I appreciate hearing more about your views on this, and so let me start by being clear that in literally no way at all am I attempting to imply anything about your gender presentation as an individual. I don’t think I’ve said anything even remotely or tangentially related to that, and that is not at all related to my words on this matter. I would go so far as to say I think it’s entirely irrelevant to the actual issue at hand, and for what it’s worth I strongly disagree with the notion that your gender presentation isn’t “sufficient” for anything - if anybody is telling you that it is, I have years of experience with you that lead me to strongly disagree.
I also understand that being called a gender-neutral term can be a way to specifically avoid having to use the person in question’s preferred pronouns. However, if this were what is specifically happening, that is not the idea that I got from your posting here, which sounded to me a lot like people were just using gender-neutral terms as a default option to attempt to avoid causing anybody harm, and inadvertently catching you in the crossfire. If that is what was actually happening, I apologize for my misunderstanding, and encourage you to report the people in question, as that sort of behavior that is intended to cause others harm is certainly against site rules.
I agree that just because something is normal does not make it okay, but I also think that we can all agree that people defaulting to gender-neutral language when online is ultimately something that has become normal here specifically because people are trying to avoid misgendering people, and I would hope we are in agreement that, in general, this is a preferable normal to what we’ve done in the past. If you feel that somebody is abusing this norm in a manner that you feel is malicious, please report them - I can 100% promise you that our moderation team will be willing to ask them to stop and escalate if they do not.
I think it’s probably easiest to respond to this by saying that yes, I am doing exactly this - but only with some of the responsibility, not all, and that bit of responsibility is to let others know how you feel. If something people do is hurting you when it would not hurt most people they interact with, it is not helpful to anybody to not voice that. People are complex and without being told that somebody feels a certain way, it’s hard to know for sure what they will and won’t like. That is actually exactly why I appreciate this thread’s existence, as I think it helps bring more light to this topic and is a great discussion to have as a community (and is also why I’m so pissed at Neon right now for being an ass about it for no good reason).
However, that does not mean you need to resign yourself to being hurt personally in order to have this discussion. From a “Site Feedback” point of view, as a technical administrator, there seems to me to be one relatively simple change that can be made on your end to alleviate the personal hurt you are feeling over this issue. That does not mean the issue does not exist, nor does it mean that all responsibility for addressing it lies with you (and once again I think this topic is a good way to turn your experience into discussion that can positively change the community) - but it does give you, personally, an option you can take to meaningfully improve how you feel about your time on this site going forward by informing others about a specific way you would prefer they not address you in. And unless somebody has a specific feature request that is better than anything I can think of for this, that’s pretty much the only meaningful thing I can point to as a tech admin here.
If you feel that any of this is unreasonable, please do feel free to let me know.