We are now at a stage where a twitter mob would see "men should not be allowed to compete in women's sports" as a bigoted statement. To the vast majority of people there are important differences between men and women, and will now have to awkwardly self-censors their speech. Or they will worry whether they are actually bigoted and attempt to signal that they are not really a bad person by relenting to the group.

We are also at a stage where a US Supreme Court nominee under questioning was unwilling to hazard a guess at a definition of Woman. The risks for them personally was just too high.

We're also at a stage where I (not American) get bombarded by this ideological pathology of the American Left when I end up on Twitter. How do I opt out?

I call partial bullshit on your comments.

>In the case of Justine Sacco, here's a thought: if you don't want to be shamed "at the scale of global society"... ...don't fuckin' post an unfathomably bigoted comment on a public, global forum.

Who defines "unfathomably bigoted"? You? A small screeching mob of twitter warriors? A small but influential group of editors and writers for papers like the NY Times and others? You're prima facie assuming that a discourse labeled as bigoted is indeed horribly bigoted.. Given the number of VERY CLEAR examples many of us have seen of highly dubious and sometimes completely irrational definitions of supposed offensiveness (feel free to google search them, there are many), then no, things are not just a full-stop case of "you must be bigoted then if a group of people say you are". Aside from issues of free speech, definitions of bigotry, sexism, racism and so forth have in many circles gone completely off the rails of rational, reasoned thought.

>If you find yourself regularly worrying about whether something you say might be perceived as racist or sexist, maybe it's time to spend time recognizing that your bigoted attitudes towards others are wrong, and doing something about it.

I could repeat the point I already made above here. You make the same very shaky assertion that someone's attitudes are bigoted just because they question certain digital assertions about sex, gender or racism. Nope. Hijacking an argument by assuming a premise is simply dishonest.

Your stabbing argument is also absurd. By widespread practical and moral definition, people recognize that randomly stabbing others is wrong and socially damaging. The same definitely doesn't apply to someone wondering if a person who's biologically a man but had gender reassignment should then compete in women's sports. The latter is far less settled, not just philosophically but also biologically.

I’m not sure why you’re so heavily downvoted - this is common sense.