(Hey, it's a text wall! Those are fun. And one without quotes to break it up, oh joy) I disagree completely about the quotes. I believe the intended purpose is basically that advice "'I' statements, not 'you' statements" e.g. what I've been doing, but banning quotations doesn't make that happen. I do that anyway, but then with resentment at Helgo *cough* the moderator *cough* for creating a silly rule which would cause a backlash, then not enforcing it much at all. People who speak aggressively still do (or at least will when they are angry), and those who didn't, still don't. And as the ghost I'm conversing with just said, people are smart enough to figure out to know whether something is directed at them, which includes hostility. If someone is going to be mean, they can follow all the rules and still show their anger in their post; I'll speak for myself: If it gets to the point where I am mean to someone, I will be very mean and lacking quotes won't stop me. And I think this entire paragraph is it's own example: I'm increasingly upset with the rule, and the only reason I'm not more vocal (read: angry) about it is I'm the sort of person who isn't vocal to begin with. I'll leave my argument here in any case (and note I end my argument because I'm the sort who does that, not because lack of quotes leave me impotent to express my frustration), but I hope I've made my objection to the rule clear: Quotes don't hurt people, people hurt people.
Anyway, first I want to go ahead and speak for myself and say I am pretty comfortable with my gender. I am. I'm not the spitting image of everyone's personal understanding of a stereotype by any means (not that it matters: We really shouldn't agree on such a high barrier as to be included. I don't agree with everything my representative in Congress says, but at least 90% of the time I agree, and I for one will not jump ship over 10%. And I don't agree with everything my countrymen say, but I do agree the most of the time, and I can say I prefer to be associated with them than to not be). I'm more comfortable in it than out of it. And my experiences are as real as those of the people who aren't comfortable. We can't deny that any group exists merely because we believe (or prefer) that they didn't, and I think that's the whole point of the discussion.
Furthermore, I think it's somewhat strange to speak of gender as a grouping that that can simply be decided as bad (I disagree with that anyway, but I digress). There are far more social issues then the ones just mentioned that come out of groups, but all must be made in light of the fact that grouping is just inherent to humanity, and mitigating the difficulties that they create does more good then trying to tear them down: you can reform a clique, but tearing apart helps no one (not that gender is a clique of course). I remember a of mine teacher who was arguing (as a devil's advocate) for a world where everyone is the same race (although you could make the same argument for same ideology, or same whatever), asking "Is diversity inherently good? If we had a choice, would we have it?". I had several arguments in favor of diversity, but one thing that really got him was how hypothetical it was: that world will never exist, even if it is ideal. Favoring such a world entails so many assumptions as to be a waste of time: Where did that world come from?
Now unlike everything else I've said, this is an absolute truth: There is no blank slate, where we can create our ideal person or our ideal society without resistance or an imprint of what was. Anything we do stands on the ashes of what came before and is changed by them. Going back to the world without race example, how did this world develop? Did it just develop in such a way that race didn't exist? Or did it come from a world where it did? What are the legacies of that? Was it violence, racial miscegenation, what? Is everyone merely one race, or truly uniform? And if I instead imagine instead a world where race doesn't matter (ignoring that there will always be something left over from before), what prevents it from returning? Some sort of mass social engineering? My answer is that we don't have a choice to be in that world without race.
Regardless of how much damage something may do in society, there are some things which simply cannot be dealt with in a final matter as a whole and must be dealt with through individuals. We can make things less likely, but we cannot hope to always prevent their issues. We can help people who struggle with gender (or conflict, or peer pressure, or what-have-you), but we can't rely on trying to stop it.