I agree with you on the usually dual-gender definition, though it's not always seen that way. I'm saying that it scans oddly to highlight a term and justify it, rather than alter it. If you think your terminology is going to cause problems, then rephrase yourself, don't justify keeping it as is.

I didn't really mean for my criticism to end up talking about further gender issues - it's really meant to be a comment on better communication. I was reading the submission about topic A, then hit a parenthetical remark that is justifying an orthogonal topic B, then back to topic A again. It doesn't scan well.