The thing to understand about minorities, the disabled, queer and alphabet folk is that they are human beings just like everyody else.

Ergo: some of them are actual arseholes.

Oscar Pistorius was an abusive murdering douchebag, not just a brave para olympic gold medal winning runner.

Indeed. And even within a group that shares some core identity across one axis (e.g., queer people), the usual fraught hierarchies have a way of establishing themselves—unless you really make a point of preventing that from happening.

The ones who are wealthy will hold relative power over the ones who aren't. The ones in good health may neglect or actively exclude the ones who aren't. Racism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. And so on.

The problem with identifying the goodness of people by their use of pronouns is that, surprise surprise, empty words good person does not make

Yes, well, that's not what anyone is doing. Here is the logic that caused surprise:

1. Leaders identify with nonbinary pronouns,

2. thus: leaders appear to be members of the/a queer community,

3. and: queer community members tend to center queer people/experiences (regardless of whether said members are shitty people for any reason),

4. yet: the leaders are specifically harming and driving out queer members of their community. This is unexpected. Not "wow, this should be impossible" unexpected, just "damn, this shouldn't have happened" unexpected.

It's quite simple and straightforward.

As an aside, (and I know I'll get downvoted for my tone, but it is what it is), for ye straight commenters: consider that your opinions on queerness and queer community dynamics probably aren't very well informed when you're entering conversations about them. (Inspired by but not personally attacking the parent comment. They might be queer too! And their statement is true, it's just off the mark in this context.)

Shieet, glad to know all it takes to be a doubleplus good person in Current Year is using an approved pronoun. Makes everything much easier.

No that's not what they mean. They mean you'd kind of assume someone who identifies as queer, or is at least knowledgeable enough on the community to participate in some ways, wouldn't be homophobic.

In practice this isn't the case, because you can use this as a shield. So for homophobic people it might be advantageous to enter the community in a way that causes the least amount of personal friction. Like, simply putting pronouns in your bio and doing literally nothing else is trivial - but the social benefit is not.

It's a big problem, because people who ARE non-binary or ARE bisexual or whatever then get a ton of backlash. Because those identities are the most common to be commandeered, so to speak. At least online.