A particularly surprising, vicious, and pernicious form of gatekeeping that I hadn't seen in some time recently reared its ugly head, causing me to reflect on a subject. I thought I'd start by proffering this analogy which I find helpful.
There's two concepts that I find helpful when I think of attempts to exclude people from TTRPGs; the ideas of de jure and de facto. Let's examine what they mean.
De jure means "by right" and is contrasted by de facto which is "by fact" or "by practice." In America, you often see this when describing discrimination or segregation, but it can be applied in all sorts of circumstances.
To give a simple, easy-to-understand example that moves away from contentious legal-isms, imagine you that there is a kids clubhouse.
If the kids have a sign on the door that says, "No girls allowed" then that would be an example of a de jure prohibition on girls.
If, on the other hand, the kids had a custom that only kids with short hair would be allowed (knowing that it was the custom in that area that boys had short hair and girls had long hair), then that would be a de facto prohibition on girls. Technically, girls could be allowed (so long as they have short hair) but in fact, they won't be allowed.
This difference is reflected in the quote by Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." It is important to be conscious of the way that seemingly-neutral rules can effect people in different ways.
I am reminded of this distinction when it comes to issues of gatekeeping in the TTRPGs. It is rare to non-existent for there to be de jure gatekeeping or discrimination. Which is no small thing! Getting rid of express barriers to entry, while the bare minimum, is still a worthy achievement. But I think most of us would b hard-pressed to find examples, today, of "no girls allowed" and you'd have to go back quite some time to even find unfortunate comments like, "Gaming in general is a male thing. It isn't that gaming is designed to exclude women. Everybody who's tried to design a game to interest a large female audience has failed. And I think that has to do with the different thinking processes of men and women."
Which leads to the issue of de facto gatekeeping. This is when people who play the games that we all love make assertions about what the game "is" in a way that seeks to exclude other people. Which brings me to my first experience with gatekeeping.
When I was but a wee player learning to play D&D, there was a lot of pushback by the OGs (original gatekeepers, original Grognards) toward us young whippersnappers playing silly fantasy RPGs. Real gamers, real nerds played wargames. They did artillery distances. And sea battles. And painted miniatured, and made towns, and did historical accuracy. Us, with our "dragons" and "elves" and "hit points" and narrating combat? Yeah, we weren't real gamers. At that point, no one was even using the term "Theater of the Mind," but that's what caused the explosion of new players into D&D. Very few people could afford and play with a full set of miniatures, but everyone could get some dice, paper and pencil, and tell a story. So insisting on "one right way" was essentially an exclusionary maneuver that would necessarily limit the hobby. Thankfully, it didn't work.
And I was reminded of this because I see that, today, a lot of new people are playing D&D; many of them are not within the "traditional" mold- we are attracting a lot of people that are new to the game, and have new stories that they want to tell; people that don't come from the traditional, white male background that many came from over history (not that there's anything wrong with that). And so many of them learn to play through TOTM. Which is wonderful and amazing.
I recounted a while back how a group that I taught 5e split off, and were (among other things) running their own, completely narrative dice-less D&D game during their lunch breaks at high school. HOW COOL IS THAT? It's so very cool. IMO. Is it D&D? Sure! It might not be the D&D I know, or fully understand, or even that I taught them, but it's their D&D, and their stories. And they will grow and add things to the hobby.
Which brings us back to the original point. I was duly shocked to see someone saying that D&D has to be complex, and real D&D can't be TOTM, not just because it's the type of gatekeeping I thought was abandoned long ago, but it's just another iteration of the impulse toward needless excluding new generations of players. I mean, I wish I was the future of the game, but I'm not. The best I (and many of the people reading this) is to act as a good steward to attract even more new people to the game so that, in the end:
1. They make the game their own; and
2. they internalize the true, terrible nature of Paladins.