This seems very naive to me. There are enough people yelling "OK Groomer" at me on certain platforms that I know the signal to noise ratio is bad enough that engaging is at best a waste of time and at worst getting more soundbites than I could possibly debunk, so I lose the optics part of the debate by default.
See "Never Play Defense" from the alt-right playbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA
And as an aside - HN is not guilt free on this topic. There's a general tendency for comments to go right past the topic even outside this. For instance, every remote work thread turns into a generalized remote vs onsite debate, without the specifics of the article being weighed in. Even worse, HN also has a tendency to devolve into calling authors of posts deranged (or deranged, but with nicer choice of words) more for their identity and politics rather than the words they wrote, as was the case with Alyssa Rosenzweig's article being posted a few weeks ago.
It simply isn't viable to assume good faith for everyone. I often (unwiesely) get into fights with transphobes that I shouldn't, and I had maybe 2 insightful well-reflected discussions over the past 10 years. Sometimes they'll complement me on not fitting their expectation of an "SJW" (which is, presumably, a screaming child), but then go on to call me a slur anyway. And when I say slur, I am very positive that this is the right classification. Unambiguously.
I recommend the entire Alt-Right playbook series, in fact. A lot of these concepts are not limited to the alt-right and are often used incidentally by everyone, but it is important to know when you have no chance at rhetoric overcoming... anything. I guess sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen, especially in a post-fact world.