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dspeyer comments on Rationality Quotes March 2013 - Less Wrong
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I saw exactly that subtext.
The quote opens "I once had a civil argument with a woman". The author spends one noun to describe this person, and spends it on gender. It could have been "with a friend" or "with a politician" or even just "I once had a civil argument" (that the author had it with somebody is implied in the nature of argument). The antiepistimologist has exactly one characteristic: gender, and that characteristic is called out as important.
It gets worse because being bad at logic is an existing negative stereotype of women.
The subtext is definitely there on some level for the reasons you mention, but probably it wasn't a conscious, deliberate choice by the speaker, and I don't think it's all that useful to hold probably subconscious attitudes against people. (I don't know whether I had noticed the subtext if I hadn't read shminux's comment before seeing the quote itself.)
To change subconscious attitudes it helps to make them salient and make people consciously aware of them.
In principle, I agree, but: 1) attempts to do that can backfire if done the wrong way, and 2) Ron Dreher is most likely not reading this thread anyway.
I basically agree with 1 and 2. That said, although Ron Dreher is not going to read this, odds are good that the number of people on this thread that would benefit from a more conscious less automatic process for choosing words with regards to making / not making gener salient is greater than 0.
Greater than zero is a weak claim, but I do think this kind of criticism adds value.