Wow, the comment thread on that page is incredibly toxic. I still don't understand how the commenters there think that a discussion about the technical merits of a programming language has the slightest thing to do with social justice.
The problem is that it turns a meritocracy into something that can be sidestepped and warped by one person claiming to be offended. In practice someone scolds another person for something that they say might offend someone reading.
I also haven't seen any sort of evidence that it solves a problem. It seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem. I don't think it magically takes care of toxic people.
I can name plenty of women that I know that are put off from participating in such communities because everyone just assumes that they are male. Individual occurrences are nbd, but in aggregate it gets really annoying. It's a good thing to teach the community to avoid such behavior.
The Rust community is one of the nicest online communities I've come across. We get feedback every week from folks happy to participate in the community and contribute to ecosystem/core because it's very nice. I'd say that's plenty evidence it's doing some good.
Then, you are attributing people's hard work of being helpful with a 'code of conduct' which is unfair to their efforts. The people helping build up rust aren't doing it because someone decided to dictate the greetings they can use.
The "hey guys" thing isn't about intent. People are aware that you are not assuming that everyone is a guy. They are asking that you be considerate of people who have to deal with being misgendered all the time and made to feel like they don't belong. There is no authority being flexed. It's usually regular community members asking not to use "hey guys", not moderators. (This is also a super rare occurrence anyway).
No, I'm not talking about helpfulness, I'm talking about people being nice. That's exactly what the code of conduct is about, and it seems to achieve that goal pretty well.
Saying "guy" isn't misgendering because it's a gender neutral pronoun. People call women "guys" all the time. Most people realize this.
Is that a bad thing? That's the ultimate in equality.
I'm not sure you're grasping the equality concept. Treating people the same is equality. Treating different genders differently is sexism.
Someone here is clearly sexist, but it's not me.
Edit - instant down votes, the sjw debate philosophy.
Are you saying that this gendered language should continue?
You haven't been arguing against gendered language here, you're arguing for using gendered language -- just gendered language for the same gender -- for everyone, when gender-neutral language has existed for centuries.
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Equality is about treating men and women the same. Having women feel like a fish out of the water by having their identity rejected is not the same. Having women feel like their identity is being rejected is not the same.
Equality does not mean rejecting individuality. Equality is not assuming that everyone is Bob and has the same personality, emotions, and gender as Bob. That's unfair to people who aren't Bob. Equality is treating them the same, or more specifically not treating someone worse because of an aspect of their existence that they have little control over. You can and should still respect their identity.
If we treat women as men, we are also treating men as women. A major part of the equality feminism (the dominated faction within feminism until the start of the 21th century) had this as their primary concept. People gave kids either gender neutral colors, or switched them randomly and had both girls and boys wearing pink and blue clothes. However, this practice and theory of feminism was dethroned by difference feminism that believes that people are different, should be treated as different, but end up with equal results. This was then incorporated as part of the modern feminism practice, for which postmodern feminism (current minority faction) is rejecting which also happens to lean towards equality feminism style of practice.