Witches VS Patriarchy

Not to discount your personal experience, just offering a different one, but people pretty regularly used to gatekeep in this way to me, I've been asked the "name 5 songs" question or some variant of it at least a dozen times when I was in school, it slowed significantly down in college and adulthood though.

I will note however that prior to my transition I read these things as "male social purity tests" and post transition I read them as "teenage boys need to be right so bad they'll attack anyone for anything" and I think a lot of this comes from our society ignoring the emotional needs for validation among young men and boys, causing them to lash out in this at potential friends who they see as a target for humiliation, instead of bringing these people closer.

Are you a woman? It might also be something that developed during very young gen X/millennial generation, because it was at that point I believe the band shirt trend escaped the "die hard fan" category into just general audience category. Maybe it's location based, or appearance based. If you don't "look the part" whatever that means to the person, you're a suspected "poser."

I'm younger than you and am a woman and can confirm this has happened to me on multiple occasions. I had an ex that liked band merch and I often wore their clothes out when I stayed over and just kinda kept them because they looked cool. I was generally happy to say I didn't know the band, but it happened enough times that I started telling people I got the merch off a corpse. It was generally a left field enough response that they didn't try to continue speaking to me. I can't remember the number of times it happened but it was enough to prompt me to change my response from "it's my boyfriends" to something to make the conversation stop.