(Obviously we still discuss Clinton vs. Sanders because it's too topical not to, and it's a temporary issue anyway.)

Maybe there were deleted comments, or flags and messages to the mods complaining about some issue with the article that I just missed. Which is exactly why I'm asking, so that I won't miss it. To me the post seemed like the potential start of a discussion about issues raised in the article, even if MeFi's consensus opinion wouldn't entirely agree with the author.I'm aware of other topics that Metafilter consistently "doesn't do well"—Israel vs. Palestine, pit bulls, Clinton vs. Sanders, basically any morally-important issue where two college-educated young urban liberals can still disagree on principles.But I don't see why this article would fall in that category.There's a definite consensus here that gender, sex, and orientation are separate concepts, that people can transition even later in their life or not at all, and (I hope) that one can be transgender without having a gender studies degree, or deferring to what a typical gender studies major would say about your personal experience. The author clearly is not a troll; they're expressing a sincere view that just can't be boiled down to "this particular sociopolitical -ism is 100% correct". So what principle makes them, not just "less happy than you think they could be if they transitioned", but "too wrong or bad to be spoken of"?I've seen intelligent responses to the article on Tumblr and Reddit (yes, even Reddit, on certain subreddits at least), respecting the author and not dismissing them from either end of the ideological spectrum. I hope that Metafilter is also capable of discussing issues without a convenient hero and villain. If not, I think the undiscussable topics and viewpoints should be explicitly listed. Guess Culture is hard enough to deal with face-to-face. On the internet, lacking tone of voice and facial expressions, it's unreasonable to expect people to internalize a bunch of unspoken rules, when members can have all kinds of cultural backgrounds and non-shared assumptions. There should at least be an effort to observe what our social norms really are and describe them for everyone, even—especially—if one of those norms is "it's crass/rude/wrong to spell out these rules, because the worthy people will figure them out".