This. This right here. This is the problem.

I really don't give a fuck. I don't. No fucks given. My five-year-old daughter is now giving clothes to a classmate who switched from "Nick" to "Nicolette" in March and it's whatever. I'm glad her mom is accepting and I'm thankful that the kid is in an environment where everyone's cool with it. But it's like k.d. lang or danah boyd or ee cummings deciding their name is somehow immune from the commonly accepted rules of punctuation. I mean, okay. We'll deal with it. But now every time I write the name "danah boyd" I have to go look it up and see if indeed she's the one that hates capital letters because some pencilneck on the Internet somewhere is gonna score points off me for miscapitalization and you know what? It's not worth it.

We got a memo the other day because we have a contestant of diminutive stature. And we all knew he wasn't a dwarf because fuckin' hell, we're not savages. But he's also not a little person because - and this was made clear to us - he has no genetic markers of dwarfism ("dwarfism" is okay but "dwarf" is not) and therefore we're all fucked if we refer to him as "little." So I can refer to the 6'5 guy of Syrian descent as "little fella" and it's a joke but if I accidentally refer to this individual as "little fella" eyebrows go up and everyone looks to see if the door is open to make sure nobody heard.

You sit there judging everyone because of the concept of "the burden of acceptance" and I get it: it fucking sucks to be an outsider, to have to play 20 questions with everyone you meet, to deal with the dysphoria of gender identity and whatever "burden" the rest of us might experience pales in comparison.

But fuckin' hell we don't have to deal with it with anybody else. My boss (who used to cruise Boston looking for "queers" to beat up, I might add) isn't going to criticize me for calling a girl a girl or an African American an African American. Meanwhile I've observed in-the-room pissing matches between queer educators over wither or not LGBTQIAPK is inclusive or exclusive and us straight white dudes are sitting over here going "apparently I'm an asshole for using a four-letter rather than a nine-letter acronym."

Meanwhile, the President loves taco salads.

So here's my industry - being scolded for not firing Danny Masterson fast enough when Roseanne went from top of the world to bottom of the pile in about 3 hours. And you gotta admit: there's a lot less bandwidth burned when an industry is of white men, for white men by white men.

Nobody pillories the coal mining industry for a lack of diversity.