Wow.

It is very annoying that, when presented with barriers to a progressive solution to a legitimate problem (the need for a gender neutral pronoun for example), one of the ways of coping with the problem is pretending it does not exist, and that people who acknowledge it and come up with another solution than you do are…

It depends on the length of the correspondence. A short note is not enough information to draw that conclusion from, and even a long note is often not enough to conclude what that reason is. And even if they do have a legitimate reason, why would I assume the reason is that they want me to do the same thing? It you…

At NO point did I say I wouldn't address someone as they said they wanted to be addressed. I said that in cases where it's not clear, I totally understand being frustrated by the ugly language.

YES.

Because you are not permitted to use pronouns without resorting to the godawful "he or she." I find that ugly when talking about a theoretical person. When it's a known, specific person, I find it very ugly.

Honestly, personally, I think avoiding gendered pronouns is (usually) very awkward writing. I understand being annoyed that a question is sort of arbitrarily ten times more difficult to answer without being unclear because no gendered pronouns were given.

Oh, God, I accidentally got into the orbit of a girl who was an admin assistant with social media duties for a college partying lifestyle mag.

Huh! Interesting!

Are Bert and Ernie children? I assumed as a child they were adult room mates.

I think it'd be really interesting if Nintendo acquired them.

And her life has gone SO shitty for the past year up to now. It'd be really nice to hear in ten years that she is doing OK.

This is a trilingual woman with a limited education who is nonetheless arguing with the premises of questions asked to her by a white dude with a law degree. One that appears to have showed up to court after sniffing glue, but still.

MLK is like their Good!Hitler.

My mom had a couple of modern Afghan rugs.

I might have replied to the wrong person. I don't think I meant to disagree with you, maybe more to expand and explain the culture of why things get dismissed that are totally cool in other contexts, and why that's not a bad thing.

Sure, it's an extreme, but it's not like it's an uncommon extreme.

I want to add, I've been going to nerdy conventions since I was six. Maybe it's just because I am older, but back when they were truly niche, they felt a lot more safe. Same with nerd culture: small usenet boards where everyone knew everyone else were a lot more safe when being nerdy was niche. Even if you had a…

As long as you understand the difference between taking a comment personally, and deciding it is not always prudent to ignore inappropriate behavior.

If you, for example, make rape jokes in which the victim is the butt of the joke, some people will find that funny.