Thank you, Rob, for your utterly disingenuous “response" to my questions. Yes, you did answer them, and on one level, I’m sure you were being honest. As you write above, the answer is that you wrote this nasty, hurtful comment on the original story for no reason at all. As you assume, the writer’s concern over whether others *of her/their acquaintance* use her/their preferred pronouns when she/they isn’t around has absolutely zero effect on your existence, and whether she/they were to stop worrying about it would do nothing to improve your existence.

You justify your mannerless, self-described “disinterested” nastiness — I put it this way because nothing else accurately captures both the tone of your response to her/their piece, and what you state in response to my calling you out — as a sort of “public health and safety" intervention.

That is, you wrote in response to this individual’s public posting of a personal story because you felt the imperative to intervene when someone thus shared views — however unlikely to affect yourself — you feel you can confidently characterize as “delusional" (and btw, I’m sorry, but if you want to use “delusional” in a clinical sense, you’ll need to define the condition in more up-to-date, medically-supported terms, and cite both your original source and those justifying your use of it: copying and pasting from an out-of-copyright general dictionary of US English now available on the web does not give you the authority to diagnose the original author with a symptom of serious mental illness). You are convinced — or so you write — that it’s your duty to society to publicly restrain individuals who express their “delusions" in public fora such as Medium, not for your own benefit (since those “delusions" never would have hurt or harmed you in the first place) but for that of the “deluded” themselves: after all, rank condescension and personal unpleasantness are such effective means of convincing others to re-examine their most profound personal experiences, their very sense of self.

(If you asked me the same questions about my response to you, btw, I’d answer that it harms me, and other internet users, to read personally unpleasant material. It’s stressful and unnecessary. Why, then, respond in kind? Because I have lots of time on my hands, and my sense is that people who expect others to be dissuaded from writing articles for the internet by personally unpleasant responses, may in fact themselves respond to such treatment by self-silencing. Probably it’s not the case that calling you, Rob, a misogynist, trans-phobic, self-satisfied, solipsistic male chauvinist who will never get laid unless he’s paying for it, will get you off Medium, or least restrict your comments to articles within your life experience where you have something to contribute other than just being unpleasant. But I’m interested in the experiment.)

There’s more to say — your actual motivations for writing your response beg to be dissected, for precisely the sort of public health and safety reasons you factitiously adduce in your response to me — but I’m going to take a break from raising the literacy level of my phone keyboard app, and continue this later.

Please do let this be your takeaway: I’m trying to get you to silence yourself, by responding to you in the same tone you used in responding to the OP. That’s what I want, and I feel no reason whatsoever to be embarrassed. As my mother — probably not yours, since you likely come from a different generation and class/cultural background than I do — always said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Rules to live by…