What kind of question is that?

Imagine this. You go to your GP with have a sore throat and hacking cough. ‘‘Please stick out your tongue,’’ says the doctor, ‘‘but before you do so I need to ask whether you are straight, gay, lesbian, bi or other.’’

From next year, Britain’s National Health Service is requiring all patients 16 or older to be asked about their sexual orientation every time they see a doctor or healthcare professional.

As a next step, the health service is investigating plans to ask all patients whether they are transgender or ‘‘non-binary’’.

GPs already say they are unable to cope with the twin pressures of patients and paperwork.

Yet this besieged behemoth nevertheless has time to busy itself with assaulting patients’ fundamental right to privacy over the intensely personal matter of sexual preference.

Small wonder many doctors and nurses are saying they will refuse to ask such questions.

For unless such information has some bearing upon a patient’s specific medical condition, not only is it irrelevant but obtaining it also poses a potential threat to the doctor-patient relationship.

NHS England says it is required under the Equality Act to ensure that no patient is discriminated against.

So what evidence is there that the NHS is discriminating against anyone on the grounds of their sexual preference or identity? None whatsoever. The LGBT Foundation, which appears to be the pressure group behind this development, says lesbian, gay and bisexual people are seven times more likely to use drugs, twice as likely to bingedrink and more likely to smoke than the general population.

So what? That doesn’t mean they are discriminated against, merely that they are more likely to risk their own health.

NHS England says not every health authority will have to implement this policy. ‘‘People do not have to answer the questions and it will have no impact on the care they receive,’’ it asserts.

Well, if it will have no impact on their care, why ask them?

Meanwhile, schools are falling over each other to encourage cross-dressing, falsely and dangerously cementing in children’s minds as an existential issue an immature desire to experiment which otherwise tends to vanish over time.

The whole issue of sexual orientation has morphed from any pretence at ending discrimination into an example of what the historian Jacob Talmon dubbed in 1952 ‘‘cultural totalitarianism’’: an oppressive attempt to engineer society and human nature itself into something completely different.

Canada shows us where all this is leading with a ‘‘gender identity or expression’’ bill part of which is that ‘‘refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity . . . will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social area covered by the code, including employment, housing and services like education’’.

New York City has gone the same way. Anyone who intentionally and repeatedly refuses to use a person’s preferred pronoun may be fined as much as $250,000 (for multiple violations).

The city recognises no fewer than 31 different genders - including genderqueer, nonbinary transgender, androgyne and person of transgender experience.

The Times, London