The real reason AOC purged her pronouns

RIP AOC’s pronouns. Yes, just like that, the kween of the bourgeois left, the doyenne of macchiato Marxism, has binned ‘she / her’ from her bio on X. Now people will just have to figure out for themselves that this person who was born a girl and who is widely celebrated as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and who speaks frequently about her ‘self-worth as a woman’ is a she, not a he. Good luck, everyone.

This is the news that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, NYC congresswoman and a fave of the rich kids of the TikTok left, has excised her pronouns. The anti-woke are cock-a-hoop. ‘JUST IN: AOC removed her pronouns from her bio’, cried one woke-bashing X account to frenzied whoops of delight from the right’s legion AOC haters. Everywhere you looked, the cry went up: Trump’s win has forced the crackpot left on to the defensive. Maybe now they’ll talk about issues that matter to everyday Americans rather than obsessing over such lunacies as the right of a man who calls himself Crystal to poop in the ladies’ restroom.

It turns out AOC’s renunciation of the religious habit of declaring one’s pronouns was not so neatly linked to Trump’s victory. Internet sleuths have found she may have dumped ‘she / her’ as far back as May. That would make her pronoun apostasy even more striking. It suggests she recognised that as the election was hotting up, as she was hitting the streets of the Bronx and Queens in her 14th congressional district, it wouldn’t do to come off as one of those turbo-smug coastal luvvies who thinks they’re the dog’s bollocks because they take the knee, say ‘Love is Love’ and dutifully issue that most joyless of utterances: ‘My pronouns are…’ No, if she wanted to win the votes of working-class African Americans and Latinos, AOC knew there was only one thing for it: she’d have to act normal.

That’s what her erasure of her pronouns looks like to me: a setting aside of the eccentric doctrines of the rarefied realm of elite opinion in which she makes her living and her impact, in order that she might connect with decent, hard-working New Yorkers who don’t need to be told that the woman they elected to Congress is a woman. ‘Fuck outta here’ would have been the likely reply if AOC had doorstepped voters with ‘I’m Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, my pronouns are…’.

Indeed, in parts of her district, voters chose her as their congresswoman and Trump as their president. She won 68.9 per cent of the vote in the Bronx, while Trump’s support there leapt by 11 points. AOC knew: woke doesn’t count for shit in working-class America where many see the rabble-rousing real-estate guy as preferable to weird Dems who think the hulking teenage boy who says he’s a girl should be allowed to play in girls’ sports.

This is why AOC’s pronoun purging matters: it’s an unspoken admission that there are two Americas. There’s the America of performative virtue, inhabited by the credentialled classes, where certain rituals have become de rigueur, chief among them the declaration of one’s pronouns. Pronoun posting serves no practical purpose. Everyone knows AOC is ‘she’, just as they know Joe Biden is ‘he’ – yes, even this 81-year-old male staple of the establishment has felt compelled to state his pronouns in the fashion of the post-class high-minded millennials who have lately conquered his party. No, the purpose of stating pronouns isn’t to provide information but to profess loyalty. Loyalty to the credo of the post-reason elites that govern our societies. It is a code of the inner sanctum, proof to your fellow travellers in the universe of staged virtue that you, too, genuflect to the religion of genderfluidity; that you, too, are good.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that AOC underwent a kind of forced conversion to the pronoun religion. In 2022, the heady days of the pronoun psychosis, she was reprimanded by her followers on Instagram for not having her pronouns in her bio. Her pronouns used to be there but they ‘fell off’, she cried, a tad unconvincingly. She made a video expressing remorse for her moral oversight. She swiftly added her pronouns to save herself from the fiery pit of cancellation. Now, two years later, she seems to have left the cult she was badgered to join – what fate awaits the apostate?

She purged her pronouns because of the other America. The America of the Bronx and Queens. The America that’s cynical, if not outright blasphemous, towards the religion of woke. The America that has no truck with the sick idea that a man who thinks he’s a woman should be allowed to get his knob out in the women’s changing room or that performing mastectomies on healthy young lesbians is ‘affirming’. The America that thinks words like man, woman, father and mother are not only fine but good – that these are roles to take pride in rather than archaic terms to be memory-holed lest some Oberlin graduate with purple hair feels ‘erased’ by them. AOC might beg forgiveness from the time-rich phoney socialists of Instagram for failing to declare her pronouns, but I bet she didn’t say the word pronoun once to the Latino construction worker or African American deliveryman whose support she courted. That’s the two Americas, right there.

I fully support the freedom of apostasy, the right of every person to abandon their faith without fear or persecution. That goes for woke as much as for, say, Islam. Yet we must not forget the horrors carried out in the shadow of this new religion. To the conceited elites of the Democratic Party, the 21st-century campus and the media establishment, the trans religion entailed little more than declaring one’s pronouns and waving dumb flags. But to others it meant mutilation. It meant drugging. It meant the thwarting of their puberty. It meant the mangling of their bodies. Untold numbers of confused youths, many of them gay, many of them autistic, were sacrificed on the altar of this post-truth derangement promoted by AOC and others for so long.

It is easy for you, congresswoman, to purge your pronouns in an effort to distance yourself from the social delirium you and your class of ideologues helped to stir up. It’s impossible for the others to recover their breasts or the youth they lost to experimental medication or just a sense of contentment. If the elites really are quietly exiting the pews of the trans religion, especially now that Trump’s returned, it is essential the rest of us loudly remind them of the social carnage they left in their wake.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy