It's true that things were different when we were young, but that's true of any new phenomenon and it's not the heart of the objection. If young people these days want to avoid saying "wonderful", or use women by default in hypothetical scenarios, or go around checking their pulse while they say "sheeeeesh", I have no real concerns about those things and I think most people on team "motherboard" would agree.
The reason I push against "mainboard" is, I think, the analogous concern. While it's possible in principle to type out the letters "mainboard" without meaning anything by it, in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted. To say "mainboard" would make me appear to be endorsing those ideas.
>in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted
I would argue this is a symptom of the same phenomenon and therefore the heart of the objection is still the same.
Is it possible in your view for any new trend to be bad and worth fighting against? It's hard for me to see how this doesn't reduce to a content-free "nothing really matters" objection.
Sure, if there is any evidence behind the objection I can support it. When the objection is some vague claim about it being "harmful for society" without anything to back that up, I will call BS.
The reason I push against "mainboard" is, I think, the analogous concern. While it's possible in principle to type out the letters "mainboard" without meaning anything by it, in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted. To say "mainboard" would make me appear to be endorsing those ideas.