I have not downvoted it. But the original phrasing "You are too focused on the topic of gender identity; I suggest that the topic is not nearly so worthy of concern." differs from the one here in that it suggests concern to oneself, rather than the concern to the community that this post makes clear. The first is telling other people what they should be concerned with, violating a clear norm, and helping no one.

I didn't downvote your comment; I think you actually make an interesting point.

For me, it's not just that people obsess over issues of gender (and race, and sexual preference). It's that their gender (or race) sometimes becomes like the team they are on and (arguably) warps their views.

For example, let's suppose you did a poll and asked people if they think women should have the right to vote. I'm pretty confident that the percentage which says "yes" would be higher among women than among men. So it seems likely that peoples' group membership colors their judgments.

I downvoted it. This was already discussed in depth on the site a while ago. See the fall-out posts and discussion related to the PUA stuff (googling for PUA site:lesswrong.com should give you most of it) Basically, the answer to your statement (and then some!) is contained in that thousands of words worth of discussion, and I thought your comment was little more than being a likely trigger for a discussion that's already been beaten into the ground here, even though that wasn't your intention and your intention was in fact exactly opposite.

I will state that summarizing this discussion for postery's sake (in the wiki) so we can stop having it is a good idea.

I didn't downvote, but considering that many people are confused about gender identity, applying rationality to it seems a reasonable topic for posting here.

Pragmatically: It's important because the fact that this keeps coming up again and again suggests it's not going to go away just because it's annoying to many when it happens, and a mechanism to channel, redirect or settle the matter in the form of community norms hasn't yet been found. Meanwhile, there's clearly people who find it relevant, both to their participation in LW and not infrequently to life experiences that have bearing on what they can contribute to refining the art of rationality. Some of those people are major contributors here; some of them may still be lurking. Some of them haven't even found te site yet. A global norm that rejects the topic altogether seems like a great path to evaporative cooling in an area where LW has real potential for PR issues, and which may be a long-term impediment to its success. Restricting the topic to Discussion only (regardless of the potential quality of the post and ensuing discussion) or attempting to limit the length of threads directly seems like a bad idea.

You can always downvote it if you don't want to see it.