Like it or not, it matters why you believe things are "going a little to far", and why you're willing to be vocal about it
In fact, even debating whether I should be able to debate it could damage my career. I believe this widespread use of silencing tactics, by implicit threat, has gone too far.
If the position is "I should be able to question and debate anything about my colleagues" then the position is obviously absurd and I would ask a person holding such a view to reevaluate what they think society is. I don't think you would hold such a position.
So, why are you troubled that you can't debate this particular thing, when I'm sure there are things you shouldn't debate about your colleagues?
I'm troubled by the top-down nature of what is decided to be beyond debate vs not: it feels like it is leading to a scary kind of authoritarianism I don't want.
For fun, I'll throw you a specific plausible hypothetical. If an app has a gender identity field, and a user enters "Apache Helicopter", should this be treated as valid data or not?
Depends on what the data is being used for? This is irrelevant, unless you're an app that collects statistics on its colleagues.