Y'can talk about tone and rudeness and everything, and I encourage doing so, but you'd be better served in your quest to achieve productivity by actually addressing the claims she's making, and doing so in the manner you'd like the thread to proceed. Announcing a refusal to engage unless your standards for discourse are met is at once oxymoronic (your announcement is a form of engagement) and hypocritical (it fails to live up to your own standards, because it fails to contribute anything). With that in mind, I'd like to actually talk about the thrust of the argument.
See, she's got a damn fine point - there's a rash of people, whenever social justice sorts of things get brought up, who like to exclaim that they're not part of the problem because they don't care. This is a problem, because denying that a problem is relevant to you doesn't actually solve the problem. So, let me be clear about one thing - I mentioned duck typing earlier, which boils down to giving no fucks about how somebody is defined as long as they do the things you need them to do. I don't mean by this, "Oh, gender doesn't really matter." What I mean is, people need to accept that there's no Right Way To Do Things. Arbitrary definitions of gender should be allowed, including
Null.
None of us are standards agencies. None of us have authority over anybody else. None of us are in a position to dictate definitions. Not me, not AlleeCat, and certainly not Th4DwArfY1. That means you don't get to tell people what does or does not matter. Gender doesn't matter to me. I'm a straight white cis-gendered well-educated American male, to list a whole bunch of labels I don't particularly care about, but have to keep in mind because a lot of people like to be assholes to people who don't have them. There are two boxes I don't check off on the Life Experience Lottery, and that's Christian and Exorbitantly Wealthy. So you can see, I'm not exactly qualified to say what matters to people who aren't that obnoxiously lucky.
Remember when McDonald's
gave financial advice to its employees? If I'm trying to set up a Grand Unified Theory of gender politics, I'm doing the same thing. The company was rightly called crazy and borderline evil, for what, trying to
help people? Yeah! Because that's what happens when you behave as though you've got answers to problems you've never so much as looked at. You tend to come off as a callous idiot.
But here's the thing we fast food giants tend to forget whenever we get criticized for this sort of nonsense - there's actually a shitton of things we can do to help, and plenty we can say to contribute. Mostly, they don't involve thinking of brilliant solutions off in our ivory towers. Mostly, they don't involve going out on righteous crusades. No, mostly, they involve listening. Mostly, they involve quiet adjustments. Mostly, they involve introspection and honesty. Mostly, they involve accepting that we make mistakes and need to fix them.
Mostly, they involve treating people like people.
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Feel free to quote me, and for the sake of honesty, I admit that I clipped an edited-in paragraph from the end that broke up the flow.