Expose rule groups like `gender`, `sexuality`, `race`, `religion`...

[etrobert]

Subject of the feature

Expose rule groups like gender, sexuality, race, religion...

Problem

For gradual adoption in our codebase, we would like to enable certain groups of rules by topic.

Expected behaviour

Allow to select rule groups in allow and deny, for example with deny: ['group:gender']

Alternatives

Ideally, this categorisation would be done by retext.

Alternatively, we are doing this same categorization in our local codebase.

[wooorm]

Hmm. Interesting idea, to help folks adopt this gradually.
All messages have a ruleId. So they can definitely be filtered.
They don’t have a category through. That would be the thing to work on first.
I’m not really sure that these categories that are in retext-equality are great or precide though. They’re more... loose categorizations so we don’t have one giant file.

Maybe the diff functionality is a better way to start gradually? https://github.com/get-alex/alex#workflow.
Or, start with a smaller list of files and add more later?

[samtuckerdavis]

Adding a concrete data point here for the speciesism group specifically.

There's now active movement on this across the tooling ecosystem:

• feat(data): add speciesist language patterns retextjs/retext-equality#130 — adds speciesism as a rule category to this package (the engine alex uses)
• feat: add Speciesism rule set vale-cli/alex#19 — adds a Speciesism.yml to the Vale port of alex
• docs: replace non-inclusive terminology webpack/webpack.js.org#7880 — merged Feb 25, 2026, added equivalent speciesism rules to webpack's Vale config

Having distinct rule groups like gender, sexuality, race, religion means teams can opt in/out granularly. The case for adding speciesism as a first-class group follows the same pattern: some organizations have explicit style guide policies around this, and right now there's no way to enable it without enabling everything. Flagging in case it's useful context for how this feature request could be scoped.