On January 21, 2026, Patagonia Inc., the outdoor apparel and equipment company, filed suit in federal court against Wyn Wiley, aka Pattie Gonia, a drag queen and self-proclaimed environmental activist.
In its lawsuit, Patagonia alleges that Wiley and his company, Entrepreneur Enterprises Inc., have filed trademark applications for “apparel …, marketing services …, motivational speaking services in support of environmental sustainability and LGBTQIA2S+ equality” using branding that infringes on several of Patagonia’s trademarked logos and texts.
The facts of the case, at least as laid out by Patagonia, seem clear: Wiley has, as evidenced by images taken from his website and reproduced in Patagonia’s filing, offered merch branded with the words “Pattie Gonia,” and has been photographed in clothing with Patagonia’s iconic Mt. Fitz Roy skyline logo, with the words “pattie gonia” in place of “Patagonia.”
The dispute began in 2022, when Wiley approached Hydro Flask to create branded water bottles with (potential) slogans such as “hydrate or die straight.”
Hydro Flask, which has a longstanding commercial relationship with Patagonia, notified the company’s representatives about working with Wiley-cum-Pattie Gonia to head off any conflicts of interest.
Patagonia claims that it spoke with Wiley and his representative by phone regarding the collaboration and that all parties agreed that they could coexist with distinct, separate branding.
Although Patagonia did not produce a signed agreement with Wiley in its legal filing (remarkably, there does not seem to be one), it did reproduce a series of emails between it and Wiley in which he seems to acknowledge (though he has since publicly denied it) that, per oral agreements with Patagonia, he would not brand his merch with the words “Pattie Gonia” or use Patagonia’s logos.
In 2025, when Wiley sought trademarks for merchandise plainly branded with “Pattie Gonia,” Patagonia reached out by email and, in the most conciliatory of tones, asked him to abide by the agreement (as spelled out in the email exchange) and stop infringing on the company’s brand, by way of both image and text font.
In response to the company’s polite throat-clearing, Wiley dismissed its concerns about brand conflicts by claiming that any similarities were coincidental, since, he wrote, they both (Pattie Gonia and Patagonia) were “inspired by the same region in South America.”
Wiley’s email quickly turned self-righteous, sounding like a whiny teenager blurting out ad hominems while arguing with his clueless (obviously!) boomer parents.
How, Wiley squalled, could Patagonia, which, through its Lost Arrow line, once produced tactical gear for police departments and U.S. special forces, presume to have a moral leg to stand on concerning, well, anything? How, Wiley bitched on, could Patagonia, which engaged in “cultural appropriation” (Wyn seems unaware that “Lost Arrow” is the name of a spire in Yosemite National Park) and was so racially insensitive as to sell the Lost Arrow line “at the height of Black Lives Matter,” have the right to oppose him, a “Drag Queen, Professional Homosexual & Intersectional Environmentalist”?!
How indeed!
His email’s snarky closer left me laughing on my office floor: “Phew, are you a bit tired? We are too! …if you or your family would ever like tickets to a Pattie Gonia show or some merch, we’re happy to make that happen. Just say the word!”
While Patagonia is seeking only $1 in damages, it is also seeking compensation for “reasonable attorneys’ fees and investigative expenses,” which could put Wiley on the hook for millions.
In situations like this, I usually root for the little guy—but in this case I will make an exception.
Let me note that as a straight, white, Christian, cisgender male, I have no desire to see Wiley personally harmed, and his “Queer people existing does nothing to your life, you cranky bitch!” attitude does not trigger any phobias in me.
I would nonetheless like to see him stopped—here’s why:
Wiley’s crusading Pattie Gonia persona smacks of self-serving environmentalist grift, with his “I am here to save the earth!” act smelling strongly of self-enrichment. Serious environmental work is already weighed down by too many polarizing, attention-seeking characters (Greta Thunberg comes to mind) to shoulder yet another one.
His Pattie Gonia origin story betrays the self-centered, performative nature of his shtick.
In a 2023 interview with ABC News’ Ginger Zee, Wiley said, “I was on a backpacking trip with a few of my friends, decided to pack these six-inch high-heeled boots into my pack, took some videos and photos, posted a video online and woke up to three million views.”
A year later, during a 2024 TED Talk, Wiley changed his story, claiming that he accidentally happened upon his true, environmentally crusading Pattie Gonia drag queen self when, he said, “on a backpacking trip in the middle of my quarter-life crisis, lost in the forest, I put on a pair of six-inch high-heeled boots and strutted the trails for the first time as Pattie Gonia.”
So, which was it? Was Wiley “lost in the forest” when he happened upon Pattie, or was the whole thing staged for views and clicks?
The answer to this question may lie in an old backpacker’s adage: “You pack what you fear.” Those who pack excessive food fear hunger; those who pack too many toiletries fear uncleanliness. What does someone who packs six-inch high-heeled boots fear? Being caught out in a sudden, on-trail fashion faux pas? Or maybe, more likely, a flat social media following.
Like his origin story, Wiley’s raison d’être, too, is suspect—that he is here to make nature more welcoming to “BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and femmes.” Nature is indifferent to who you are and is only unwelcoming to the self-centered and unprepared. How much anyone gets out of any wilderness trip depends entirely on whether they are willing to conform their attitudes and actions to the environment, rather than insisting that this essential exercise be done the other way around. As the saying goes, “mountains don’t care,” and that’s part of what makes them beautiful.
Beyond the questionable claims about Pattie Gonia’s origins, Wiley’s act is causing real harm to the three million followers he claims to have.
Wiley is promoting the mistaken notion that nature is here to detoxify us from civilization’s many corrupting influences. For Wiley and those he leads astray, the societal corruption in need of a natural scrubbing is the imagined oppression that he and the other alphabet people believe they suffer despite a whole month of Pride, multiple citywide parades, pro-gay moralizing Netflix series, and an endless stream of fawning corporate sponsorships.
The proposition that nature is here to purify us from civilization’s corruptions traces back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), one of the most impactful and harmful thinkers concerning our relationship to nature.
As Europe staggered out of the 1600s, suffering badly from a changing climate, inflation, famine, and the effects of devastating religious wars, Rousseau proposed that the fix for Europe’s problems was to overhaul how moral people were formed and, thus, how future societies were constructed.
In 1762, Rousseau published The Social Contract and Émile, or On Education, in which he asserted the source of Europe’s ills was the corruption of the individual’s nature by our social institutions: government, the arts, and especially religion. The solution to this corruption, Rousseau asserted, was a return to a condition of “natural man,” a supposed state that we once inhabited before becoming civilized.
Unfortunately for the West, Rousseau’s picture of natural man was of a figure that never existed.
Rousseau believed that before the rise of cities, humans lived in what is best described as a fantasy-like state in which small bands of people walked the planet, giving little thought to who they were or why they were here.
Rousseau envisioned natural man as a simple, contented, cartoonish creature who foraged for plants and hunted animals without a care. This natural, uncorrupted man, Rousseau imagined, had no laws, no governments, no economic systems, no organized religions, no arts, no sciences: no civilization at all.
The problem with Rousseau’s vision was that it was unsupported by any evidence, and, worse, Rousseau was unperturbed by reams of information about the “natural” men of North and South America pouring into Europe by way of French missionaries.
For example, St. Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649), who spent nearly twenty years living among the Wendat until he was tortured to death by the Iroquois, reported in written detail, year after year, that native societies around the Great Lakes had complex languages, systems of government, and religions.
Brébeuf’s reports also made it clear that, as individuals, some of the natives of the New World were kind, some were cruel. Some were helpful, and others deceitful. In other words, despite living in a “natural state,” the native peoples of the Americas, just like Europeans, possessed social institutions and all the virtues and vices inherent in human nature.
Like Rousseau’s natural man, Wiley’s environmentally crusading drag persona is detached from reality.
First, to state the obvious, Wiley is a man, complete with XY chromosomes and all the anatomical parts that come with them. No amount of makeup, hairspray, dresses, or dancing around to Ariana Grande’s songs will change this biological fact.
Next, Wiley’s rationalization for the naturalness of drag bears a striking resemblance to Rousseau’s mistaken imaginings of the behavior of natural man: both are tethered to strained analogies to nature that fall apart upon closer inspection.
Wiley frequently points to nature to justify queerness, repeatedly citing the life cycle of the clownfish. For example, in a 2025 interview with the San Francisco-based e-zine CultureVulture, Wiley said: “Nature is queer.” How? Why? Wiley explained: “I see queerness in the way clownfish can change gender several times in a lifetime.”
True, some members of the Pomacentridae family, such as damselfish and clownfish, sometimes change sex, not gender. For Wiley to say that the clownfish “can” change “gender” betrays either his ignorance of this natural phenomenon or his deceitfulness in the justification of his cross-dressing compulsions.
A clownfish might change sex once in a lifetime, and only from male to female under very specific environmental circumstances. The factors that cause these involuntary changes in clownfish have nothing to do with any expression of free will that we would associate with the word “can.” What’s more, the involuntary change of sex in the clownfish is done exclusively to ensure procreation and the survival of a family group, typically numbering two to six fish.
Wiley describes himself as a “Professional Homosexual.” Homosexuality, by design and function, is antithetical to procreation. Consequently, in his forced and factually misleading rationale for the existence of Pattie Gonia, Wiley’s environmental drag queen affectations more closely resemble those of a clown than those of any fish.
When Rousseau’s removed-from-reality ideals about nature’s effect on us became a major current in Europe’s Romantic literary movement and then flowed across the Atlantic by way of writers like the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), they did considerable harm to the “natural peoples” of North America.
Heavily influenced by Rousseau, 19th-century American naturalists like John Muir preached that only nature could get rid of “the rust and disease” for the “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people,” but only if it were an empty place that one visited to be refreshed.
When this prescriptive need for empty wilderness clashed with the reality of people living on the land, such as natives in the American middle ground or the West, Europeans becoming early Americans acted out the Rousseauian ideal of purifying nature by forcibly removing indigenous people from the land, with disastrous consequences for all parties involved.
Here, too, Wiley and other activists are doing tremendous harm to our present-day social fabric by targeting children with their drag-is-natural propaganda.
Like the drag queens who are forever trying to shimmy their way into our children’s story hours, Wiley, under the cover of platitudes like “let’s save the earth, kids!”, is relentlessly promoting to children, through a variety of organizations, that homosexuality, drag, and a whole slate of unhealthy behaviors are natural.
Indeed, a few animals sometimes engage in same-sex cooperation. For Wiley and his queer allies to point to these anomalous behaviors and call them natural for humans, and therefore desirable, is dishonest and misleading.
Up and down the taxonomic hierarchy, animals do all sorts of things naturally: they abandon the sick and injured, consume resources without regard to other creatures, opportunistically devour the unsuspecting and weak, and frequently engage in cannibalism.
Would Wiley advocate for any of these natural animal behaviors among his fellow humans? Since Wiley promotes himself as a spokesman (spokesperson?) for the environment, someone should ask him.
Yes, we need to spend time in nature to be put right. However, it is important to keep in mind that “nature” is neither a thing nor a reparative agent. It is, instead, a visual representation of God’s creation, a three-dimensional catechism of what our repaired state might look like if we surrendered and aligned our functions to our form. That is, if we carefully discerned our God-given vocations and ascended to them, first and foremost as men and women.
Regardless of what is settled between Wiley and Patagonia, if he wants to build a career around helping people feel less anxious and get outside more often, he should (re)start by seeing nature for what it is: a system, created by God, in which each component’s function is aligned with its form. In nature, birds don’t identify as fish, and oaks don’t insist that their acorns be called apples because the latter are prettier, and, “y’know, just such a fabulous shade of red!”
To begin detransitioning out of Pattie Gonia and into a genuine environmentalist, Wiley could start by taking some of his own advice. In an audience Q&A posted as a YouTube Short, Wiley, dressed as Pattie Gonia, was asked: “Who has inspired you most?” He responded, “Mother Nature,” because, he continued, “She is the best designer and leader that’s ever been on earth.” Well put. Wyn Wiley could learn more from nature if he stopped playing dress-up, sat quietly outside, and listened attentively.