Video game developers participating in the prestigious annual Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco are under pressure to wear labels displaying their “preferred pronouns” as pertains to their gender or lack thereof.
The “pronoun ribbons” being made available at conference registration and display the following gender options: she/her, he/him, or they/them. A fourth option allows attendees to identify themselves as “Steve Gaynor” (a prominent game developer) for reasons that are unclear.
Increasingly popular pronouns such as xe/xir and bun/bunself were not on offer this year.
The use of “preferred pronouns” is a recent trend across campus spaces in North America and the United Kingdom that first began online, in Tumblr’s intersectional feminist spaces. On Twitter and other social media platforms, social justice warriors often showcase their preferred pronouns in their bios, using them even when they are clearly “cisgendered”—people who align with the gender binary of male and female. It has become a form of virtue signaling, for telling others that you’re “one of the good ones”—an intersectional feminist.
Meggan Scavio, the General Manager of GDC, is the main driving force behind the flairs. Posting on Twitter, she reminded game developers and journalists to pick up their pronoun ribbon at the event’s registration booth alongside their attendee badges and press passes.
She made it clear that the ribbons were not intended as a joke, and pleased the numerous game journalists who responded to her tweet. They lauded the GDC for its wokeness.
Likewise, Feminist Frequency contributor Carolyn Petit voiced her enthusiasm for the new initiative, and urged members of the game industry to adopt this new form of politically correct flair. She called on GDC attendees to “consider rocking the pronoun ribbons as a gesture of understanding and solidarity even if you don’t think you ‘need’ them.”
Steve Gaynor’s appearance as a personal pronoun hasn’t been without outrage from the progressive left, either. Crash Override Network member and video game marketer Christos Reid expressed anger at game developers who wore “Steve Gaynor” flairs and treated the concept of preferred pronouns like a gag.
“good to see that gdc offered a load of cis folks the option of walking around with someone’s name as their pronoun like it’s all a big joke,” he tweeted, signaling his virtue as “one of the good ones.”
He wasn’t alone. Others tweeted similar complaints about the flair.
So far, no one attending the Game Developers Conference has dared to voice their dissent. Doing so would be career suicide, of course—no one in the game industry wants to make the nonsense of preferred pronouns their hill to die on. And so the social justice crusade marches on. Anita Vult!
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
