Says the man hiding behind a pompous title who would totally send cops to destroy the lives of many people on Twitter if he knew their government names. The concept of a “real name”, as promoted by authoritarians, is asinine. Try Googling “William Henry Pratt” and see what pops up. Which is his “real” name? If you Google “Maggie McNeill” you get pages and pages of stuff relating to me, including books, pictures, videos and a huge number of essays. If you Googled my government name, you’d get a couple of property tax records and maybe a 17-year-old arrest record. Which is my “real” name? Here are a few more “real” names:
Marion Morrison
Robert Zimmerman
Neta-Lee Herschlag
Farrokh Bulsara
Maurice Joseph Micklewhite
Demetria Gene Guynes
Reginald Kenneth Dwight
Krishna Pandit Bhanji
Caryn Elaine Johnson
Marvin Lee Aday
Calling the name on government records “real”, rather than the name by which people are widely known, the name they chose for themselves and built a career on, is a sickening obeisance to the State. Anyone who uses the term unironically can be safely dismissed as an authoritarian stooge.
