‘This election killed the woke era’: MAGA’s greatest issue is still the use of pronouns

The anti-woke crowd’s outrage against pronouns goes to show how out of touch they are against social issues that are worth addressing.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (AOC) recently took her pronouns down from her Twitter account bio. Now her bio reads, “US Congresswoman, NY-14. In a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live. People-funded, takes no lobbyist. Personal account.” Her new bio omits her preferred pronouns (she/her). 

Instead of thinking that her pronouns don’t fit the character count of Twitter, anti-woke keyboard warriors rejoiced over “the end of the woke era.” One of these accounts reacted, “This election killed the woke era.” They also emphasized that AOC changed her title from Representative to Congresswoman. These accounts celebrated the erasure of AOC’s pronouns from her account, as if they’d won some culture war. Twitter currently has a restriction of 160 characters on a biography. Including the money bag emoji AOC placed—she consumed exactly 160 characters.

If there’s a war these culture warriors won, then it’s all in their heads. This allergy to pronouns implies that they don’t have any. Does that mean they simply don’t exist? If they can’t even be called “he,” “she,” or “they,” then this mass of anti-pronoun people may identify with nothingness. Jokes aside, these people do exist—their outrage against pronouns is extremely palpable, after all. The bigger question is: why are conservatives so against the use of pronouns? Even incoming President Donald Trump seems to take issue with pronoun usage altogether.

Somewhere in between misunderstanding and trolling

This issue with pronouns stems from the lack of understanding conservatives have of trans and non-binary folk. When these right-learning people are corrected about a person’s personal pronouns, they feel shamed or inept. That is, of course, just one side of the issue. Other conservatives are less forgiving and simply mock pronouns for the sake of edginess. Think of it as their form of rebellion against a world that they perceive to be too politically correct—too accommodating for non-cis gendered people.

One of Trump’s promises during his presidential campaign was to sign an executive order that would “seize all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition.” Many conservatives may be averse to understanding gender and sex before, but bridging these ideas to them would be even harder if this EO is enforced. Nevertheless, pronouns shouldn’t be a big issue for conservatives and liberals alike. There are important issues to critique, like the rise of fascism in the US and what another Trump presidency would mean for queer people and the middle class. Instead, the debates devolved into conservatives screening whether the person making a valid point uses pronouns explicitly or not.

In theory, pronouns should be as simple as respecting another person’s name. You don’t question why I’m named Vanessa, and I don’t scrutinize why you’re called Billy. I don’t need to know that you’re named after a Michael Jackson song. I choose to call you what you ask me to because that’s what basic human decency entails. Your identity is not for me to unravel, and neither is mine your business. As simple as that solution sounds, it’s not one many conservatives are on board with—especially not Christian nationalists who feel as if their values are attacked by pronouns.