About the races we have.

[Theodric]

People fear feminine men and masculine women (bonus points if they're tall). We're lucky we have the latter at all.

It's not fear. They're just not the popular aesthetics they're made out to be when it comes to mainstream audiences and are vastly overrated by a very vocal portion of players who often have projected issues with conventional standards of beauty. Often because they're very obsessed with making a character look as close to themselves as possible or they're doing it because of niche preferences.

When it comes to feminine men there's the added baggage of some very creepy individuals having revealed themselves to the community at large by pushing for child-like models or making bizarre, weird statements about Alphinaud.

After all, Yoshi-P had to make a statement recently explicitly stating that child-like viera would never be a thing for moral and ethical reasons. In addition to that, I believe a major FFXIV Discord lost official recognition due to inappropriate art being posted there.

So, no - it isn't as clear cut as 'fear'. A lot of us are just well aware of what is really being pushed for in many cases after reading between the lines/seeing horrific comments in various threads and in-game chat channels.

That isn't applicable to every case. Some people are fairly innocent when making their requests for such things. Though Yoshi-P has thankfully ruled it out altogether to prevent problems later down the line.

Looks like we got a coward here, lads.

It's not 'cowardice' either. Again, see the above commentary.