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference -- in that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is what you were thinking, was it not?"

"Yes," said Winston.

O'Brien smiled slightly. "You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroyed a heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instance of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days a heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not.' The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt.' Our command is 'Thou art.' No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. . . .

His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exultation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite; he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched a heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again.

"Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still, you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back . Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves..."