Umair, I am a great admirer of your writing here on Medium. I think it’s a mistake for you to keep on singling out transgender pronouns in these articles. Maybe you ignore comments — there’s certainly a good argument for that — but this, I think is important. I happen to agree with you about everything you say here, and just about everything you write on Medium, including the fact that worrying about special pronouns and bathroom usage and hyper-specific sexual/gender identities is much less important than hunger, war, environmental collapse, torture, etc. You are correct. I see this.

At the same time, I find it off-putting that you continually single out this one issue as The Thing that’s tearing the Left apart and distracting people’s attention from the larger and more significant troubles of the world. I find myself thinking that you have a bone to pick with people of unconventional gender identity. I wonder if you might be singling this issue out because it doesn’t effect people in your own life — your family, your peers, yourself. This constant focus on gender pronouns makes it hard for me to share your articles with my own peer group and family, which includes lots of LGBTQ people (including myself, if that matters).

When I look at the fracturing and infantilizing of the 21st Century Left, I see a longer list of ailments at its root. You’ve touched on some of these,: the reliance on a deteriorating university/intellectual class shaped more by postmodernism and critical theory than by rigorous scholarship, the focus on imaginary worlds like movies and YouTube channels over reality (your oft-mentioned “intersectionality of Captain America”), and the prioritization of one’s own sexual fulfillment and proclivities over the more pressing needs of others. I would add to this list the obsessions with cultural appropriation (a girl wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo gets more attention than sprawling refugee camps at the border), Politically Correct speech (arguments over whether we should say “disabled” or “differently abled” or “alter-abled” get more attention than fighting for universal healthcare), Callout Culture (we must believe all accusers, ignoring their motivations and the sequence of events that lead to their accusations, even when those accusations are severely damaging the lives of good people), Cancel Culture/Deplatforming (anyone who disagrees with any aspect of alt-Left orthodoxy is a Fascist and must be silenced, even die-hard progressives whose lives have been spent working for the greater good), and a host of others.

I’m not telling you how to think, or what to believe. I mean in this in the spirit of advice from an ally. Like you, I have spent all my life fighting and working on the side of the Left. Like you, I find the present alt-Left takeover of the discussion in the English-speaking world to be truly hazardous and deeply damaging to our efforts to build a more just and equal society that lessens human suffering on a global and national level. I firmly believe you should stop singling out the trans identity issue in your articles. It’s lazy thinking, and it calls your own motivations into question.

Thanks for your time.