> I'm not really sure what you're trying to say; I can see where you're coming from but I'm not sure how you draw your conclusion.
I'm trying to say that while I do believe we should try to understand whether and why someone feels offended or attacked, we shouldn't use them feeling attacked or offended (or claiming to) as a strict guideline for actions, and we should judge their actions and reactions not based on whether they felt offended, but on whether a reasonable person would have felt offended, much like we do for e.g. self-defense.
> Total failure of communication.
That may be a total failure in the way I'm trying to communicate. I didn't mean to suggest that that's what you said, I exaggerated what I understood your position to be to make it obvious why I believe it to be a difficult approach.
When we allow subjective things like feeling offended to be used as general facts, we're going to end up with two opposing parties both claiming offense - if there was no opposition, there would be no issue.
Once we're there, we are back to square one: who is right in being offended? If we then say "well, I like that person, so they are right", we really don't need to talk about the whole thing, because sympathy-based decision making has always been a thing and everybody understands how it works, and very few people would claim any sort of fairness or system (after all, we cannot deduce anything from any previous decision, as the decisions depend on who the parties are, not on the issue itself).
If we instead try to find some general rule, we can just skip the whole "I'm feeling offended" stage and proceed directly to this one, that is, to the claim "this is offensive", which implies "a reasonable person will agree, it's not about my feelings, my tribal membership, my background, my experiences and personal convictions".