Dear Hinge, Sharing My Pronouns on My Profile Makes Zero Sense

Thoughts on performative corporate wokeness and cultural sanity

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

About a week ago I decided to take a morning scroll. I went through my social media and dating apps, motivated by the typical mixture of loneliness, boredom, and hopelessly naive optimism. Hinge has been my go-to for dating. (I’m too cheap for E-harmony and not nearly hot enough for Tinder). I opened it up to find a pop-up screen containing a prompt about updating my profile.

It said that “in order to make Hinge a more inclusive space we recommend specifying your preferred pronouns.” (quoting from memory)

I thought this was odd since in my profile I had already stated that I was man. It says so clearly next to my age. I also declared that I was looking for women.

It seemed even more odd when I considered the fact that all conversations on dating apps are one-on-one. The only pronouns typically used are I, me, and you, unless referring to someone else.

Perhaps Hinge wants me to be inclusive of people who refer to themselves, and the people they’re talking to, in the third person? Maybe they’re the same ones who might use gender pronouns that are opposite of the sex that they identify clearly on their profiles?

I was lost on this one. But at least I wasn’t bored anymore, or lonely, or for that matter… optimistic. In fact, the whole thing really got my mental wheels turning…

I’ve seen the pronoun sharing thing before, mostly on Twitter. Naively, I thought that it was just something for the hyper-woke, the wide-eyed idealists, and far left-wing activists who wanted so badly to feel that they were on the “right side of history” that they were willing to deny the reality of biological sex, and its associated linguistic conventions, to do it.

After all, Twitter is a political platform. Its design naturally fans the flames of the culture war, attracting those with axes to grind, and virtues to signal. But Hinge is a dating app — one of the last places I expected to feel any peer pressure to deny the basic tenants of evolutionary biology, or if you prefer…common sense.