River Grimm is such a good default name, dang.
Anyways, loved whatcha got so far! (≧▽≦)👍
You really cannot expect an indy dev to have the same reasources as a business. More often than not they are very small teams and sometimes, especially in the visual novel world, just one person.
In these cases your money is not supporting a *business* it is supporting *people*.
So again I'm going to reiterate, they do not have the same resources to continue a project in the face of personal hardships. People can be shady about it, yeah, but calling having to make the choice to open up to talk about why they've slowed down or gone on hiatus or dropping a project "whining" is disrespectful. To the people having to make that choice, to the things they've had to deal with.
Because you keep mentioning specific projects, I feel like maybe you've been let down by a dev or project and take it personally. I'm sorry that's something you dealt with, but I find that painting everyone else with the same brush is kind of callous and unkinnd.
I'm gonna reiterate that they aren't just radical feminists. They're terfs/swerfs. People who HATE queer folk and sex workers. People who keep the old "gays prey on children" bullshit alive.
They don't actually care about child abuse or women's rights they're just bigots who are desperate to justify their hate.
"And I don't see how being disrespectful of that is any better than being disrespectful of someone's true gender or sexual orientation."
Given that demanding to know a non-binary person's downstairs mixup is patently rude and can be triggering for people with body disphoria, yeah it is pretty different.
For me it's a constant reminder that I will never escape the body I was stuck with and that it will always define me in some way despite my wishes. So like, yeah, seeing shit like that fucking sucks.
You are asking for their SEX not their GENDER. They are non-binary which means that even IF they were assigned female at birth (afab) they are not a woman.
And yes it is rather offensive because demanding to know their sex makes it seem like you think that genitals are more important than how they identify. Which is gross. I hope you don't treat real people like this.
This is what what sensitivity readers are for, they're just someone who can catch things like this because they have a different viewpoint and background. I doubt some of the people who are asking for one want to make your work bland or easily digestible or censored. It's honestly just a good way to get another perspective, which, I think, is very important in any kind of storytelling.