I am of two minds about a taboo on gender issues. On the one hand, it seems tiresome and ineffectual to try and fix other people's mistaken conclusions on empirical questions if they hold them for political reasons. If someone thinks that the height distributions for men and women are equal because that's what they feel is the morally correct answer, then it seems unlikely that showing them the evidence will change their mind. They could have found it themselves if they had been interested, and so discussing it on-site is likely going to be a waste of the time of everyone involved. (For example, I wrote a long takedown of the piece you mentioned, which I've deleted and relegated to a few sentences at the end of this comment.)

But on the other hand, part of the reason why the politics taboo is helpful is because it extends into other parts of life. If you're an Apolitical Alan, you can be happier and focus your attention on more important things. One of the things that excited me when I first came to LW was that here was a bunch of fun things to think and talk about with a bunch of clever people, and those things were more exciting and useful than politics. If the politics taboo is just a "let's not talk about this at the dinner table, because it will interfere with our digestion," that's very different from a "politics is a suboptimal subject to spend your time and energy on. Here are some things you might prefer, and if you insist on continuing to talk about politics, do it elsewhere."

And so if we have a gender taboo, I would much rather it be a "your opinion on gender politics really doesn't matter, and to the extent you have one, you should be curious rather than idealistic" than a "let's not talk about gender politics because it might upset X." The first is dissolving politics; the second is surrendering to X.

This is an interesting current discussion of that subject.

Her claim that the biggest problem with evo psych is that it matches stereotypes doesn't seem very empirical. Notice that none of the examples that she gives in the meat of her article directly tie into her primary point that smashing stereotypes is desirable for science. Yes, lots of science is bad, psychology is worse than average, and evolutionary psychology is probably worse than psychology's average. But the primary substance of her claim should have been about the epistemic role that stereotypes should play as evidence. If some thing is true on average (say, men being taller), we should assign higher probability to the popular stereotype being that men are taller than to the popular stereotype being that men are shorter. Indeed, we find that stereotypes are mostly accurate, as outlined in this book.