[The scene is a high-end coffee shop in a gentrified urban neighborhood. An androgynous and porky person, with pink hair and pale, almost translucent skin, named Pat (pronouns “it/its”), stands to its feet and waddles towards a whiteboard on an easel. Pat is surrounded by similarly flabby, ghastly-pale, and sexless people, whose unblinking eyes follow its every move. Pat paces, gestures, and speaks like a professor who thinks it knows everything. The subject of Pat’s lecture is “How the Woke Debate.”]
“Hi, I’m Pat, and my pronouns are it/its!” A few audience members return its greeting and provide their own pronouns. Pat then stiffens its face and tries to look somber before clearing its throat. “Let us all bow our heads for a land acknowledgment and an invocation of the noble spirit of the Indigenous people from whom this land was stolen.”
Pat’s students reverently bow their heads. Many of them clasp their hands together or raise…
