On the way to being the most downvoted post ever on StackOverflow:Meta

> It seems like anyone who respects how other people identify will have hard time running up against this policy.

Because the policy isn't about respecting gender identity; it's about having a political battle where there are no winners.

It’s like making it illegal to not greet your neighbor each morning. The underlying premise is to make things nicer, but it’s also just stupid. A good rule would be “try to be considerate of pronoun preferences”.

The wants of the LGBTQA community are, in the eyes of the majority, probably not this. I like to be polite and respectful. I’ll be honest though, I would guess that less than 0.1% of the English speaking population identifies as “Xir” and that a non trivial portion of those that do are comfortable with the understanding that random strangers are more comfortable using gender neutral language. I would further posit that the portion of those that are not ok with people having points of view favoring even gender neutral language and instead demand the usage of the term Xir have adopted it as a counter cultural stance to combat heteronormativity- which honestly is fine, but it’s also a move made knowingly to make some people uncomfortable which by any metric must be ruder than someone who is just trying to avoid controversy at all by using gender neutral pronouns to begin with. I’m a left leaning adult, and I think it’s pretty bullshit. Especially on the Internet where women have been assumed to be men by default for decades.

If I misgender someone, and they ask me to use any specific pronoun in the future, I probably will. If the responder instead gets angry and implies that I am rude because I made a common assumption, and instead asserts that I’m going to tell them to buzz off.

Rudeness is clearly a subjective concept based around intent. And it’s frankly a waste of people’s time.

Imagine if every post had pronouns at the end, and if every man then demanded a correction for a use of they instead of “he”. That would be a waste of time and disrespectful to the ability of everyone else to be an adult.

I don't think your post is off-topic at all.

We have very few signals in this medium that can tell us if someone is acting in bad faith, or just simply made a mistake. The scary thing about this code of conduct change is that it's mandating required behavior, which is a little unusual: most items in a code of conduct remind people of things they should not do, but speak in general only about behaviors that promote inclusiveness. This new bit is very specific, and lays out rules for how to use language. English itself is not a particularly consistent language even within English-majority countries like the US or UK; differences are huge between countries, especially when English isn't the primary language, due both to cultural convention and personal skill with the language.

I do think we should refer to people using their preferred pronouns when known. But we need to make allowances for mistakes; sadly I expect that the norm will be an assumption of bad faith when simple mistakes are likely to be the most common case.

How does that work in the language itself? In English people say "latin-ecks". In Spanish do people say "latin-equis"?

The visible outrage is not from people "complaining about people being upset about being misgendered", it is from people complaining about an actual policy change introducing compelled speech. If people complaining about being misgendered is as rare as you suggest then why does stack exchange feel the need to push through such a controversial policy change?