I don't know about other people but, for me, inserting elements into the game that have a tendency to weed out players of a variety of different groupings (whether based on sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc) without being necessary or optional seems foolish at the minimum and ranging well into the realms of stupidity and immorality in more extreme forms.
I'm pretty much done with this topic, but this sort of assertion is worthy of at least an attempt at answer.
One thing I've learned posting at EnWorld over the years is that to gamers, pretty much everything about games ends up being a topic that carries moral value. It doesn't matter how you play, someone is certain that you are not only doing it wrong, but having badwrongfun. I say this with full knowledge that I've from time to time been guilty of the same hubris.
For my part, I believe that this hobby is little more than a vainity. That it is ultimately trivial is both its damnation and its saving grace. The least we could do is drop some of the pretention with respect to other people playing a game since there is very little that can occur within the game that is ultimately serious. If we believe otherwise, then we ought to apologize to Jack Chick, because if this game is that filled with potential moral hazard perhaps we ought to consider a more healthy and less hazardous hobby like going to bars and over indulging in spirits.
In this particular case, it seems some people believe that they can infer from an aspect of the game mechanics whether or not someone is sexist and from that draw some bright sharp moral dividing line. This is hardly surprising, since as I said, there has hardly been a topic I've been involved in where someone didn't accuse me of moral, emotional, and mental disfunctionality for disagreeing with them. A full accounting of the number of times I've been called stupid, foolish and immoral on this site would number in the hundreds, to say nothing of the thousands of times I've seen such insults hurled at third parties. It's not like I expect this topic to be unique in that matter because it involves gender politics; nothing else has escaped it either.
For my part, I find no such coorelation between this mechanic and well anything. I'm not ready to pass moral judgment one way or the other on people who do or do not endorse or use a particular sort of mechanic. The reason for this is that I can imagine sexist motivations behind, either including or excluding such mechanics and I can imagine a complete lack of sexist motivation behind such inclusions and exclusions. I can imagine women who prefer and invent such mechanics, and I can imagine mysogynist games designed by people with sterotypically disfunctional mental issues with the opposite sex. Heck, I can imagine games filled with misandry as well. What I can't imagine is lumping everything in to one category.
Ultimately to me the matter does seem trivial. It is a trivial matter within an otherwise trivial gaming excercise. In and of itself, it tells me very little of the table, it's interests, or even the genders that play at that table. In short, in and of itself, having mechanical gender differences I think tells you nothing about the people playing the game. It's a fairly trivial matter of table preference, probably often adopted for the most trivial of reasons, and while I understand some people might have been previously burned on this topic just as there are some who've been burned by bad DMs using every sort of excuse imaginable (which is why we have wars over editions and over sandboxes vs. adventure paths, to prep or not to prep, and every other seemingly trivial preference), I would encourage people to understand that their own experiences probably doesn't cover the wealth and diversity of tables that are out there (good or bad).
