The midfielder formerly known as Rebecca Quinn summarizes the insanity of the gender-bending craze

We* can accommodate narcissistic athletes without pretending their mental woes make them pioneers

A quick hit here.

A woman known without controversy for a quarter of a century as Rebecca Quinn is a member of the Canadian Olympic women’s soccer team, which won a gold medal on Friday. Today, she goes by just Quinn after deciding last year at age 25 that she was transgender.

Because she continues to compete as a woman—as, “strangely,” do all trans-male athletes I’m aware of—it’s unclear what this announcement was supposed to accomplish other than making Quinn’s feelings the most important thing in the world. She toured the social-media circuit straightaway to scold people for not revamping their grammar and, yes, not doing research on what she should now be called.

After demanding that people keep the hell up, not surprisingly, Quinn, a dead ringer for Galen Rupp, revised her status to nonbinary by year’s end. And, of course, the properly Wokish sports world is treating these kinds of comings-out as grave athletic “firsts,” in the manner of Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, or Roberto Clemente becoming the first Puerto Rican to reach 3,000 MLB hits.

Here’s all I gather from this tiresome bullshit. Quinn and her ilk are people with mental and personality disorders—gender dysphoria, terminal self-absorption, or one stacked atop the other. The result doesn’t necessarily keep them from managing their lives, any more than depression or other psychological problems do. But it does cause a lot of needless problems for other people, many of whom are too blinkered to say “No, you’re just another goddamn weirdo with a public platform and you’re not special” to any of this.

If the afflicted really think being trans or nonbinary is important enough so that entire English style guides and Internet histories need to be rewritten, then I think being that grandiose and self-absorbed is a good reason for people to check themselves into loony bins no matter how deft they may be at executing a push-kick.

I’ve been a social liberal all my life, but this stuff is just dumb, and Quinn is just one more high priestess of ME-ME-ME! in a lengthening line of them. But under Wokism, people’s ever-shifting yet all-important public “identities” and outbursts of rank nonsense are seen as evidence of bravery and self-insight.

Congrats on the gold medal for Canada, but it’s too bad Quinn—who, fittingly, probably is the most bro-like character in any setting she afflicts—and her antics are cannibalizing so much of the team’s media glory. Given how many of the Wokish are upset that women’s soccer doesn’t get enough attention, maybe they should try promoting women’s soccer and other sports primarily as sports (which would, admittedly, require that they learn about them) instead of mainly as safe spaces for feigning masculine feelings and perpetrating language crimes?

Folks under thirty can have as much fun as they want with their generation’s brand of social cosplay—when it doesn’t inconvenience others. But inconvenience is often the point, and if I spent five minutes with Quinn asking her to tell me her most revealing dude-moments in her most male manifestation, all I would hear in response is stammering cluelessness, stuff any woman with any imagination could guess at. But more than anything else, I learned the importance of subject-verb agreement a long time ago, and I see no sense in playing along with the whimsical needs of the sports world’s most flamboyant weirdos. It makes me write like a shithead, and I already make plenty of typos as it is. People are welcome to label their own inability to figure themselves out in any way they like, but I think I’ll keep my terminology the same and deal with whatever backlash comes from the cosplay crowd and its enablers.

If nothing else, people shouldn’t pretend that any of these bozos are really acting on behalf of a group, cause, or sport. It’s all about Numero Uno. Every time.