I hadn't seen that earlier, and (knowing myself, and being honest) it would've alienated me so much that I wouldn't have wanted to have a discussion around this article by that person.

But, given that we're already here, and if I'm aspiring to be the change I want to see in the world (as we say), I suppose it's most inclusive and cooperative to have a civil discussion about the topic of the article -- even I'm disappointed or offended by some separate statements of the author.

(And if we can do that, maybe in another context we can discuss what's bothering different people around the other topics, and collectively improve around those.)

Ad hominem. We don't need to do a background check on every author of an article, we can just focus on and discuss the contents

We can, but if a person announces to the world that they are an asshole we can also choose to spend our valuable attention somewhere else.

"If you disagree with me on one topic, you are an asshole and I will not listen to anything you have to say on any other topic."

Yes, he's the asshole here.

This is a very specific topic. There are plenty of topics where disagreeing with me doesn't mean anything.

Still, I prefer not to give the person additional exposure.

I am trans and have also followed this habit. But I'm not fun either.

I don't see any connection to this twitter user from the article at all.

Look at the left hand sidebar of the article with the author info. There's a Facebook and Twitter icon.

Thanks for clarifying. I don't think I've ever actually clicked one of those "social networking" icons so didn't realize that's where it was going. (I had grepped the text for the name instead).

There's a twitter icon underneath the author's name that links to that twitter profile...

The author's twitter is linked from their profile page on hackernoon.