What purpose is served by trying to argue that an overtly sexist comment ("you're a woman, leave development to the men") has nothing to do with sexism? This is another instance of the "to a certain kind of nerd, every problem can be unproductively reduced to a spreadsheet" fallacy that Joel Spolsky talked about on his blog.
Follow the logic to its conclusion and what you're ending up with is "there's no such thing as sexism (or racism, or ageism); there is only exploitation and abuse, and sexism happens to be one of its vectors". About the best thing you can say about an argument like that is that it's a flight to abstraction, demanding that we litigate epistemology instead of dealing with the circumstances that are staring us in the face.
The signal these tangential arguments tend to send is "the author of this comment is profoundly uncomfortable confronting sexism". It is OK to be uncomfortable with sexism; you don't have to engage.
You're having a different conversation from Mindcrime and Protonfish.
Mindcrime expressed confusion that anyone could actually believe such a thing. Protonfish expressed his belief that such comments are primarily intended to hurt, by which he's implicitly agreeing with Mindcrime. He doesn't think the attackers actually believe such a thing.
He's not trying to minimize the attack. He's just attempting to help Mindcrime understand how someone would say something that they both believe to not be true.
What he's not doing is addressing the origin of the desire to hurt, which likely is based (at least so I believe) in misogyny.
No one has at any point said there is no such thing as sexism or misogyny.
Follow the logic to its conclusion and what you're ending up with is "there's no such thing as sexism (or racism, or ageism); there is only exploitation and abuse, and sexism happens to be one of its vectors". About the best thing you can say about an argument like that is that it's a flight to abstraction, demanding that we litigate epistemology instead of dealing with the circumstances that are staring us in the face.
The signal these tangential arguments tend to send is "the author of this comment is profoundly uncomfortable confronting sexism". It is OK to be uncomfortable with sexism; you don't have to engage.