[roommin]

So you can see why they put it in scare quotes. Just above your reply another says it's politically neutral to adopt whatever pronouns the speaker feels is valid, and not punish them for it. This is "neutral" in that it sides with the speaker regardless of who they are, but is clearly designed to allow bigots to misgender freely. That is the point, "neutral" is not so trivially defined, and often falls on the side of more conservative societal trends.

[quamserena]

Thank you, this is exactly what I was getting at.

[shayway]

What would you consider to be truly politically neutral, then? Because it seems we're in agreement that a decision to "refer to all trans people using they/them" would not fit the bill. But whether it's politically neutral or not, it's unnecessarily exclusionary; that's what I take issue with.

(for the record I do realize the phrase 'politically neutral' is vague and unclear, and often used as a conservative dogwhistle, which is why I generally avoid it)

An example of the sort of Code of Conduct I personally feel is the most inclusive and 'politically neutral' in a non-scare-quotes-dogwhistle way is the Hacker News guidelines[0]. I think the moderation in general here does a good job of promoting open discussion across people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html