I know at least one writer who keeps two pseudonyms because she’s married to an elected official in a very liberal town. Only a tight circle knows the truth. She’s not doing it for fun. She’s doing it to stay employable, to protect her husband’s position and career, to stay unharassed, to keep her family off the radar.

This is a sharp turn from how pen names used to work. When Mary Ann Evans signed George Eliot or the Brontë sisters sent out manuscripts as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the pseudonym was a key. It unlocked a door guarded by people who wouldn’t take them seriously as women. When Alice Sheldon wrote as James Tiptree, Jr. during the 1960s and '70s, the mask was a way to be read on the merits in a male-dominated genre. The pen name was about access.

Today the pen name is often a shield. Not just against rejection, but against the mob, the HR department, and the activist who thinks your kids’ school should know what you write. The logic has flipped. Once, a pseudonym helped you get heard. Now, it can be the only way to avoid punishment for speaking.

Contemporary publishing doesn’t merely ask, “Is this any good?” It demands to know who you are in the most reductive sense: race, sex, sexuality, politics. Identity declarations are required on query letters and bios because those tags are seen as marketable. Grant forms and residencies insist on demographic checkboxes in bold. Sensitivity screenings no longer ask “does the story ring true?” but “is the author the right kind of person to tell it?”

These are identity hoops. A writer must jump through them like a circus animal, hoops raised and lowered at will, sometimes lit on fire. The writer doesn’t choose their shape or their height; the gatekeepers do. And every time you clear one, another appears.

It’s the inversion of the old barrier. Women once had to downplay their sex to enter the room. Now many writers are told to amplify a label to stay in the room. Some even adopt labels and identities that are untrue just to get a foot in the door — a dangerous tactic when today’s publishers can easily track down your social media and see who you really are.

If you’re constantly asked to lead with group identity instead of craft, the center of gravity shifts inside you.

First, the self gets flattened. “I am queer,” “I am biracial,” “I am disabled,” becomes the headline, and everything you are — teacher, novelist, parent, builder, survivor — is relegated to the subhead. Accomplishment becomes evidence for the label rather than the other way around.

Second, the pressure to represent kicks in. You aren’t writing as yourself; you’re writing on behalf of a category. Failures are magnified: they can be framed as letting the group down. Success is shaded: “Was it talent or the tag?”

Third, alienation grows. You start curating a version of yourself that will be accepted, and you measure every sentence against what the label is supposed to say. After a while you stop asking, “Who am I and what do I see?” and start asking, “What version of me will get through the hoops?”

This is the psychology of collectivism. The group stands above the person. The category is the fundamental unit; the individual is raw material to be processed. It’s a soft form of the same logic that every authoritarian system uses: you matter only as a representative, not as a soul.

There’s nothing more individual than making art. One person’s imagination pulls something into being that didn’t exist yesterday. That spark is personal. When you force it through group expectations, you sand off the edges that make it worth reading.

The first casualty is the authentic voice. The question shifts from “What do I need to say?” to “What does my group need me to say?” Honesty loses to messaging. Revelation is replaced by repetition.

Next comes self-censorship. Every paragraph is pre-screened in the artist’s head: Will this reflect badly on my category? Will it be read as betrayal? Will it get me hauled before a committee? The work becomes cautious. Caution is death to originality.

Then the vision dilutes. Committees produce safe content. Hollywood’s writers’ rooms prove the point: when the mandate is to satisfy every stakeholder, you get formula and filler. The surprising line, the beautiful risk, the uncomfortable truth — these are the first things cut.

Art turns gray when it’s made to serve a slogan. The culture starves. People feel it even if they can’t articulate it. They drift to older books, to small presses, to anonymous accounts, to anything that still sounds human.

So the writer learns a perverse lesson. Use a pseudonym, and you separate your real self from your work. Don’t use one, and your real life may be targeted. Toe the line and your voice dissolves into paste. Refuse, and the gate closes. That’s the dilemma.

The system sends a constant message: you don’t have a voice unless it serves the group. But literature doesn’t work that way. Storytelling is a handshake between one human and another. It’s intimate, sometimes more intimate than sex. It depends on the courage of the individual voice — the person who will say the true thing, even when it’s unfashionable, even when it offends the committee.

We owe writers the freedom to be people, not mascots. We owe readers the freedom to encounter minds that are not performing identity, but speaking truth. The point of story is to reveal the human person as he or she actually is: contradictory, particular, sometimes wrong, often glorious. Categories can be useful for statistics. They are poison for art.

This is not a plea for niceness. It’s a demand for honesty. If we force artists to jump through identity hoops, we train them to lie. If we make them represent a group first and themselves second, we teach them to hide. If we punish them for seeing what they see, we destroy the very thing culture needs to stay alive.

One last thing, and it’s pointed at my side of the aisle. Conservative and libertarian writers: never, never, never subsume your identity to please a system that wants the mask more than the man or woman. Do not perform a label to gain favor. Do not train your voice to speak in someone else’s cadence.

Use pen names for one reason only: to keep a healthy boundary between your creative life and your private life. In an era of doxxing and swatting, it’s common sense to protect your family and your day job. Draw that line as needed. But do not surrender your voice. Do not shave it down to pass through the hoop.

A story without the courage of the person behind it isn’t a story. It’s a press release. And a culture that feeds on press releases will forget how to recognize the truth when it hears it.

The writer’s dilemma is personal anguish, yes. It’s also a warning sign. If we keep flattening people into categories, we will keep flattening books into propaganda. The door out is the same door that let great writers in to begin with: an individual, standing only for himself, and yet, for the greatest writers, all of humanity at the same time. That’s art.

The author referenced at the top? She wrote The Narrative, a brilliant satire, under one pen name. Read it. If you have a sense of humor and have lived in the world during the last 15 years, you will appreciate it!

Part 1: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Gatekeepers

Part 2: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Awards Racket

Part 3: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Market Disconnect

Part 4: DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot: The Silencing of the Straight White Male

Next up: Part 6: The Reader Rebellion

The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.