You seem to have read that as literally "hide if you are queer". What I meant to encompass was also "hide that you're queer". And that's absolutely a norm that exists, and that can perfectly well hide behind "stick to technical considerations". If you say "I prefer to be referred to by these pronouns" then the reply "please stick to technical considerations" is not neutral. If someone would point out @acronym_XYZ is actually a woman when someone referred to her as he, nobody would reply with "please stick to technical considerations". "Please stick to technical considerations" as a response to any behavior that is outside some societal default is not enforcing a technical concern, it's enforcing the societal default, including when there are no technical reasons to do so.

That doesn't mean that "Please stick to technical considerations" or quite simply "that's off-topic" are never valid. They very much are. It simply means that they don't provide some clean clear demarcation line around which to organize a technical community.

> If you say "I prefer to be referred to by these pronouns" then the reply "please stick to technical considerations" is not neutral.

There's no single societal norm in worldwide source projects; that's just you monolithing a diverse set of groups. In this particular instance if you're just a GitHub handle then whether you're female or you wish to be called "her" then that doesn't require hiding that you're "queer", but it also doesn't require mentioning it. Just say, "actually it's 'she'" and you're done.

I thought you merely misread my comment. But it really seems you are very determined to pretend that there are no reasons for people to hide that they are queer, which, given the current political climate, is just bizarre to me.

"Societal default" here doesn't explicitly mean laws.

I didn't mention laws. What do you mean?

I assumed you were talking about laws because the social default in places like the south of the US is definitely that visibly queer people should hide.