Morality partially stems from autonomy (in the sense that "I should be able to act as I please"). According to autonomy, a person should be able to act freely, and two people should be able to interact similarly. One person's policy will be judged by any other, who is free to act by a distinct policy. But autonomy alone doesn't make for a good person, or a good society. The other factor in morality is non-hypocrisy (in the sense that "I should act how I say I should act").

I've laid out a neutral response. Of course I have my personal beliefs, as one does, but I speak here without pretense. Believe what you will.

That is absolutely not politically neutral.

Yeah that's the fastest way to breed animosity in these communities. Insisting on calling someone by a name they don't use for themselves is extremely antagonistic.

r/programminglanguages has the right idea: put a pride flag in the logo and a lot of these problems just sort themselves out.

  the flag logo has proven surprisingly effective at weeding out bigots. Not just in this thread or the previous one, but also in the moderator mail: we've had at least several instances of mouth breathers writing rants along the lines of "How dare you use colors in your logo!" (that's a very nice "translation" of what's actually written in those cases). Similarly, several comments in this thread have been removed and their authors banned, due to comments that boil down to "I'm not a bigot, I just hate LGBTQ+ people". This will not change, based on the simple premise that such people aren't worth having around in any community, and these people don't contribute anything of value anyway.

And it does work out well, the discussions stay on topic, LGBTQ issues aren't really a community topic despite the flag. Here's how that works out in practice, from today:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1onr6...

Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it. In more toxic communities where people are encouraged to use whatever pronouns they want, that simple interaction because a whole thing, where eventually one person calls the other delusional, the other calls them a bigot, and then no one is talking about programming languages. It's an eternal struggle, and for many people who build and maintain programming languages, they prefer to kick out the bigot rather than be called delusional, so everyone can get back to talking about programming languages. Still, there are plenty of online spaces, especially language spaces, where LGBTQ people are made to feel excluded. People upset with the flag or pronouns can join one of those communities, and everyone is happy.

(If anyone is wondering what kind of comments, they're usually veiled or not so veiled threats along the lines of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727677. If the mere presence of the flag keeps people like this out, that's fine by me.)