Thank you, sosed, for clarifying your meaning. Thank you, Naked Freedom, for putting the exchange and my posts in perspective.
I want to make clear to that my responses to sosed were in no way aimed at setting a "trap" or "overshadowing" his question, and certainly were not aimed at creating a hostile environment. Rather, they were motivated by a militancy about ungendering that I must temper. I realize that sosed's intent was not to ungender, but the words "natural" and "normal" must be used very, very carefully. My concern is that if we start our discussions from false assumptions that I inferred from how sosed posed his question, we render the answer to be equally false. My way of approaching a post that jumps out in this way brings out the professor in me, which is often not the optimal persona for anonymous, online discussions. (It works quite well in a classroom setting, where my students see my smile and hear the tone of my voice and know I am challenging them to achieve a higher distillation of their thinking, not trying to beat them down.)
So, chastened, I will strive to take Naked Freedom's much-appreciated advice.
I would like to clarify one thing further. Naked Freedom writes that "so far no one had taken offense to what sosed wrote." One should not make the assumption that the absence of posts in the discussion means the absence of responses. I would not speak for the other moderators, but there are a number of members on this site who post infrequently (if at all) who write PMs to me about posts that raise questions for them or are disturbing in one way or another. I encourage members to post, but they do not always do so. In this case, I did receive some PMs about what sosed wrote.
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