Technical opinions aren’t something we’re born with, they’re not intrinsic and uncontrollable properties of a person, and technical opinions haven’t historically been subject to widespread discrimination or hate crimes or even social imbalance in terms of income, right? The protections we have for race and gender aren’t there to avoid discomfort or to avoid conflict, they’re there to avoid harmful discrimination and to reinforce the civil rights of all citizens.

The argument that opinion should be equally protected, or that conversely race and gender should not be protected seems very surprising coming from a gay black trans person, which makes me assume I probably don’t understand what you mean. I’m curious to hear why you say the sensitivity to race and gender is artificial and irrational, given the history of physical atrocities that have occurred.

All that said, this particular case isn’t about protected categories at all, is it? The issue was not the existence of a dissenting opinion, the issue was that it was handled unilaterally without consensus, against the stated mores and procedures of the organization. They had a codified process for “protecting” dissenting opinions, and someone ignored and broke that process. This isn’t to be confused or conflated with US (or any other country’s) labor law’s notion of a “protected class”, we’re talking about two completely different kinds of protection.

Everyone has an opinion. That's why we have committees, governments, etc, to have a voice. However, your or my opinion is no more valuable than anyone else's except to ourselves. I have definitely taken criticism of my code and architecture very hard, once I even got up after a meeting after my group voting against my architecture. I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into over about a month of late nights and plenty coffee. However, I accepted the decision (by team committee I guess you could say. I didn't cry that my feelings were hurt. I was actually vindicated about a year later when that project fell apart under the crush of being very brittle, whereas mine would not have. However, I didn't gloat, I helped replace their brittle infrastructure with the one I had stuffed away in a zip file and almost forgotten about. However, stuff like that is just work. I think that has to be kept separate from human rights like respect for your gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, etc . Those should never be negotiable and no one should be made to feel "less than" are a separate concern. No one should have to put up with that, but I don't think that's what this is about at all. We should all have a thin-skin and maniacal defense of those basic human rights. Not so much when it comes to a language architecture. Life isn't about "feeling comfortable" in all circumstances. So I don't think those situations are similar at all.