Sam, thank you very much for raising this issue and for recognizing that there's more than one angle to it.
I tend to agree with Scott. It is well known, at least since George Orwell wrote his books, that controlling how people speak means controlling how they think. So I believe that this issue is very important. And indeed, in the last decades, redefining language has been a major part of the political debate at large, with every group trying to "hijack words for their own ends". For example, the pro- and contra-abortion parties label themselves as "pro-choice" and "pro-life" respectively, that is, they both try to frame the debate by presenting themselves as "pushing for a good thing" while the other party is pushing against. When you choose which language you use, you effectively already take a side. And when you agree to use the other party's language, you've already nearly lost the fight. So this is also inevitably a political issue. It's not just about "being polite" (or "welcoming" or "excellent" or whatever). I believe that I absolutely have the right to "being impolite" if "being polite" means that I must use a language that conveys a political position that I oppose. For example (forgive me if this might seem off-topic, but I think that working out the details of an actual example is necessary to make my point clear), I do not feel that I should acknowledge people's requests to refer to them by their "preferred pronouns". That is because I believe that people's sexual identities are determined by objective facts, such as which chromosomes are there in their DNA, and not by how they subjectively "perceive themselves". So when I refuse to refer to a person with XY chromosomes as "she", or to abuse the English language by calling an individual "they", in fact I am defending my world view, and you must not deprive me of that right. (May I remember that the incident that led to Norbert Preining's temporary suspension from Debian started with him using "the wrong pronoun" in a blog post!) And while Debian isn't a government, neither it is an island somewhere out of the "real world". So we can't pretend that we can leave that out. Gerardo
