ANovember 3 post on X (formerly Twitter) from J.K. Rowling caught my eye recently. It was her comment on the decision of an Australian court to mandate that the ‘preferred pronouns’ of people identifying as transgender be used as a “matter of respect” to ensure “public confidence in the proper administration of justice.” As Rowling noted: “Asking a woman to refer to her male rapist or violent assaulter as ‘she’ in court is a form of state-sanctioned abuse. Female victims of male violence are further traumatised by being forced to speak a lie.” Indeed, forcing a woman to refer to the man who abused and raped her as ‘she’ seems a particularly grotesque form of gaslighting.