Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.

I don’t think there’s anything remotely “chicken” about Sackbut’s in-person strategy for handling the gender issue. I think it’s courageous and commendable. Yours, too, Mike B.

This is a war! It really is. All resistance is good resistance. Even just “passive” non-compliance adds a bit of weight on the good side of the scale rather than the bad one. (By that I mean avoiding the use of coerced pronouns.) Anything at all to avoid putting one’s full weight on the other side of the scale is a win in this war. Size doesn’t matter. Even just not putting pronouns in one’s email bio. Or if even that could get one in trouble, avoiding them in Zoom meetings… et cetera, et cetera. Any act of defiance, no matter how small, counts. It’s ok to be a civilian in a war — nobody’s obligated to throw all their personal responsibilities away to join the Resistance. Even neutrality is better than coerced compliance with the other side.

The stakes are genuinely big to people’s livelihoods, no matter how metaphorical this war can feel at times. That’s what makes this war so strange — it feels simultaneously like the heaviest burden and the lightest one. It’s all-consuming weight — or perhaps it’s a bunch of abstract nothingness, mostly just online noise and academic ideas. Even many people who “kind of” see our point of view often accuse us of that. We’ve all encountered them, the ones who don’t disagree with any of our points, but who can’t see the weight of them when the whole picture comes together.

That contradiction can claw at one’s self-esteem, making people feel guilty for perceiving the weight of it instead of its purported weightlessness. Fuck that! That’s why I won’t put scare quotes around the word war here. It’s perhaps a smaller war than, say, Viet Nam, but I want to emphasize the real cost to so many people — especially women — so I won’t diminish it. I refuse to treat the gender war as weightless or superficial.

Once again, one of Graham Linehan’s many insights comes to mind: he compared this war to the many Young Adult fantasies in which there’s a secret war between vampires and werewolves or wizards or whatever, while the broader public carries on largely uninterrupted, blissfully unaware of the epic battle going on in its midst. (Rowling’s Harry Potter series is an example of this trope.) But because ours is a war that’s explicitly about reality rather than fantasy, even though the closest analogy to it is, well, fantasy… it puts us rationalists in the trenches in a position that’s almost too difficult for even our own selves to compute. It’s so logically improbable and inexplicable, the contours of the Gender War. When virtually every single liberal media outlet calls us crazy, Occam’s Razor almost begs us to find a way to write ourselves off, to dismiss our own side’s point of view as too improbable to be real.

But here we are. It’s all too real. But it’s much easier to fight this war online, in the domain of abstract ideas, than in the real world, where its absurdity feels so comically unreal and out-of-place it can short even the most robust circuits.

How to deal with it in the real world as opposed to online is a question worthy of much, much more discussion, I believe. There’s much anguish about the IRL front, because the rules are completely different from online.