[MissC]

I'm thinking that possibly I should take exception to your first paragraph of response. It strikes me as, dare I say it, "ageist'.

My goodness, you could, couldn't you! I certainly didn't mean it that way. I was raised to respect my elders, so please rest assured that it was my way of deferring to your greater length of life experience!

My father was in his mid-40s when I was born; a larger generational gap than most experienced. I'm rather attuned to the phenomenon of how attitudes change from generation to generation.

I don't actually recollect whether you have disclosed your age,

I didn't, previously... I am somewhere between 30 and 40.

Moving on to passability, I read you as saying that we should all assert our true gender, and that is consistent with what you say in this post. For myself, being at least somewhat bi-gender, I still don't know what I am supposed to assert, And that assertiveness is one of the (I think masculine) characteristics which is missing in my brainset. PM certainly helps me not to worry about some deviations from societal orthodoxy, but it doesn't make me assertive.

Now there's something to chew on!

Certainly, not everyone is assertive, and it's not necessarily related to one's sex or gender. In life, there are leaders, followers, and spectators. Leaders are the smallest minority. I suppose humanity would be chaos otherwise.

Likewise, upsetting apple carts is not in my nature and I don't see it as a duty of mine, but if you do, I still consider that it is important to be careful and unprejudiced in selecting carts. People can get hurt in the upsets.

They can... but shouldn't. The sharing of ideas should be logical and dispassionate, untainted by emotion. That's hard to do unless one is Vulcan, of course, but that's the idea.

There is no possible way to write anything of any significance without upsetting someone. There just isn't. You can write so as to not upset one or two or a handful of people... but no matter what you write on the internet, someone is going to be offended. It really truly cannot be helped. No one can be held liable for offended readers... it wouldn't work even if we didn't think free speech was a good idea.