I am talking about Tim Pope. I have forked his code and renamed it, but instead of the community helping me, I've received a lot of negative feedback about "fragmenting the community" for trying to maintain and evangelize a non-sexist version of the plugin. It is difficult to continue in the face of so little support, but I believe in what I'm doing, and all of my male and female developer friends agree with me.
I think you're right that it's a less overt form of sexism, but I support what you're doing and I hope one day this clicks for Tim and he sees what a minor concession this is and what a positive thing it would be.
I'm a Vim user myself, and a big fan of his work. It's not nice to mention his name in a thread like this, however tangentially related. But given the topic, I thought for once it might be forgiveable to err on the side of those without male privilege.