patrick.net

it seriously never fails. never.

pronouns in name and bio remain undefeated as a predictor of of being a censorious, oppressive authoritarian.

i have never seen a community so thoroughly and gleefully badge themselves as irrational and toxic.

put pronouns in your self description and you pretty much suck.

i don’t think it’s a coincidence.

i think it’s the manifestation of a pathology.

foremost, it shows a need to performatively demonstrate allegiance to the victim cults of the woke and noisy. here is my identify! see it! praise it! accept my alliance and validate my otherwise bereft and hollow sense of self!

these are the sorts of semi-NPC automatons that have ceased to be “people with ideas” and chosen rather to “be their ideas” as a substitute for cultivating any sort of nuanced selfhood. agitariat. ideology as identity. it’s an attractive proposition for the otherwise empty.

what makes this particular manifestation so pernicious is the intersection of such identiology with just what ideas like “demanding proper pronouning” mean.

these pronouns are rarely issued as suggestions. they are demands.

i have decided this about me and i require you to comply.




implicit in this stipulation is an aggressive narcissistic assumption: that you must conform YOUR sense of my identity to MY sense of my identity.

deciding who you seek to be is all well and good, but when you step over the line into feeling entitled to dictate that others agree with your conception and join in the validation of it, what could be more inherently authoritarian?

i get to decide who you see me as.

those are some serious bossypants. ...

why would an an obviously identifiable male like dr tom seek to ensure being called “he/him”?

i suspect the reason is this:

they did not go into it for the identity.

they went into it for the bullying.

their alliance is tactical.




... i will speak. you must listen.




... adopting pronouns in your bio that would have been the default used for you over 1000 years is not about carving out space for yourself, it’s about carving strips off other people. ...

folks like this do not become horrible authoritarian thugs because they want pronoun justice.

they wrapped themselves in the convenient flag of aggrievement alliance because they were horrible authoritarian thugs already and saw an opportunity act on it.