The Lived Reality of DEI.

Now that DEI has been sent off to DIE, an obituary to ten years of closeted hell.

Tell you what, reader, I was going to write a long article for you. I was going to say what dozens of others have already said four thousand times, just like all my fellow members of the shit-flinging, pissed off, alt-left chorus on Substack. It was to be an obituary for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) a movement that ironically ended up serving as a cover for racism, homophobia, and sexism in the workplace, the media, and academics. I was going to tell you about the time DEI was used to justify saying that turning up on time was the domain of white culture - no one else turns up on time, only white people, and expecting someone to be on time is racist. I was going to bring up Students vs. Harvard, the famous Supreme Court case that ended affirmative action in student admissions, after it was found that affirmative action was being used to racially discriminate on a systemic level against Asian Americans at elite universities. I could have talked about the tech job fair for ‘women and non-binary people’ that was filled with men.

But everyone’s already said that. Underneath all the fancy verbiage of ‘DEI’, we had white women like Robin DeAngelo quite seriously arguing for segregated racial affinity groups and treating black people like aliens. School districts in San Francisco argued that black children couldn’t do algebra, and that algebra was racist white supremacy, and therefore schools should be segregated. Gays and lesbians were either shoved back in the closet or fired if they objected to being told that sexuality was a spectrum and they could change to being heterosexual. Men got free reign in the women’s bathroom if they said the right magic words. Being racist towards Jews was now noble ‘anti-colonialism’, because a random synagogue in [insert country] caused the war in Gaza, so it deserved to be covered in swastikas. That’s not nascent fascism, but Elon Musk awkwardly saluting a flag definitely is.

It got used as a cover for straight white people to say the most ludicrously racist, sexist, and homophobic things imaginable and then be praised for being progressive for saying that black people are inherently less intelligent, the only way to fix racism is more racism, lesbians should suck dick, gay men should cut theirs off, women should put up with being raped in prison cells by male sex offenders and those evil money-grubbing Jews are secretly running the world. It turns out if you use the right canards from whoever your critical theory best boo is, it’s completely fine to be slightly to the right of Adolf Hitler.

Wow, I bet Elon Musk wishes he learned that one weird trick to avoid Nazi accusations!

And of course, the media got infected too. I could write about that. I’d join a million other voices of the ‘alt-left’ all saying the same thing. But sometimes, when you start writing, the text gets away from you. You write something more visceral, more intimate, a reflection of your own experience. We talk about ‘DEI’. We talk about its effects. Who has said a word about what it was like to live through it? What it was like to be in a workplace that swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker?

I’ll tell you.

It meant that suddenly networks used by gays and lesbians to connect in the workplace were infiltrated by straight people. If you objected to this, you would find a chat to human resources about not being inclusive scheduled in your Outlook calendar. Suddenly, it was okay to fire people for being gay again, because they were just not being inclusive enough. It’s finding out everything is suddenly under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion, and that consequently you’re the wrong sort of diversity: a lesbian with boundaries and an opinion, which for these people, is the worst thing ever.

When you’re faced with this, you have to grin and bear it if you want to stay employable. Let me tell you what ‘DEI’ in the workplace is like as a gay person. You have to go in the closet. You cannot ardently defend your rights outside of work, and if you use a pseudonym to do so, you had to understand how to protect it, or you were going to be doxxed and lose your job. The Lavender Scare was back and it was on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and Instagram, hunting down out and proud homosexuals. You turn up to the ‘LGBTI+’ work networks, hoping to meet gay colleagues, but there are none, and now Bob from Accounting is calling himself Lilith and wants to connect with you as a fellow lesbian.

You don’t want to be used as a validation vending machine, or a prop in some straight person’s fantasy about ‘living the queer lifestyle’. You feel like a zoo exhibit at every ‘networking meeting’ for the ‘LGBTQIA+’, as you’re the only real deal in a room full of pretenders, and you stop engaging. You find Bob in the bathroom, attempting to lower his hairline. He tries to talk to you about lesbian girl gossip. You just wanted to sneakily watch five minutes of the Packers game on the toilet in peace, but now there’s a man in your bathroom being a creepy fuck and you’re not allowed to complain about him being there.

You sit through the workshops telling you that actually, sexuality is fluid and on a spectrum, and Bob from Accounting is just as much a lesbian as you are. That’s the new workplace equality policy, in fact. Sexuality changes throughout your lifetime, you know. You might be a lesbian today and heterosexual tomorrow ! It’s all a journey, just like Bob’s gender journey, which you must not question, unlike the fluidity of your homosexuality. By the way, if you don’t include Bob in your lesbianism, you’re being very close-minded. You wonder why Bob keeps leering at you, and hopes he isn’t going to try ask you out on a ‘lesbian date’. You wonder if you’ll end up explaining to human resources why you turned Bob down. You listen to some woman with a husband and three kids at home telling you about how she’s a queer authority, and therefore is righteously delivering you inclusivity training. She’s queer because she dyed her hair purple and bought some Birkenstocks, but she’s never seen another woman’s pussy in her whole damn life, and you keep your damn mouth shut because you don’t want to be fucking fired.

You thought you were free? Hah!

Don’t let the closet door hit you as you jump right back in it, because suddenly it’s once again fine, nay, progressive to fire someone in the West for being gay, and you can justify it as ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’. Your colleagues clam up around you, because your obvious difference means that if they make any critical comments about any of this shit, they’re worried about getting fired. You might be one of ‘those ones’, the people with the power to complain to human resources and get them fired. You start to become isolated. You didn’t do anything. You were just gay.

If you were butch, suddenly there was a gaggle of straight women assuming you were like them - a gay trans man. When you were fairly clear about your lesbianism, it started to turn hostile. See, your average butch lesbian woman can pass as a man on first inspection without much effort. Their masculinity comes naturally, and some of the attraction for many femme women is the inherent contradiction, the masculine female, somehow still completely masculine even when the adornments come off and reveal the female body underneath.

This provokes jealousy - you become an object of envy and hatred - to the woman pretending to be a man, you are doing what she wants to do - perform masculinity - not only effortlessly, but fully embracing your womanhood while doing so. To the man pretending to be a woman, you remind him of what he will never be, no matter how hard he tries, because you are living proof that womanhood has nothing to do with whatever kind of drag society pronounces as ‘feminine’. Living proof of the old gay maxim that you’re born naked, the rest is drag, you are a walking, talking argument against the veracity of trans ideology. Simply by existing, you undermine their arguments. Thus you must be bullied, if not into hating your own body, and into transition, you must be dehumanized, debanked, unemployed, a pariah, excluded, branded with scarlet letters, held aloft as a great evil. Diversity, equity, and inclusion does not apply for women like you, who really should just transition so we’d all stop being confused.

It does not matter if you kowtow or if you say the right words in order to stay employed. The jealousy, the envy, the simmering hatred of one who contradicts their entire belief system simply by existing, that’s something that knows no bounds. You are living wrongthink no matter how many times you respect the pronoun pin, and they will try their best to destroy you in any way they can.

But it is not simply the butches who were victimized by DEI. It was anyone who counted as a ‘diversity hire’. DEI’s answer to under representation was not constructive. It turned out their view of removing barriers to entry was in fact, lowering standards. Now anyone who was counted as ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ faces the accusation that they were only hired based on their identity characteristic and are by default assumed to be incompetent. The term ‘DEI hire’ emerged, used as pejorative to describe this stereotype There is nothing like being made to fear that you weren’t really hired on your own merits, but because the hiring manager thought you were ‘diversity’. There is nothing like reading online that people like you only have the job you have because you were a ‘DEI hire’. Now the assumption is that you’re incompetent. Couldn’t have got the job otherwise. You put a deserving white man out of a job, you awful DEI hire, you.

You go home from the workplace, where you spend all day in the closet, and decide to relax. You log in, and your favorite game has suddenly decided that you are no longer a woman, you are a ‘Body Type 2’. Men, of course, are ‘Body Type 1’, the default. What makes someone a Body Type 2 is an exercise left to the player. You grin and bear it, and start grinding bear asses for your Hand of Ragnaros. Once you’re sick of bear asses, you decide to play something else. It says it’s ‘LGBTQI+ inclusive’, but all the gay characters ring hollow - then you realize that if you were playing as the opposite sex, they’d all be heterosexual. That’s not really representation, you think. It means there are no actual gay characters in this video game. A playersexual character is not a homosexual character.

You try playing something else. All the options to make your character look like you are gated behind calling your character a male, even if they have a ‘body type 2’. You need to select the correct pronouns to wear the leather jacket and if you choose to do so, the game offers to give your avatar ‘top surgery scars’.

If you say something, suddenly you’re a right-wing chud, not a lesbian who wants genuine representation that was written by an actual lesbian, not a straight man in a dress playing pretend. You think, maybe it’s a corporate thing, these DEI games. You go looking for indie games, but searching ‘lesbian’ on Itch.io brings up two pages of autogynephilic fetish porn games about being a ‘gay mess’. Every time you hear about a ‘lesbian creator’ on social media, you look them up only to find a man staring back at you.

He’s a lesbian. You’re a bigot.

You watch a lesbian movie on Netflix, it’s totally woke, it’s supposed to be brilliant. She realizes half-way through the film that she’s been converted from lesbianism by her true love, a man named Chad and his magic penis. This movie gets nominated by GLAAD for being ‘outstanding queer representation’, even though it’s a literal lesbian conversion plot. You turn on the L Word reboot, only to find out the male lesbian plot isn’t a joke anymore, there’s a man swinging his dick around, and everyone pretends he’s a real lesbian. If someone like me is on TV, she’s a frumpy monster, destined to have a brave man in a dress to correct her on her bigotry. A cardboard cutout, a negative stereotype, a woman who said no to men and needs to be corrected, because she’s not embracing diversity, equity and inclusion. When the two-minutes hate is over, she’s dead on Midsomer Murders.

You try finding other people who are equally incensed about this, but it turns out the most prominent critics are the actual right-wing chuds. The real problem with all of this, according to them, is that there’s actually women, black people, and homosexuals in media to start with. That’s all woke nonsense, and we need to return to only having straight white men in all forms of media, the workplace, and everything else, before all this woke nonsense took hold and ruined everything with ‘DEI pandering’.

That straight white men, regardless of what they call themselves, are implementing all of this 'forced diversity' or benefiting the most from the hallowed DEI status of 'transgender' is beside the point. Women and minority gamers didn’t ask for ‘body type 2’, they asked for the opportunity to play protagonists that were like them. That’s not ‘DEI pandering’. That’s asking for the same opportunities that their white male counterparts have.

It’s now at the point that you know that anything that openly advertises how safe it is for ‘LGBTQI+’, or how inclusive it is, is by default something that will be actively homophobic. Whether it’s a workplace, a retail store, a political party, a film, a video game, a book, a bar. You know the more they preach how inclusive they are, the more sexist, homophobic and racist they are in reality. This disease has made itself present in every single cultural aspect of modern life.

There is no venue for liberal criticism of any of this, let alone gay criticism. You’re either totally on board with DEI or a drag queen on TV is a harbinger of the pedophile apocalypse.

You face the Sophie’s Choice between insidious homophobia, or outright homophobia. When you’re brought to this point, you feel like giving up. You watch Carol for the 100th time. Your cultural world gets smaller, because mass culture has decided it doesn’t want people like you in it, because if you’re a homosexual with boundaries, you’re a bigot. You spend your working life walking on eggshells around Bob from Accounting, especially when he turns up to work dressed like a hooker.

The lasting legacy of DEI has been to force gays into the closet at work, and paint women and racial minorities as inherently under qualified and incompetent compared to their straight white male colleagues who, in their minds, only got where they were on pure merit. No woman or black person or gay person or someone who’s all three ever got to a high position based on their own merit, instead they got there because of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’. They were quota hires. ‘DEI hires’. They’re not real people, real workers, who worked hard to get where they are. It was just handed to them based on their identity. No one wants to be tarred with that brush, but that’s the brush the modern shitlib has successfully tarred every minority group under the sun with. Fuck you.

In the end, a bunch of privileged and rich straight white people ruined culture, destroyed the gay community, ruined people’s lives, and completely destroyed affirmative action as a concept, all to make themselves feel better. The only thing that’s been achieved is reinforcing old bigotries and setting women and minorities back twenty years. That is the lasting legacy of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’.

Let me know when this is all over, and I can go back to being a lesbian at work, and I can play video games as a woman instead of a Body Type 2, and lesbian conversion movies stop being ‘great queer representation.’