but we cannot do that, because "ordinary guy" (and "normal woman") is a strong political identity too.
If everyone has a strong political identity, then the phrase “strong political identity” is meaningless.
Also ... I wonder what a person whose maps of the social world were really "no better than random" would look like.
Exactly. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Let me try to unpack it a bit:
People who do not claim a named gender-related political identity (like "feminist" or "MRA") nonetheless typically explicitly teach and reinforce ideas about gender ... and get defensive about them in pretty much the same way that people get defensive about political ideas.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.