FWIW: I’m Black.

Political correctness goes much further than politeness.

I was 46 when I entered BigTech (no longer there) in 2020. Of course the famous master vs main. But you were also chastised for saying “you guys” - even though the women said as much as the men, if you didn’t put the proper pronouns under your profile. I got chastised for saying “war room”. I heard an anecdote that now “pow wow” wasn’t allowed.

One podcast I listen to - Stuff You Should Know - replayed an old episode and added a disclaimer up front apologizing because the episode was about pregnancy complications and in the older episode they were being “heteronormative” by not calling out that this issue only affects cisgendered women.

I’m not saying anyone should be disrespected or I wouldn’t call someone by whatever name or pronoun they prefer.

I also found all of the “ally” groups, discussion of “micro aggressions” etc groan worthy.

This is in the DNCs charter

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/25/politics/democrats-gender-non...

> The language now says committees “shall be as equally divided as practicable between men and women (determined by gender self-identification) meaning that the variance between men and women in the group cannot exceed one (1).” Gender nonbinary members will not be counted as either male or female, “and the remainder of the delegation shall be equally divided.”

Yes I would find this just as bad if the language was about race and someone of mixed race heritage.

I would much rather hang out with good live and let live traditional “guns and church family centered” old school Hank Hill conservatives (even though I’m not one), than the posturing “anti-racist” leftist wing.

I’m a White, Greek man, 58 years old, living in Southeastern Europe between Greece and Cyprus. Until my 40s, the world - at least in Europe - didn’t feel divided by trivial issues like “what counts as hate speech.” There was always a small racist minority, but the majority of people generally respected a politically correct language—not as oppression, but as a way not to harm others. Nobody felt “silenced” by avoiding harmful words. Then came the hyperboles and the rigid rules you describe. To me, these are very similar to the poor-quality AI filters I discuss in my article: they judge without context. But judging requires more than scanning words—it requires understanding how, why, when, and under what circumstances something is said. What you’ve experienced—and thank you for sharing—is the result of bad, simplistic policy created by people who haven’t truly tried to understand or adapt. Human beings, societies, even nature itself, are complex systems. They can’t be reduced to mechanical yes/no rules. That’s the heart of my article. And what I truly believe—as an eternal optimist—is that we can get to a place of smarter filters and smarter ways to coexist. It will take time, patience, and sincere effort. But it’s possible.