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.
Requiring the use of a real name also opens a person up to harassment (a real name, especially an unusual, makes it much easier to track town a person’s address, phone number, etc) and, in the case of those with conventional jobs, efforts to get them fired by harassing the employer. Forcing the use of real names is a tactic to silence people by facilitating intimidation by mob.
That’s all obvious, but it isn’t my point. My point is that the phrase “real name” is, in itself, an attempt too pretend goverent gets to define reality. It does not. Many people may indeed use pseudonyms online that they never use anywhere else, but for some us – myself included – we are vastly better known by our chosen name than by the one on our passports. For a government official to pompously declare that the name known by millions is not “real” because it’s different from the one on government records is nothing short of megalomania, on order of the Australian politician’s declaration that the laws of Australia trump those of mathematics.