[fhd2]

Dunno if that's possible. To stick with the example, you can either go for gender neutral language or reject it. There is no "I'll stay out of it and do neither". Your only options are one or the other. So feels like a bit of a cop out.

For the decision itself, I don't see how he should be put in some extreme political camp for that. I think that's probably hard to understand for anyone outside the US / culture wars bubble.

[detaro]

There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do", but somehow the people scared of "gender police" are always the ones that want strict rules saying that nobody is allowed to use it.

Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".

[fhd2]

I suppose there's no way to not make a _decision_ though, is there? If, to stay with that example, he says "You know what, anyone can make a PR to gender any way they like", that sounds like a blood bath.

Reasonable responses I can think of are:

1. No we will not use gender neutral language here, it's a policy.

2. I think it's a good idea, but I don't have the bandwidth to make ground rules for that right now, so for the time being it will stay as it is.

3. Good idea, I'll set up some policy on that and if you have time to change things, help is appreciated.

> Same way nobody asked him to plaster pride flags over his project, but he went to the step of telling a contributor to please remove a flag from their avatar because showing that avatar in his project would be "political".

If that part is true, that's pretty wild. If he _did_ ask someone else to remove symbols from their personal avatar, that sounds as political as it gets to me... But from some quick research, I couldn't find anything about such a thing happening.

[darkwater]

> There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do"

And how does that work, exactly? If you get a PR to modify all the docs/code to be gender neutral you accept it? And what if in the same PR someone else vehemently opposes to the change? Or what if 2 days after the PR was merged you get a revert PR by someone else?

The thing is that you cannot just ignore "politics", politics are an integral part of our lives. Completely ignoring politics means accepting the status quo, so it's by definition a conservative position.