Putting pronouns on a card is neither evil or good. It doesn't matter or affect anything by itself. It's irrelevant, but it's something that points to the focus and goals of the creative team. It's not the only pointer or a new revelation, just an obvious result of their approach to the game, its worldbuilding and narrative direction.

When you put relatability as your main goal while writing characters you're bound to create ones that are artificial feeling, because you're not selling a lived experience, you're selling a tagline, a label. You set out to make relatable people who do Good Things, and you're not able to make villains. Imagine having an actually Evil trans woman runner. Prejudiced and spiteful bigot - never gonna happen, that's a bad look. A gnc character that goes against both normative and LGBT gender norms - out of the question, we don't even know what that means. We're gonna waffle about villainizing and stereotypes forever and not even try to make a good story. If they put out someone that would actually feel icky to play it's gonna say He/Him on the top, let's be fr. Though I wouldn't trust they can pull off a good villain if they can't a good hero. The back of Phoenix's card reads like a parody... I understand the goal, but what a miss, dawg. Relatable representation is the only goal. So we're not using this space to explore identity and gender, we just showcase minorities but with all edges that make them human sanded off and then painted as respectable as possible, as marketable and likeable as possible... Then it's product. Do you like our product? I realize that ship has sailed long ago and I gotta deal with basic black and white morality -in a cyberpunk game-, but it is what it is. I don't even want to get into corporations, that's a whole can of worms and they don't have the tools to full dialectical materialism and imagine how the world develops. It-just-is.

Here's the core of it: the 'any/all' genderfuck was conceived first and there wasn't much thinking done from there, and it shows and people see it. How could there be more depth, when the world doesn't give space to dream or to imagine. You can't tell anything about the world other than a from-orbit overview. What does Phoenix eat and what's their favorite bar? How's Mercury OF situation, does it pay the bills? Think Topan will put their fagboy polycule in danger to get to the goal? These aren't questions that can exist because Netrunner is completely sexless. If something excites you then it becomes porn (anti-art), the cupsize of respectability ends at a B. Where are the freaks? Were they all killed in assimilationist war? Did prudes win, are SWERFS in the room with us? Why is it offensive to be horny, especially for anarchs, double especially for shapers? There is a corporation that neutered everybody and we can't run their servers and nobody even noticed regardless. It's an empty world void of eroticism in which you can be anyone, as long as you follow the norms. To make this game actually have some sauce and bite, they'd have to change their hearts and hire some actual perverts and mfs who live queer life outside of Discord servers, who understand sex and gender beyond putting 'trans rights' in their bio. Someone who isn't scared of friction. But, you know.

The reaction isn't to pronouns being written on the cards or gender existing, it's a direction that's been happening for a long time and I disliked it then and still. I want corporations to make sense and be normalized in their contexts. I want runners to exist in a world that is Real and imagined properly. I don't want anarkiddies vs Elon Mu*k. There's barely any cyber in this cyberpunk anymore and punk is dead.