"Protected attributes"

For like the millionth time, YouTube has once again revised their policies and terms of service. It's an endless wild goose chase, because it will never, ever, ever be good enough.

Anyway, this part of YouTube's announcement really "triggered" me, if we are allowed to use that term:

"We will no longer allow content that maliciously insults someone based on protected attributes such as their race, gender expression, or sexual orientation."

As a social liberal (leaning quite heavily on classical liberalism), individualist, and extreme constitutionalist and "free speech absolutist", that term "protected attribute" really grinds my gears.

Everybody should be treated equally, as an individual person, not as part of a group. People should be judged solely on their own personal actions, merits, achievements, opinions, and other such actions and abilities. People should not be judged, nor treated differently, based on their innate external characteristics, nor based on which arbitrary group they might belong to.

Now, when an innate inconsequential external characteristic, like race, becomes a "protected attribute", this goes blatantly against this principle. Now some people become more "protected" than others because of their race, "gender expression", or "sexual orientation". In other words, people will be treated differently because of these characteristics, because of belonging to such groups, rather than as individual people.

I wouldn't actually have too much of a problem with that sentence I quoted above if it didn't have that word "protected" in it. Remove that word, and I'm pretty ok with it. But just that one word, "protected", in this context makes it really obnoxious. Why does that word need to be there? The sentence could work perfectly well without it, and would make much more sense.

It might not be deliberate from part of the people who wrote that text, but just that word alone there works as social engineering. Millions of people will read that text, and that concept of "protected attribute", such as "race", will become completely normal in the public consciousness, and the vast majority of people will not think much about it. Some human attributes becoming "protected" becomes normalized, so people just start accepting it.