Hacker News is no longer really a community for serious debate or challenging insights WRT non-technology subjects. YCombinator's position as a public face of the tech industry sort of requires that submissions/comments, especially relating to gender issues, be whitewashed to some degree.
The intelligent discoursers I know have all moved to communities like slatestarcodex, LessWrong, potentially-vile "neoreaction" sites (you can read Mencius Moldbug's writings for a primer), and other obscure parts of the Twitterverse. Your mileage may vary with any of these subcultures, and there is plenty of "toxic" content, but IMO the quality of discourse is vastly higher that what you'd expect on a typical Hacker News thread for anything not explicitly related to startups or programming.