Sure.
I will not use "racism" or "sexism", since those words, for some people, have meaning beyond "prejudice or discrimination based on a person's race/sex/gender", only including cases where racism and sexism are institutional and mantained by society at large. I have no problems acknowledging this, so I'll use "discrimination".
+Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
+
+- ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’That's where my problem is: a code of conduct is not to make marginalized people feel better and safer participating in it, but to make EVERYONE feel better and safer participating on it, while inhibiting bad behaviour, or at least creating rules and guidelines on how to handle those cases.
The whole PR is ok, but that part strikes me as wrong because it legitimize prejudice as long as the prejudiced is not on a marginalized group. Removing it would not make easier for while males to be discriminatory, but would open the gates for them to be discriminated upon.
OK, I get you now. Your concern seems to be that if we only tailor the Code of Conduct to protect marginalized groups, then we risk individuals who don't necessarily belong to any marginalized groups becoming vulnerable to harassment and not be protected by said CoC.
Now, of course that we care that all people feel better and safer when participating in an open source community. However, let me preface my argument with this comic that illustrated why saying “ALL lives matter” in response to “Black lives matter” isn't very productive:
People who went on social networks to say “ALL lives matter” in response to the outcry of the oppressed Black community were both right and terribly wrong at the same time. They were right in the fact that all lives matter because we as society have defined that as a fundamental right a long time ago and as a result, no person has a right to live more than any other person regardless of nationality or color. They were also terribly wrong, however, because with those chants they demonstrated their tone-deafness in a context of a specific crisis that affected a particular community which needed their voice to be heard. By insisting on the fact that “ALL lives matter”, these well-meaning people who were trying to point out general “facts” were actually contributing to the discrimination against Blacks. It was a subtle, unintentional silencing tactic.
Back to our Code of Conduct. Ideally, we want all members of our community to feel safe. However, the reality of things in our community, as a reflection of the state of the industry as a whole, is that women and people of certain minority groups feel disproportionally less safe because of discrimination, harassment, microagressions and similar. Our responsibility is to focus on these groups more than protecting those who are already privileged, because if the protect everyone “the same” then we're just upholding the current status quo and not helping with any positive change.
For example, Rails Girls workshops are often being criticized for being “sexist” against men because they only allow female participants to apply. If there was a male workshop that didn't allow women, that would be true discrimination because men are already in power and women are historically marginalized gender. However, Rails Girls workshop barring men from participating isn't evidence of reverse discrimination; it's creating a safe space for women to participate in until the industry is ready to treat everyone on equal ground.
Until we reach true equality, it's important that we keep doing efforts that offset the discrimination by providing disproportionately more attention and opportunities to marginalized groups because those are the same people who have disproportionately fewer opportunities and suffer discrimination and harassment on the daily basis. The Open Code of Conduct isn't concerned too much with protecting the feels of white men because, in my opinion, they don't require any specific protections since they make up the majority of software communities anyway and are typically in positions of power.
Also, it's worth noting that equality != justice. Eventually, we want to end up in a place where everyone has equal rights and opportunities. Until then, we need to try to keep justice by providing more opportunities to those who have fewer. That entails providing extra protections to those groups who need protections more than the privileged groups. Than, in my opinion as a person who is not directly affilliated with the TODO group, is the primary purpose of codes of conduct in general.