So I know I don’t post here a lot anymore, but today’s level of ridiculous is just that, so I feel like this is worth posting.
Even if GamerGate ended back in 2016, more or less, as Breitbart writers and editors transferred from the dark depths of the internet to mainstream media and lecture circuits and–god help us all–the White House, clearly the attitudes which made it happen in the first place are sadly alive and well.
I say this because in the past few days, a game developer has dared to present a third gender option for its players to choose based on pronoun: “he,” “she,” and “they.” (The game is Battletech, available through Steam.) During avatar creation, the player simply is asked to select class, name (first and last), and pronoun, along with one of a variety of premade headshots of varying skin tones, features, and gender-alignments.
That’s it, folks. One little drop-down menu choice of pronoun. And it has produced this rants of epic proportion, as this Twitter user notes (really, go click on the images):
I can see the Steam forums are taking Battletech’s decision to allow “they/them” preferred pronouns in the character creator well and not at all posting gigantic frothing rants. pic.twitter.com/onOe2XBljA
— MayaScientist (@MadScientist212) April 26, 2018
That, by the way, is one rant spurred by the possibility of choosing a gender-neutral pronoun.
The level of entitlement and male (and presumably white) privilege exemplified in this post is quite frankly nauseating, and reminds me why I stopped writing so much about gender in games–because what kind of inhumane person gets that worked up because someone else might choose a gender-non-specific pronoun in the creation of their avatar?!
GamerGate is not dead, folks. It’s a lurching zombie, and it’s desperately trying to eat all our brains. It’s time to take this seriously and fix this epidemic of entitlement-rage, because it can–and let’s be honest, it probably has–gotten people killed. This is the same sense of entitled privilege that led a white manager to call the cops on some black people in Starbucks (using Starbucks the same way everyone else who is white uses Starbucks), and the same sense of privilege that “permits” self-identified “incels” to believe they have the right to kill people because women won’t lay down and have sex with them just because they want it. We have created a culture of compassion-less monsters, and it is high time we do something about it.